Chevy in the Hole

If you drive down Chevrolet Avenue toward the Flint River, you drop into a shallow valley, the land falls away beneath you, and for a moment the old industrial buildings rise up on either side like canyon walls. Workers called it Chevy in the Hole, and the name stuck because it was exactly what it described: the Chevrolet manufacturing complex, tucked into a depression along the riverbank.

Automobile manufacturing at this site began in nineteen oh four. At its peak, the complex employed fourteen thousand workers and occupied seventeen buildings. This was not one factory but a small industrial city, vertically integrated in the way Durant had envisioned, with engine casting and body assembly and paint and trim all happening within a few hundred yards of each other.

Chevrolet in Flint was also one of the central sites of the nineteen thirty-six sit-down strike. The strategic seizure of plant number four here on February first, nineteen thirty-seven, was the move that finally forced General Motors to the table. The union's occupation of that building cut production at Buick and other GM facilities across the country. Six days later, negotiations began in earnest.

Plant closings began in the nineteen nineties, and by two thousand four the complex was gone. The buildings were demolished. The river that had powered the factories was cleaned up. Genesee County Parks began transforming the site into what is now Chevy Commons, a park with restored wetlands and meadows and a trail running along the Flint River.

The hole is still there. The land still drops away. You can kayak on this river now. The factories are gone but the shape they left in the earth remains, a topographic memory of what was here for a century.