Wreckers Stir Up as Many Memories as Dust at Ford Plant

To the Ford Motor Co., it was the world’s most modern and efficient factory of 1930, churning out one Model A every 93 minutes. To the city, it was a ticket to modern industrialization. And to some of the men who worked on its grinding assembly line, it was “a real sweatshop.”

For more than a quarter of a century, the old brick plant at the edge of the Port of Long Beach buzzed with the mechanical genius of Henry Ford and helped turn a virtuous beach resort into an industrial boom town.

Now the plant is coming down. Although it has been nothing but an oversize warehouse since Ford moved out in 1959, the poking and prodding of workmen preparing it for demolition are stirring up as many memories--good and bad--as they are dust.

“This is a fascinating building, a building that represented the coming of age of Long Beach as a modern city,” said Ruthann Lehrer, neighborhood and historic preservation officer.

“By today’s standards, it was a sweatshop,” countered Don Thomas, who worked on the upholstery end of the line in 1945 and was glad to leave it one year later. “They would complain if someone went to the bathroom on company time. The Ford Motor Co. (plant) was not an easy place to work.”

Up to 2,000 men once worked under the hot lamps of the line, but today the huge factory stands hollow and vacant, except for a few homeless people who sleep there at night and an occasional pair of pigeons nesting in its rafters.

The sheer history of the place has qualified it for the National Register of Historic Places. Ford handpicked the site to manufacture the classic Model A, the car that helped turn a rich man’s luxury into a poor man’s staple.

But history has been bumped aside by progress. The Ford plant is an earthquake hazard, full of asbestos. And it’s standing in the way of the expansion of a port that is one of the largest in the country and growing fast.

When port administrators announced recently that they would knock the building down to use the valuable land along Cerritos Channel for container storage, scarcely a word of protest was heard, even from usually vocal Long Beach preservationists.

There was some talk of turning it into a nautical museum or a restaurant for passing cruise ships, but the cost was considered prohibitive and the location--on the fringe of a gray industrial section of town--too remote.

By December, demolition experts say, it will be rubble.

“This is a fascinating building,” Lehrer said, “one that means a great deal historically to the city. But from a practical standpoint, there’s really no use for it anymore. I am always sorry to see a building of such overwhelming historical importance that has no future.”

To compensate for the demolition, port administrators say, they have spent close to $100,000 to make a detailed photographic and historical record for remembering the plant.

A report already compiled by researchers--who deemed the factory eligible for national landmark status--tells the following story of a town and a factory that helped share a few years of industrial glory.

The Ford Motor Co. was young and booming in Michigan by the 1920s, and 2,000 miles west, so was Long Beach.

While Ford was pioneering an assembly line that spit out one Model T every 93 minutes, Long Beach was striking oil.

Before the Roaring ‘20s were over, there were 15 million Model Ts on the road--more than half of all the automobiles sold in the world. At the same time, the Pacific Fleet had come to Long Beach, creating a strong and growing harbor and positioning the city to attract nationally known manufacturers.

The first of them would be Henry Ford.

It was Christmas of 1927 when Ford decided to replace the fabulously successful Model T with the Model A, a modern wonder with roll-down windows that started without a crank. It would be built, Ford decreed, in a customized factory, his 36th in the country, at Long Beach Harbor.

Rumors were swirling in Long Beach over the arrival of Ford, by then a living American legend. “The key to Long Beach is yours,” the mayor and several other city officials proclaimed in a full-page Press-Telegram newspaper ad.

The stock market crashed in the fall of 1929, but who cared? Ford was promising to employ 1,200 men. He had nearly doubled the minimum wage of the day to $5 and cut the workday from nine hours to eight.

On April 21, 1930, Lt. Gov. H.S. Carnahan pressed a button at the Pacific Coast Club (another landmark that would not survive the century) and an assembly line 1 1/2 football fields long began to roll at 106 inches a minute.

Ford’s 29-year relationship with Long Beach would be as rocky as a torrid love affair, beset by labor problems, a world war, even an earthquake, then lifted to record heights by the prosperous postwar ‘50s.

