Riverside drive
When Francine Romine was in fifth grade, she took a field trip that left a big impression. Like a lot of kids growing up around Detroit, she and her classmates trooped through the nearby, gloomy caverns of Ford Motor Co.'s Rouge River plant, once the world's largest factory. Romine remembers peering from a high catwalk onto a shop floor that looked like a caldron boiling over with molten steel, whining machines, and sweating men. "It was like that movie Scared Straight about the guys in prison," she says. "You thought, `Gee, if I don't do my homework, I'm going to end up down there.' "
Now Romine is an executive with Ford and helping to reopen tours of the new and improved Rouge plant on May 3. It's not exactly the Magic Kingdom, but for those who appreciate the gritty romance of American industry, this tour is destined to become a classic.
Just don't count on being scared. Ford aims more to amaze visitors with a glimpse of the state-of-the-art assembly line: a clean, safe, environmentally friendly plant where F-150 trucks are made that looks more like a Home Depot than a Dickensian nightmare. There's ivy on the walls and designer grass growing on the roof to moderate the temperature.
Thankfully, enough of the old factory's smokestacks and coke ovens loom alongside to evoke memories, but visitors can't walk through them anymore. "That was in the days before we worried about liability insurance," sighed a Ford spokesperson. To compensate, the tour starts with two compelling movies: a vivid history and an industrial ballet showing how a pickup truck is made, complete with a soundtrack by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. When the F-150 bodies emerge from a vast pool of pearly gray undercoat, it's better than Swan Lake.
Audacious. When high costs closed the tour 25 years ago, the public lost its last place to see the innards of industry. The Rouge was American power personified and Henry Ford at his most audacious. Sick of being at the mercy of suppliers, he decreed a totally integrated factory. Millions of tons of material scraped from the earth and dumped at one end of the complex were formed by 100,000 workers into shiny new cars rolling out the other.
As automaking decentralized, Rouge scaled back. Still Ford's largest plant, it built Mustangs for the past 40 years. The new line can customize nine versions of the F-150s. Instead of an "assembly line," ergonomic "skillets" bear cars-in-the-making along a looping 4-mile path tended by soldering robots and a relative handful of workers. If the old Rouge is the story of 20th-century manufacturing, Ford hopes this new line will be the story of the 21st.
The tour starts at the spectacular Henry Ford museum with its homage to car culture dating to the late 1800s as well as industrial breakthroughs such as steam boilers and turbines. If you're the kind of person who's thrilled by the world's largest steam locomotive--and who isn't?--this is the place for you. Then go outside to Greenfield Village, a replica 19th-century farm town that reflects Henry Ford's passion for things bucolic. As Bob Causey, one of the museum's curators, puts it, "In one place, you can explore the world that Henry Ford built and the one that he destroyed."
The Guide
You can see more new models at a regional auto show, but Detroit's Big Three have museums of their greatest hits. You'll have to motor between the spread-out sites, but what else would you expect?
THE HENRY FORD , Dearborn. Best of the bunch, it traces auto evolution, including other companies' cars. Don't miss the bone-jarring IMAX movie on NASCAR racing. $9-$26
WALTER P. CHRYSLER MUSEUM , Auburn Hills. About 60 cars including prototypes offer a frank look at the innovative company's ups and downs and ups. $6
GM WORLD , Detroit. A bigger facility is planned for this museum, but for now, ogle the '49 Roadmaster's "carnivorous grille" and the Buck Rogers fins on the classic '59 El Dorado. Free -Brian Kelly
This story appears in the May 3, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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