Doraville: Nine and a Half Million Cars

In nineteen forty-seven, General Motors broke ground on a cow pasture in Doraville, a small DeKalb County town northeast of Atlanta. What rose on that site was one of the South's defining industrial plants. Over the next six decades, workers here assembled Buick Skylarks, Pontiac Grand Prixs, Chevrolet Impalas, and Oldsmobile Cutlass Supremes. By the time the plant closed in September of two thousand eight during General Motors' financial crisis, it had produced millions of vehicles.

At its peak, the Doraville plant employed thousands of workers who built the cars that suburban Atlanta drove. When it shut, it took a generation of stable manufacturing jobs with it. The site has since been reimagined as a film production campus. Third Rail Studios moved in, and the remaining acres became a media complex. The plant began life under General Motors' Buick-Oldsmobile-Pontiac Assembly Division, created in nineteen forty-five. It was one of two General Motors factories in Atlanta, the other being Lakewood Assembly, built in nineteen twenty-seven. In its last years Doraville built minivans, including the Chevrolet Venture, the Pontiac Montana, and the Oldsmobile Silhouette, and from nineteen ninety-seven to nineteen ninety-nine it made the Opel Sintra, a minivan sold in Europe. The last day was September twenty-sixth, two thousand eight. By twenty fourteen the whole factory had been demolished. The old training building became Assembly Atlanta, where Third Rail Studios opened in August of twenty sixteen, and a network soap opera, Beyond the Gates, films there. Next door, the Doraville rail yard, where GM vehicles were loaded onto auto carriers, is still served by Norfolk Southern. The cow pasture became a factory became a movie lot, each transformation a chapter in the story of an American suburb.