General Motors' Factory Zero stands on what was the northern end of Poletown, a Polish and Kashubian neighbourhood settled from the 1870s. In 1980, with Detroit losing auto jobs, GM offered to build a new assembly plant in the city if a suitable site could be found. Mayor Coleman Young and the cities of Detroit and Hamtramck used eminent domain to assemble one. Counts vary, but something like 4,000 people, more than a thousand homes, some 140 businesses, the neighbourhood's churches and a hospital were cleared in 1981, on land joined to the old Dodge Main site. The neighbourhood fought. Residents went to the Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled that economic development counted as a public use. Protesters held a 29-day sit-in at the Church of the Immaculate Conception until police removed them in July 1981. Ralph Nader took up the cause. Young, who had condemned the destruction of Black Bottom, was accused of doing the same thing to another community. In 2004 the same court reversed itself in County of Wayne v. Hathcock, overruling the Poletown decision as a radical departure. It was too late to matter. The plant opened in 1985. One piece of the old map survived inside the fence: Beth Olem, a Jewish cemetery of more than a thousand graves in the northwest corner of the site, which GM had to build around and which opens to visitors about twice a year.
Getting there
42.3760, -83.0430
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