Lincoln Highway road trip wrap-up #3. Another Lincoln Highway wrap-up from Holland, Michigan.
Sewing machines and generators and vacuum cleaners and trumpets and cars.
Driving the old Lincoln Highway route in this part of the country is like a tour through America’s manufacturing past. We are accustomed to driving by shiny new tech buildings in the SF Bay Area – one really doesn’t see too many of these huge old factory buildings. The old Ford plant in Richmond comes to mind. There are a few. Right on or very close to the drive I saw a veritable history of American manufacturing. When one sees the sheer size of some of these complexes (and looks up the history of the closures), one gets a better picture of the gut wrenching economic dislocation and adjustment they have been going through in the Rust Belt as these plants close, the union jobs are lost, tax revenues evaporate and all of the support businesses and services also suffer. It’s not all doom and gloom; Pittsburgh is the comeback kid, for example, and South Bend is not doing so badly either. Some of these buildings are being repurposed.
Anyway, here we go: first, the gargantuan former Singer sewing machine factory complex in Elizabeth NJ (now a struggling industrial park in challenged Elizabeth); the Westinghouse complex in East Pittsburgh (20,000 jobs evaporated when this complex shut down) and in the background the George Westinghouse Bridge which is the Lincoln Highway route into Pittsburgh; part of the huge Hoover factory in North Canton (now being converted into housing and offices – as far as I know all US production was here); the former Selmer band instrument manufacturing facility in Elkhart IN (once where most band instruments sold in the US were made – slated to become housing); and finally one of the two surviving Studebaker buildings in South Bend (part of a huge conversion project presently underway – at its post WWII peak 25,000 employees).
Fascinating and very sobering to see all of these places with my own eyes.
On to Charlevoix today to see my friends in northern Michigan.
