Detroit's Iconic Fisher Body Plant #21: The End of an Era
A Detroit Classic: Abandoned, explored, loved and now with a new lease on life...
Detroit, Michigan. The Motor City, on any given day at any time of the year and in any weather. When you get off I-94 at Russell Street, turn down the unassuming rough and mostly-patched blacktop of Piquette Avenue, totally unaware of the deep historical background you’re cruising through, and pull up to the Fisher Body Plant #21 for the first time, you can’t help but stare up in awe at the sheer scale of what you’re witnessing. Five stories of pure Albert Khan industrial architectural-style beauty loom above you, blotting out the light in its shadow and reminding you of a time when a goodly piece of the country’s automobile bodies came, in part, from this monolithic and now ruined structure you’re dwarfed by. Its long de-windowed eyes stare down at you, hollow and jagged where once panes of blue glass shone in the sun. You pull around the titanic building onto Harper Avenue, and THAT is where you truly get an idea of what true industrial grandeur looks like. Staring through the old and rusting barbed wire fence that surrounds what used to be the parking lot of FBP21, your eyes scan the mammoth block-long structure, parts of it collapsing, giant metal stacks still standing, an old cargo elevator shaft half-collapsed and leaning precariously against the rest of the building from a fire years ago, empty doorways and darkened holes galore beckoning you to explore the dim recesses of what used to be one of Detroit’s many bustling and powerful automobile factories. What was this place? How could it come to be as it is, standing before you? What is the history of this truly magnificent (even in ruins) former stirling example of bygone American industrial might?
Fisher Body Plant #21; winter 2022
The slogan “Body By Fisher” may not mean much to younger consumers, but in the early days of the auto industry, it carried a lot of weight.
It all goes back a century, give or take, to when the automobile was a novelty to most, and not as ubiquitous as it is now. In the years before the fully integrated automobile chassis became commonplace, the passenger compartment of a car was a modular component that could be swapped out with different makes or models to meet the particular tastes of a customer. This practice dated back to horse-drawn carriages; one could opt for various levels of decoration and amenities provided by different body companies.
The Fisher Body Company, formed in 1908 by Albert Fisher and his nephews Charles and Fred, and initially produced bodies for both the carriage and auto industries, though they dropped the carriage line in 1911. At the time, auto bodies were made of a mixture of shaped wood and metal, the construction of which was a complicated process requiring specifically skilled tradesmen. The big automakers found it was more cost-effective to outsource body construction; by 1910’s Fisher was producing high-quality automotive bodies for Cadillac, Ford, Studebaker, and Hudson, among other names.
An aerial of Fisher Body Plant #21, date unknown (photo from HistoricDetroit.org)
To meet increasing demand, Fisher expanded operations to over 40 plants in Detroit, Cleveland, Flint, and Ontario, Canada. Body Plant Number 21 was built in 1919, on Piquette Street in Detroit; just a stone’s throw away from Henry Ford’s original workshop (literally). The six-story building was designed by Detroit’s architect-legend, Albert Kahn, featuring reinforced concrete construction (something very new at the time), the “fluted” style columns that held the weight of all of that concrete, and end-to-end walls of windows to allow in natural light on each floor. The plant started to turn out Buick and Cadillac bodies in the 1920’s, focusing on the stamping process.
Fisher Body Plant #21 on a winter’s day, date unknown (from historicdetroit.org)
Automobile bodies being assembled at FBP#21, year unknown (Detroiturbex.com)
General Motors had moved most of its bodywork to Fisher in 1917, and two years later bought a controlling interest in the company. The two companies merged in 1926, though the “Body By Fisher” marquee continued. The Fisher brothers built their landmark 30-story headquarters across from the General Motors Building in what would later become the New Center area of Detroit (another fascinating place, NOT abandoned, and in modern day, a glorious wonder to behold if you’re ever in town!).
A series of violent strikes broke out at General Motors and Fisher Body plants across the country in the late 1930’s, bringing work to a halt. The sit-down strike at the Flint Fisher Body Plant #1 was one of the first organized labor actions by the nascent United Auto Workers, and naturally spread to all of the other plants, including FBP#21.
A striking worker sleeps on a set of uninstalled car seats before his time on the picket line at Fisher Body Plant #21, late 1930’s, exact date unknown (Library of Congress).
