Road to Power

Chapter 8 Buick LeSabre: Fixing Hamtramck

A low, sprawling building painted a putty-yellow color, General Motors' Hamtramck assembly plant sits on a crumbling, weed-lined service road off the Edsel Ford Freeway. The plant has the unusual distinction of being located both in the confines of the independent city of Hamtramck (pronounced Ham-TRAM-ick), an enclave of 22,000 people, and the city of Detroit. Plant officials joke that workers ask to be assigned to lines on the Hamtramck end of the plant, rather than the Detroit side, because that way they will avoid paying the higher taxes of the Motor City.

Hamtramck was a contentious plant before it was even built. To make way for its construction, the city knocked down much of the neighborhood known as Poletown, which had been settled by Polish immigrants who came to labor in the auto industry in the 1920s and 1930s. According to the Detroit Free Press, “1,300 homes, 140 businesses, six churches and one hospital lay in the path of the proposed plant.”¹ Despite an offer by the city, led by Mayor Coleman Young, to buy homes from those displaced and to help finance new ones, the construction rankled residents.

The protests made it to the national level after GM's longtime nemesis got involved: consumer affairs crusader Ralph Nader. His activists decamped to the area with vigils and legal action to back the local residents fighting eviction. Even the venerable New York Times columnist William Safire wrote about the controversy, decrying ...