Uniroyal Giant Tire

Along Interstate Ninety-Four in Allen Park, you can't miss the eighty-foot Uniroyal Giant Tire, one of the most recognizable roadside attractions in Michigan. It started as a Ferris wheel at the nineteen sixty-four New York World's Fair, where Uniroyal used it to promote their tires and let fair visitors ride gondolas built to look like tires. After the fair closed, the wheel was dismantled, converted into a solid static tire, and installed here in nineteen sixty-six as a billboard you can see from the freeway at sixty miles an hour.

At twelve tons and eighty feet in diameter, it remains the largest tire model ever built. In nineteen ninety-eight Uniroyal added an eleven-foot nail to the tread to promote a puncture-resistant tire, and it was removed in two thousand three. The tire has outlasted the Allen Park Uniroyal plant that once stood nearby and is now a local landmark in its own right.