Later on like other automotive companies, Fisher, during the Second World War, retooled for military production, manufacturing components for planes, anti-aircraft guns, tanks, other machinery used to combat the German-Nazi Wehrmacht and Imperial Japanese forces.
Fisher Body Plant #21, November, 1943 (from historicdetroit.org)
After the war, FBP#21 on Piquette once against refocused on civilian work, stamping and assembly work for buses, ambulances, and limousines. By this time though, the Fisher name had started to recede from public view. In November of 1982 General Motors announced it was closing the #21 Body Plant and moving limousine production to Flint. The last day of production was April Fool’s Day, 1984.
The vacant plant found new life when the Carter Color Coat Company purchased it in 1990 for use in industrial painting; this however was short-lived, as Carter Color filed for bankruptcy in 1993 and subsequently abandoned the plant. Ownership of the site reverted to the city of Detroit in 2000. After that, it stood abandoned, open to the elements, vandals and the scrapping frenzy that really took off in Detroit after the 2008 crash and subsequent Great Recession. Windows were smashed. Doors were ripped off their hinges. Untold amounts of metals were torn out of the building, carted away and processed by armies of scrappers, often for little gain. In an extreme and ultimately desperate time in Detroit’s history, it ceased to be a busy place of industry and became a dubious and looming symbol of economic collapse and societal malaise in the Motor City. It became a place where the Detroit Police Department would find bodies; sometimes homeless individuals who had tried to weather out winter weather and who had frozen to death, and sometimes individuals who had died of overdoses, or worse, from bullets or stab wounds. Naturally, it also became a place that graffiti artists and explorers would be attracted to, as our story will later recollect.
Despite its ideal location close to midtown and Wayne State University, a lifetime of industrial processes at Fisher Body 21 left the site severely contaminated. A real EPA nightmare. A 2004 survey by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality found “asbestos materials, lead waste, industrial equipment, storage tanks, other solid / hazardous debris and wastes, and contaminated soils and concrete” in and around the plant. Further studies found the presence of arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, cyanide, lead, mercury, nickel, silver, thallium, and PCB’s; a veritable cocktail of industrial miasma and forgotten, buried metallic sludge.
The Environmental Protection Agency began remediation work on the site in 2008, removing and disposing of large quantities of soil and contaminated equipment. The oiled wooden bricks that had covered the floors were removed, as well as sections of concrete. Further work was carried out in 2010 to remove underground storage tanks.
Up until very recently, despite over $1 million dollars of work, the site was still considered “contaminated” by the EPA; a building in steady decline, slowly being broken down by natural as well as human elements. Several sections of the floor had caved in, the cement being eaten away by water and broken by ice. At least one fire heavily damaged the ground level of the first floor, partially collapsing a section of floor and a giant cargo elevator shaft. Moving into modern day, as of a few years ago, word came down that FBP was going to be renovated; transformed into more than 400 apartments plus retail space under a redevelopment plan. The $134 million project, called Fisher 21 Lofts, is currently underway as this article is being written. Rumor has it that there will be some partial demolition of the central part of the building, to create either two buildings or some kind of central courtyard. It hasn’t happened as of yet, but time will tell.
A rendering of the renovated Fisher Body Plant #21 (from detroitmi.gov)
Now, don’t get me wrong; this is undeniably a good thing for the city. Good for jobs and good that a historical landmark building is going to hypothetically be reborn. Its not getting torn down, ripped and shredded apart by wrecking crews and discarded into nondescript rubble piles like so many others. It IS a monumental win for the city’s history…but it is also, at the same time, a loss for those of us who have really come to know and love the place as we have. It sounds weird, but it’s true.
But my, oh my, despite all of that, Fisher has been our beautiful girl over the years; a true gem of exploratory perfection. Hours and hours were collectively spent exploring her many nooks and crannies, her long dim-lit reaches, her rusting innards. Several generations of urban explorers, photographers, skateboarders and bikers, curiosity seekers, and not a few ne’er-do-wells over the past few decades have claimed her as their own special kingdom, a place in which to revel in her abandoned state. So many will scoff at her “blown out” nature, and many will angrily call her an urban eyesore, but those of us that spent time there and who got to truly know her will tell you differently. Ask around the urban exploratory community. Almost EVERYONE has a story about Fisher Body Plant #21.