The $3-million factory more than kept its promise, employing 2,000 men rather than 1,200. It produced 300 cars a day and supplied Model As to 200 Ford dealers on the Pacific Coast. Business Week magazine on April 16, 1930, lauded the new plant as “one more step in the amazing transformation of Southern California from a tourist’s paradise into an important industrial community.”

The plant surged with initial success until the Depression took hold and cars stopped selling. The success of the Model A, which the Long Beach factory had been designed to produce, was “solid but not spectacular,” mostly because Ford refused to offer such innovative features as a V-8 engine.

“Ford’s stubbornness cost him leadership in the industry as the Model A was outsold by General Motors’ Chevrolet and Chrysler’s Plymouth,” researchers later concluded.

The last Model A left the line in 1931. Shortly afterward, Ford cut the minimum wage to $4 a day, below prevailing industry pay levels.

More trouble was to come at 5:56 p.m. on March 10, 1933, when a 6.3-intensity tremor struck with an epicenter in Huntington Beach. In 10 seconds, what is known to history as the Long Beach earthquake killed up to 52 people and left behind $45 million in property damage in Long Beach. Martial law was declared, and soldiers patrolled the harbor with bayonets. The damaged Ford plant shut down and did not reopen until December, 1934--with many new problems on the horizon.

Labor unions were demanding decent working conditions and a livable wage. The Long Beach plant was plagued by strikes. And men like Thomas, the former assembly line worker, left in search of steadier work.

“Henry Ford paid $5 way back when, but he also got the most out of people before he gave them that $5,” said Thomas, who recently took city officials on a tour of the plant.

When the speed of the line got comfortable, operators were told to crank it up, Thomas said. Most young GIs working on the line could not afford to buy one of the cars they helped produce, which sold then for about $550. (But any worker who could accumulate enough money for a car was given the day off to follow it through the line and make sure it was manufactured just right.)

Then came World War II, and the federal government leased the plant to be used as an army supply depot. Two-door sedans gave way to jeeps. Ford moved its offices to Los Angeles, and its auto-making to Richmond in Contra Costa County.

When the war ended on Aug. 15, 1945, Ford rose like a phoenix in Long Beach.

Within four years, the Long Beach plant was producing 50,000 cars a year and boasting of modernized spray-paint booths that, Ford said, were so well ventilated that workmen didn’t need respirators. Production hit its peak in 1953.

For three years, profits soared. But something else was sinking: Long Beach Harbor. Oil dredging was causing the bottom to collapse. The Edison plant at the center of the harbor had sunk 22 feet and was dropping two feet a year. The Ford plant was well below sea level. The Navy was threatening to leave.

By 1958, the city was injecting water below the harbor’s surface and the problem that had threatened to wipe out Long Beach’s economy was solved. But by then, Ford had decided to leave.

The plant shut down March 20, 1959, and Ford moved to Pico Rivera.

The factory that Henry Ford had called his pride and joy was relegated to a warehouse that slowly faded from the public memory.

“This plant embodies much of what Henry Ford stood for and preserves for the community a sense of time associated with his genius,” researchers wrote in a May report assessing the building’s eligibility for national landmark status.

But the factory that had helped change the city is the city’s latest victim of change. The port once known for manufacturing now profits wildly from import and storage of products manufactured somewhere else.

“The older structures are coming down. Unfortunately, that happens,” said Stacey Crouch, environmental specialist at the port. “It would be nice to save them all, but they aren’t all safe. And in order to be the least environmentally damaging, we have to develop on property that already exists. That’s our problem.”

The port will make way for a cargo handling terminal. Ironically, there is some chance that FORD PLANT FACTS The Ford Motor Co. plant in Long Beach Harbor:

Opened: April 21, 1930.

Cost: $3 million.

Employed: 2,000 men.

Production: 300 Model A cars a day.

Assembly time: 93 minutes per car.

Minimum Wage: $5 a day.

Closed: March 20, 1959.

Source: Port of Long Beach. the land will be used to store cars--imported from Japan.