Requiem News & Events & Guides

The birthplace of modern America – one might say the modern world – is a huge disused factory building that stands on a busy six-lane boulevard in a part of Detroit named Highland Park. Outside, on a scrubby patch of untended grass, is a sign posted by the Michigan Register of Historic Sites stating that this was the factory where, in 1913, Henry Ford began the mass production of automobiles on a moving assembly line. By 1915 Ford had built a million of his Model Ts; by 1925 more than 9,000 were being assembled in a single day. Mass production, the sign reads, soon moved from here to all places of American industry ‘and set the pattern of abundance for 20th-century living’.

It is a wonderfully evocative phrase that stops you in your tracks – the pattern of abundance for 20th-century living(requiem lant). From here came the principles of mass production that provided the goods that fuelled the consumer society; from here, the automobile that begat the roads and the freeways that carried people and goods from sea – as America the Beautiful has it – to shin ing sea, and then to the world beyond.

The Highland Park factory was known as the Crystal Palace because of the amount of glass used in its construction. But its windows have long been shuttered and boarded. What remains of the plant is now used for warehousing, with one part given over to a retail outlet for a company selling cheap shoes made in China.

Ford built his prototype for the Model T three or four miles down Woodward Avenue on Piquette Street, in a modest brick building that is still owned by the Ford Motor Company, and is now used to store the company’s medical records. Along the street is the Fisher Body Plant 21 factory that once made bodies for Cadillac limousines. It has been closed since the early 1990s(requiem gold), a rotting hulk sequestered behind a chainlink fence, catching the tumbleweed blowing down the street.