FBP#21, first floor columns
My own personal tales of time spent experiencing the old girl began with my first trip to Fisher in early January of 2019, on the very first excursion I ever took to explore anything in Detroit. We pulled up to the towering and hulking mass of former industrial glory in the midst of a blizzard at about 8 AM in the morning, parking our car out front on the street. Six inches of snow had fallen in only a few hours and many more would fall before the end of the day; Detroit was as quiet and still as it ever gets, as everyone smart was inside and off the roads that, at least back then, never got plowed because the city couldn’t afford it. We were living recklessly by being out, but dammit, we had driven all the way from Cleveland for the weekend, had spent the money on a hotel, and snow or no snow, we were going to explore what we could. At this stage in the game and moment in time, Fisher only had one entrance to its cold and dark chambers, and as we clamored through snow drifts to get to it, the sheer size of the place had me transfixed, even as the snow whipped around me. I was still new to exploring at that point, and didn’t have much to compare it to, but Fisher, standing solid and dark and half obscured by the furious snowstorm, burned a life memory into my brain. Trudging through the ever increasing drifts along Hastings Street, we saw our way in through the rough hole in the wall, which the city had tried over and over to stick plywood boards across (all to no avail) , and from that point on, my exploratory days would never be the same.
Into the gloom on the upper floors…
We spent hours inside her that morning, even despite the vicious wind howling across her empty and denuded concrete floors, the snow drifting around in what seemed some kind of wild and magical whirlwind, an invisible and ferocious yet sinuous beast or the shifting sands of the Sahara. I had never been in such a massive structure, despite having been a few of Cleveland’s bigger abandoned factories; Fisher had them all beat. The main obstacle of the morning, save for the ever dropping temperatures (it got down to 11 degrees that morning, and we had wrapped extra shirts around our faces for warmth), was ascending to Fisher’s upper floors. In those days, the city had welded metal plates over all of the entrances to the buildings multiple stairwells to attempt to keep intrepid curiosity seekers like us from getting to the upper levels where any number of bad things might happen. Unbeknownst to us at the time, there WAS a way to get to one of the stairwells; it required climbing through a trash filled elevator shaft, to a hole that had been knocked out in the rear of the shaft, into a crawlspace, then through another small hole in the cinderblock walls and then into that stairwell. We had no clue that existed on that first trip, and so, if we wanted to see the rest of the building, we were going to have to go through a rite of passage of sorts. On the first floor was a collapsed stretch of floor; I never did find out how or when the collapse happened, and I heard many versions of the story from explorers who had been coming here long before I ever showed up. Some said scrappers took to much of the load bearing beams out. Some said a fire happened in that section, which weakened the steel underneath the floor. Whatever it was, a vast slab of reinforced concrete floor had come down (the noise of that fall had to have been absolutely Biblical in nature) and had laid down a canted ramp of sorts, at about a 70 degree angle. It looked as if a giant had smashed a piece of the floor in with a raw and massive fist. Over time, skateboarders had added cement to it to smooth it out and use it has a quarterpipe, and many graffiti artists had used it as a canvas. It was this “ramp” that we were going to have to climb. Luckily, someone at some point in the unknown past had climbed up there and tied a rope to a beam on the second floor, but to get to the rope itself, we had to find all sorts of debris and stack it along the surface of the ramp so we could inch our way close enough to grab on. Now, in all honesty, I am, how shall we say, gravitically challenged. I am NOT a climber (this is understating things greatly). But somehow, the gods of abandonment watching over me, I hoisted my graceless carcass and all of my affixed gear up to that second floor, my mind screaming with the idea of a broken leg or worse, and finally pulled myself up that twenty feet to solid ground. And then I helped and hauled my poor girlfriend, also not a climber and near-hyperventilating in fear, up the rest of the way. All of this while the snow from the blizzard outside was cascading through the blown open walls and windows next to the ramp, enveloping us in its frigid embrace. I don’t think my fingers ever hurt as bad as they did from a) the subarctic cold, and b) the rope burns from trying to grapple my way up to the ledge above, all the while avoiding rusty rebar jutting out of the broken lip of where the floor used to be.
The collapsed “ramp” in much warmer weather than my first visit…
Once situated on the second floor, we spent several hours, cold as hell but excited to be where we were, trying to see as much as possible before the cold became too much for even our gloves, hats and improvised t-shirt scarves. We made it as far as the fourth floor, and at that time, when I was still doing Go-Pro videos and posting them to my now rather dead YouTube page, capturing the building in it’s wintery status.
The link to that whole explore, here: Mr. P. Explores the Fisher Body Plant #21.
