Preston Tucker worked for Packard at one time, and probably toured the plant during his employ.That big plume of black smoke that filled the sky Monday night and was visible from downtown to the eastern suburbs? It was just the Packard Plant burning. Again.
And that fire is likely to be burning this morning, because the Packard Plant is too dangerous for Detroit firefighters to enter after dark, so they had to let it burn Monday night.
Fire crews are called to the massive and mostly abandoned complex about once a week, said Lt. Steve Kirschner of Engine Co. 23, which is stationed a few blocks west of the plant.
The fires stem from scrappers and their acetylene torches and people, many of them young, who like to explore the Packard Plant and think it’s cool to set fires to the huge mounds of trash and other dumped debris in the complex’s large rooms.
Packard had a history of innovation (for years after they'd gone out of business they still had more patents than any company in the automotive industry), and, like Tucker, when the company went under, there were accusations of a conspiracy by the bigger makers to shut them down. (A Congressional investigation did find evidence of this, but failed to do anything about it.)
Currently, no one owns the plant. There was an effort some years ago to have the place preserved as a historical landmark, but very little ever came of it, and from reading the article, it sounds like so much of the plant is gone, that there's no way to preserve any of it. Supposedly, when the company closed, all the dies and tooling were left behind. It would be a shame if that had all been cut up and sold for scrap, but I doubt that at this late date, there's anything left.
