Checker Cab, the Russian Immigrant, and the Yellow Car That Defined New York
Near Kalamazoo, Michigan
The most iconic vehicle in New York City for most of the twentieth century was built in Kalamazoo. The Checker cab, squat and durable and painted yellow, became so associated with American urban life that the company eventually gave up trying to make any other kind of car.
The man behind Checker was Morris Markin, a native of Smolensk, Russia, who immigrated to the United States and found his footing in Chicago as a clothier. During the First World War, he grew wealthy supplying uniforms to the Army. He used those profits to move into the taxi business in the early nineteen twenties, acquiring competing companies and looking for a manufacturing base far from Chicago's notoriously violent taxi wars of that era. His own house had been destroyed by a bomb in nineteen twenty-three.
He moved the operation to Kalamazoo, taking over two vacant auto plants that had previously housed the Dort Motor Car Company and the Handley-Knight. On June twenty-third, nineteen twenty-three, the Kalamazoo factory opened and the first Checker cab rolled off the line there. The company employed seven hundred workers.
Markin's genius was vertical integration. He owned both the factory making the cabs and major shares in the taxi fleets buying them, creating a captive market that kept the company solvent through the Great Depression when its competitors folded. The vehicle itself was designed for punishment. Heavy frames. High roof lines for passengers wearing hats. Doors that could be slammed ten thousand times. The cab that New York taxi riders remembered from the nineteen fifties through the nineteen eighties was engineered for longevity in this factory.
The final Checker rolled off the Kalamazoo line on July twelfth, nineteen eighty-two, ending nearly sixty years of production. The company lingered as a parts supplier until bankruptcy in two thousand nine. The plant is gone. But drive through New York in any archival photograph from the second half of the twentieth century and almost every cab in the frame came from this city.