The floor we had really wanted to see, the fifth floor, where all of the machinery and automobile tracks were still to be seen, was, at least to our knowledge at the time, unattainable; more metal plates had been fixed across the stairwells to those levels (it turns out that there WAS a way up, but in our ever-freezing stupor, we didn’t have the patience to find it, though to be fair, we didn’t know it was there to be found!).
FBP#21; second floor; one of the holes where car frames were dropped down to the next level via a track, long removed.
Eventually, it was time to return to the ground level, back to the car and hopefully into some much-needed warmth. We had to descend the same way we had come up, which meant sliding down the 70-degree incline while hanging on to the rope. Not thinking at all, the friction from me sliding down rough concrete heated up my ass far more than ever would have wanted, but still deposited me safely (-ish) to the bottom. My girlfriend had it far easier, as I was there to slow her descent. Either way, we had accomplished the drop without any broken bones or debilitating injuries (I don’t include my pride on that list!), and after me cooling my burning posterior off for a moment, steadied ourselves for the walk back to the car. In the hours we had been inside the building, the blizzard, if anything, had gotten even worse, and snow had piled up even more prodigiously; the car itself was absolutely buried and required quite a bit of time to uncover, but at the end, the heat welcomed us as we sat there, looking back through the snowy maelstrom at the snow-shrouded and abandoned industrial giant we had just mostly conquered. It was a moment in time that I will never forget, a story I will no doubt tell my grandkids about someday; just one of those life events that burns itself into who you are and what you become as a person. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but Fisher had that affect on me, especially given the conditions and circumstances of our first meeting.
FBP#21; second floor; rusting in peace…
I’ve had many trips back to Fisher since that day, most of them in far warmer and more agreeable weather. I got to see far more of her than I ever knew that I had missed on that first visit. The rows of still intact blue windows on the upper levels that brought a beautiful glow to the otherwise drab concrete. An insane amount of excellent graffiti; some of Detroit’s best, dating back years before we had ever been there. The massive and rusting water tower on the roof. And speaking of rooftops… views of the surrounding city that were unparalleled, (we spent many a moment up on that roof, and in a few cases, watched Detroit’s yearly July 4th fireworks displays from that vantage point). On the aforementioned fifth floor, there were the winding, bending and utterly rusting metal tracks that would have carried automobiles through the plant as they were assembled. The tracks lead through old paint booths and dark passageways, all of which provided some of the most glorious photographic opportunities one could hope for.
The top floor, automobile track area…
A track through an automobile frame paint booth…
Dim light inside a paint booth on the top floor…
“Tunnel O’ Luv”; tracks lead into a paint booth section…
There was, of course, the infamous “curve,” the most pronounced and well-known bend in the track, hidden in the far back corner of the still intact wood-block floor. “The Curve” was one of the most photogenic examples of ruined automobile factory machinery in Detroit, the long track along the open-windowed side of the building ending in the graceful curve that led into the many twists and turns of the middle of the plant; many an end of the day celebratory beers or adult beverages were had at “the Curve” after shooting the glorious orange-tinted sunset “golden hour” amongst the fluted pillars and rusting machinery on the top floor. The windows at “the Curve” provided an unbelievable view of the industrial urban vastness of the Motor City, and at sunset, it was a little more than divine. Perhaps a lot more, in this photographer’s humble opinion.
“The Curve” on the top floor…
Sunset at FBP#21, Summer 2022.
Final setting of the sun at “The Curve”; summer 2022 (beers not shown here).
