Postcard image via Jalopy Journal.
While the effort to save a portion of the Willow Run assembly plant has come down to its final week, demolition crews have already torn down about half of the former Kaiser-Frazer and GM structure outside of Ypsilanti, Michigan, to make way for an autonomous vehicle research facility.
“Every single day big chunks are coming down,” Said Dennis Norton, director of the Michigan Aerospace Foundation and original founder of the Yankee Air Museum, which has so far raised $6.8 million of the $8 million necessary to purchase a fraction of the plant. “Now that the weather has warmed up, the demolition crews are going to move rapidly.”
Bulldozers arrived on the site to begin tearing down the 5-million-square-foot facility last fall after the RACER development trust – which took possession of the plant after GM shut down operations there in late 2010 – reached a deal last September with Walbridge Development to build a shared research and development center and test track for connected vehicles. According to Bill Callen, speaking for RACER Trust, demolition slowed down during the long and hard Michigan winter, but is now about 50 percent complete. “The demolition contractors know that the museum has an interest in that portion of the plant, so they’ve segregated that and are demolishing the rest,” Callen said.
Yankee Air Museum officials launched a campaign last year to raise $8 million to buy about 155,000 square feet of the plant, a portion that includes the end of the assembly line and the bay doors through which every completed B-24 bomber rolled out of the plant during World War II. Former GM chairman Bob Lutz stepped in to help the campaign, as did retired astronaut Jack Lousma, and RACER Trust worked with museum officials to push the deadline back multiple times last year. The current deadline of May 1 is the last that RACER has offered, but Norton said he is confident the museum will raise the final $1.2 million by then.
“I’m about 95 percent sure we’ll sign the purchase agreement by May 1,” Norton said. “That $8 million will take care of building two new walls to close up the section and to put in utilities like heat and a fire suppression system. It’ll be an almost new building when we’re done with it.”
Artist’s rendering of the Yankee Air Museum in the Willow Run bomber plant.
Built on land owned by Henry Ford to crank out B-24 Liberator bombers in 1941, the Albert Kahn-designed plant became the largest single industrial building under one roof. Once it ramped up to full production in late 1943, the so-called “Grand Canyon of the mechanized world” would produce a bomber per hour, along with a number of wood-bodied gliders.
After the war, Ford declined its option to buy the massive plant from the federal government, so the government – through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the War Assets Administration – ended up leasing, and eventually selling, Willow Run to the newly formed Kaiser-Frazer. Kaiser-Frazer converted Willow Run to automotive production and built cars there from June 1946 to July 1953 before selling the plant to General Motors for $26 million. GM used the plant to build Hydra-Matic transmissions and other powertrain components until December 2010, when it shed the property as part of its bankruptcy.
The Kaiser-Frazer assembly line at Willow Run. Photo courtesy Ypsilanti Historical Society Photo Archives.
RACER, which obtained the 332-acre plant not long after, attempted to sell portions of the property to other industrial companies, but pointed to the massive plant as an impediment to finding new tenants and thus decided to tear it down last year. Not long after, RACER signed a contract with Walbridge to sell the property after demolition is complete.
Callen said that the demolition was slated to take a full year, but Norton said he believes that demolition will be complete by about mid-July.
UPDATE (2.May 2014): It looks like the Yankee Air Museum wasn’t able to raise the required $8 million to purchase the plant. As of this morning, the SavetheBomberPlant.org website noted that $7.23 million had been raised, with another $770,000 needed to reach the goal.
