Highland Park, Michigan

Highland Park is a small city completely surrounded by Detroit, covering about three square miles. Henry Ford chose it in nineteen ten as the site of his new Highland Park Plant, where in nineteen thirteen he introduced the world's first moving automotive assembly line. The Model T price fell dramatically as production efficiency soared, and the plant employed over seventy-five thousand workers at its peak.

When Ford moved mass production to the massive River Rouge complex in the late nineteen twenties, Highland Park's fortunes began a long decline. The city incorporated separately from Detroit in nineteen eighteen to protect its tax base. Today it has roughly nine thousand residents, a fraction of its nineteen twenty-seven peak of about forty-six thousand, and stands as a poignant reminder of how thoroughly the auto industry's geography shaped, and then unmade, the communities it touched.