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Sometime in the 1960s, the plant began to lose its competitive edge. Dodge Main is eight stories tall, and that made it an anachronism. Chrysler was finding it more efficient to build separate, more highly automated plants all on one floor, to specialize in the various stages of production. While Dodge Main once housed its own foundry, sewing room and stamping plant, it now became an assembly plant. In a good year, like 1973, it could pour 511,000 cars out onto the second-floor inspection deck. But in bad years, which most have been lately for Chrysler, the plant cost a bundle. It had 32 freight elevators to carry people and parts from floor to floor. In winter it leaked heat from a thousand windows. Says a Chrysler production man, Jim Caton: "This place goes back to when coal was $2.50 a ton, when miners got $32 a week, versus about $70 a day now."
When Chrysler announced that the plant gates would close, the future of Hamtramck itself was thrown into question. Already burdened by a shrinking, aging population, the city suddenly faced the loss of $2.3 million in annual tax revenues—almost half the general fund budget. The municipal payroll has been slashed from around 500 to 200, leaving just 43 policemen and 40 firemen. "They used to take up a whole block on Joseph Campau marching in parades," recalls Mayor Kozeran.
A Washington consultant has been hired to find a future for both Dodge Main and Hamtramck. A symposium of academics and government officials gathered there last summer to exchange ideas. Some suggested turning the plant into a bus factory. Others thought solar panels would correct the energy losses. Still others said to forget about the plant and transform Hamtramck into a free trade zone or a tourist attraction, like a Polish-theme park. "What Hamtramck does," said one participant, Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, "will be an example for the rest of the nation." Added University of Pittsburgh Historian Samuel Hays somewhat pessimistically: "It's almost as though you're seeing the death of the manufacturing city right here. And my point is: don't resurrect it. Why try to rebuild something that is gone?"
It's more emotional than rational," I answers Dick Lada, a Dodge Main employment supervisor. "Half the judges and attorneys in town paid for their educations working at this plant. I was born here. I've worked at this plant 15 years and hired thousands of people, many of whose fathers and grandfathers worked here. It's been good to a lot of people."
But the younger generation does not share that sense of obligation. Wanda Paruch's daughter Betty, 33, got her master's degree in humanities at nearby Wayne State University with the help of her mother's Dodge Main paychecks. Now she works as a secretary to a local psychiatrist. Most of her high school classmates have left, she says: "They settled into a lower-middle-class life in places like Warren and Dearborn." A case of upward automobility, perhaps. As Boorstin said, "The mobility that brought the people here is also the kind of mobility that, in American history, carries them elsewhere." —Barrett Seaman
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