RIP: Abandoned since 1958, Detroit's Packard Plant

Just remembered this. Not abandoned, but there's an old but nice apartment building in downtown Newark with a bowling alley in the basement. When you rent you get your key, and a pair of bowling shoes.

 

Yeah, the Alexandria site is definitely polluted and no one wants to pay for the remediation.

Plus, I remember reading somewhere that there’s a still-active power station right smack-dab in the middle of the site that any developer would have to build around.

 

Then there’s Kezar Stadium, immortalized by Harry Callahan

 

When renovation of the Michigan Central station was fnally begun, people started showing up to return stuff they'd stolen through the years.

 

Kezar is still there. Most of the grandstands have been removed. It's used for high school football.

 

The Michigan Central Station project amazes me — the building was in such poor shape. I’m surprised Ford is plowing so much money into it. I saw that they’re expanding the current Detroit Amtrak stop, so there goes the chance of trains stopping there again. I wish I could’ve seen it when it was in its prime.

 

Buffalo has a great train station, the old NY Central Terminal. There's a caretaker group that has done some upgrading and prevented it from total decay, and the state just earmarked $61 million for remediation/renovation, but unfortunately Buffalo doesn't have the big corporate hitter like Ford (or GM) to help shoulder the load.

And the city decided to build a new Amshack Station downtown, instead of re-opening the Central Terminal. So there are still two separate terminals (downtown and Depew); the need the Depew one because westbound trains have to back up for a several miles to get back on the main line from the downtown station so they can head west.

 

I've heard the seagulls are really bad about pooping on everything there.

 

They filmed a scene of The Natural at the old Buffalo station. It’s the scene where Roy and the scout arrive in “Chicago”.

Forgotten Buffalo featuring Locations of the Natural

 

Same here. It's almost like it was a doomed project from the start. Instead of building it downtown, Michigan Central built it next to its freight right of way with the idea of 1. adding a tunnel under the Detroit River to pay for it, 2. that other industry would eventually expand that way. It wasn't particularly convenient because you needed to take a streetcar or bus to get to it and had very little car parking. So it wound up as a big white elephant when train travel waned after World War II and white flight went west and north of the city proper.

The New York Central was trying to unload it for a mere $5 million as early as 1956, so its decline matches the Packard plant in many ways.

 

I was in downtown Detroit right before COVID hit; man it was bleak. Terrible.

 

Let me tell you about Penn Station, a truly wonderful station built in 1910. It was considered one of the great architectural achievements in New York at that time. But alas, the building was demolished in 1963 and Madison Square Garden built over the previous structure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910–1963)

The birth, life, and death of old Penn Station