The things I’ve done and seen in this gargantuan concrete and steel behemoth could provide stories for days. The things we experienced here are things that will never be forgotten. We have witnessed music videos being filmed amongst Fisher’s ruins (including, bizarrely, a man who had pulled his beater vehicle into the lot below while we watched from the roof, set up a tripod and video camera, and had his girlfriend twerking up against it while he filmed. Not TOO odd in itself, I suppose, but what made it so damn weird was the fact that while this was going on, a four year old kid was sitting on the hood of the car, while the woman I assume was his mother was shakin’ her rump for her man, in the same frame. Yeah. Just an example of the fact that you honestly never knew what you’d see at Fisher, trip to trip.). We’ve watched skateboarders and BMX bikers use the collapsed section aforementioned to make insane, life-threatening but ultimately amazing jumps. Of all things, I’ve watched a whole mini-van full of young, eighteen year old Taylor Swift fans climb that same incline in sandals and summer dresses on a warm summer night as they were on their way to the concert downtown. One by one, they ascended the rope, and we were too amused from our vantage point above to let them know that one of the staircases just down the way was wide open and would take them to the second floor. We’ve chased and scared the living bejesus out of edgelord Tik-Tok kids smashing windows there, sending them running down the stairwell and back to their mom’s car, parked just outside on the street. We’ve sat on the seat of the long-defunct old floor sweeper that sits exactly where it was left on the fifth floor back in the 1990’s. We’ve rummaged through the rotting wooden frames of what used to be offices, and tossed concrete blocks down the elevator shafts like a bunch of overgrown kids. We’ve sat on the heavy and massive circular industrial sinks that used to adorn each floor’s main restroom/locker room, taking a break with a cold beverage on a hot July day. We’ve had raucous laughs there, felt at peace there in the silences, talked about all number of life’s situations, good, bad and whatever was on our minds, with our friends, who quite honestly, became our extended family. Hell, we even were planning to put together a goodbye cookout up on the roof in the summer of 2024, but were never able to as it was cordoned off by construction crews by then. All this and so much more, we saw through our experiences and through our camera lenses over the years.
Graffiti and rotting wooden office walls…
Brick faces in all the right places…
What remained of the “blue windows” in the summer of 2023.
Now, perhaps, you come to see why we might be so saddened to witness the end of this place as it had been, what the outsider might see as an eyesore and a public nuisance. Over time and through all of your visits, you truly came to see a place like Fisher Body Plant #21 as your own, even though it really wasn’t. From our point of view, it was more ours than it was the city’s or the state’s; we at least APPRECIATED it for what it was. You do grow attached to these old industrial wrecks. You feel a special kinship with them. You soak up the history and the energy of years past instilled within their walls. You’ve built memories in these places, even though they are dangerous, toxic and dirty. And, like anything you learn to love, it can be hard to let go. You can never completely explain it to someone who doesn’t do what so many of us do. You could certainly never ever explain it to the asshole mayor of Detroit, who sees it as just another abandoned place with graffiti that he feels makes him personally look bad. You can usually never explain it to colleagues at work or family members who just can’t wrap their heads around why, for the love of the gods, why you spend your time in these filthy, “scary” places. You get weird looks for explaining the real reasons why. But you don’t care. You champion these places, because, after all, they ARE yours. You’ve fallen in love with their brooding, dim and mysterious rooms, the crumbling concrete columns and colorful, sometimes questionable, artistic additions. You’ve became enamored with their rusting, corroded pipes, broken and half-scrapped machinery, cracked industrial sinks and shattered glass panes. You can still smell the oil, the grease and the propane fumes of tow motors long gone that somehow still cling to the building long after they have been abandoned, and those smells always give you good vibes and recreate good times when you scent them anywhere else. You remember specific visits where your camera and your eye worked together to truly capture the magic of the place. You remember all of the grand times that you and your exploring partners and friends have had there; the crass language, the guffawing jokes, the dumb things you might add to the walls with a marker and the beverages consumed. You feel almost as if these places (and Fisher as a prime example) have become part of your extended family of sorts, well loved and well regarded. And who gives a damn what anyone else thinks past that?
The infamous floor cleaner, aka “the Zamboni!”
No doubt we’ll be there to document her as Fisher changes into whatever she will become. It will be sad, I have no doubt about it, as we’ll know we’ll never really get to step foot back into her massive halls and grungy stairwells, nor will be ever be able to shoot the shit at “the Curve” at sunset with beers in hand and the Black Keys going on someone’s phone, to watch the place get darker and the lights of the city below slowly come on. We’ll never get to laugh at some of the ridiculous stuff that happens in and around the place on any given trip. But in the end, at least she’ll still be standing and won’t have been erased like so many other places the mayor of Detroit has chosen to delete from existence because they get in the way of his vision of a sterilized version of a gentrified city. She’ll endure. Many of her future residents will never know the adventures we all had in the very spaces they will someday inhabit, and many of them, in time, will never even know that she WAS abandoned, much less her history before that. But we’ll remember. And our photos, videos, blogs and journals will make sure that none of that will ever be forgotten.
Raise a toast to Fisher Body Plant #21, all. May she stand forever.
(All photos taken by Mr. P. Explores, unless otherwise noted)
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Graffiti piece by Detroit artist “Julian”