Volunteers toil to save home of Ford's Model T in Detroit

DETROIT -- For the past 14 years, teams of volunteers, many retirees from Ford Motor, a few from General Motors, many who never even worked in the auto industry, have been painstakingly restoring 355 double sash windows at an old Detroit factory that's called the "Birthplace of the Model T." 

Henry Ford had an office at the small, three-story brick factory, built in 1904, and reminiscent of an old textile mill. Its historic relevance is intensified by a special "secret room" that had been walled off in a corner of the third floor. There, Henry Ford and others nurtured the idea for a car that was affordable enough to end up being sold to the masses and the Model T was born. The Model T was developed here and introduced in 1908 as a 1909 model. 

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The first 12,000 Model T cars were built at the Piquette plant that sits on an industrial corner of Detroit's Milwaukee Junction neighborhood, north of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the city's famed art museum.

The role of the retiree brigade and the restoration of all those 355 windows are a part of its story. These quiet heroes have diligently showed up for years, created their own workshop, donated tools and worked hard to bring light back to an important part of Detroit's history.

Without fixing all those windows, the plant might just be another vacant building. But now it's a trendy spot that's used for weddings and other events. The Piquette plant is on national and state registers of historic places.

"We're down to only 16 windows," said Art Pope, 83, who was one of the original team of volunteers back in 2003. The job could be done by late fall.

Auburn Hills-based Guardian Industries has donated many of the glass panes to restore the windows. Edsel B. Ford II — the great-grandson of Henry Ford — and his wife Cynthia Ford donated money to adopt windows on the front of the building. 

By one estimate, the work of the volunteers could add up to almost $1 million. 

The plant is operated by a nonprofit organization incorporated as the Model T Automotive Heritage Complex, which bought the building at Piquette and Beaubien in 2000. 

"It's not a pristine museum; it's a real place. It actually manufactured 45,000 cars. People toiled here," said Nancy Darga, executive director for the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant. In all, eight Ford models were built there. 

Darga sees many heroes in the story starting from the early dedicated preservationists who took money out of their own pockets to help buy the building to generous donations to the "Adopt a Window" program to the volunteers.

"The window team is a hero because they provided the muscle. They provided the muscle to save the building," she said. She estimates that all that work added up to under $1 million.

The large, expansive windows provided maximum daylight to workers when cars were in production. But decades later, many of the windows were broken, and the building was full of pigeons and raccoons, according to Darga, who wasn't even sure early on that dreams of restoring the building would work. 

The Model T did well enough after early production at Piquette that Ford soon bought 57 acres to build the massive Highland Park Plant and begin assembly there in 1910. The property at 461 Piquette Ave. was sold to Studebaker in 1911 and Studebaker used the building for auto production until 1933. Other owners followed. 

But by the late 1990s, the Piquette building was long neglected and in rough shape, much like the neighborhood around it, when Jerald Mitchell, a retired professor of anatomy at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and others worked to save the building from potentially being demolished. 

The restoration process is quite involved including removing glass and hardware and stripping frames to bare wood. The windows are being restored to U.S. Department of Interior historic preservation standards. 

Deteriorated wood needs to be hardened with a two-part epoxy formula. Missing areas of the wood are reconstructed. And volunteers take part in sanding, priming and re-glazing of original glass when possible.

"You can see here, the ones that are not clear are recycled glass," Pope said, as he walked with me around the Piquette plant last week.

 Pope and others said they found a reason to keep working all those years on the windows because of the historical value. 

"You can see a building that Henry Ford himself had worked in," Pope said. 

"Obviously, this is a historical shrine," said Eugene Greenstein, who retired from Ford in 2005 as a mid-level engineering manager.