Effort underway to restore historic Ford Model T plant in Highland Park
JACK LESSENBERRY
Michigan Public Radio
WED APRIL 30, 2014
http://michiganradio.org/post/effort...-park-michigan
It looks like a museum and potentially more may soon become a reality for the long underutilized historic site.
- One of the most significant sites in the history of Detroit – and the modern world – has also been one of the most sadly neglected. Not only that, it isn’t even in Detroit. Every day, thousands of commuters drive by an old red-brick building on Woodward Avenue in the little enclave city of Highland Park.
-You can tell this building used to be something grand, by the beautiful Pewabic tiles ringing its roof. But the plate-glass windows are regularly broken, and weeds and small trees mostly obscure a fading historical marker. But now that is all about to change. Last week, the non-profit Woodward Avenue Action Association announced it had bought the old administration building and the executive garage behind it. This was, in part, a case of some of today’s world’s newest technology coming to the aid of history. Harriet Saperstein, chair of the Action Association, told me that a significant chunk of the money was raised by crowdsourcing on the Internet. More than 700 individual donors chipped in. While most of the slightly more than half a million needed came from traditional grants, she feels that crowdsourcing gave a lot of people a sense of sharing in a momentous event. Not only that, she told me, these contributions will help them make the case to people with real money, “the foundation, corporation and governmental sectors,” who they will need to secure the millions needed to turn this into something wonderful. For they intend to build not just a museum of automotive history, although that will be part of it. This is to be an Automobile Heritage and Welcome Center meant both to remind us of what is worth preserving about our past and help revitalize this area.
- She hopes this building is fully open to the public in five years, with everything from tours led by holograms of Henry Ford to an advanced industrial technology learning center.