Sex and Cadillacs. Not Necessarily in That Order.

In my “Wheels” post the other day I put in a link to Hemmings, publishers of Hemmings Motor News and other fine automotive publications. It was only yesterday that I spent considerable time on their site, and was pleased to find Hemmings also has a blog. I was further pleased to find a photographic essay about the General Motors Heritage Center on said blog, with an initial installment of 26 photos taken during “a visit to the GM Heritage Center, part 1.” What makes the photo essay special is the fact GM’s Heritage Center is not a museum and it is not open to the public. So the things you see on the blog cannot be seen by just anyone, anywhere. Sorta like another GM archive…the Cadillac Museum.

A little-known jewel of automotive history exists in Warren, Mich., not far from the General Motors Tech Center. This jewel consists of a collection of historic Cadillacs maintained by Cadillac Historical Services and overseen by Greg Wallace.

A descendent of the Cadillac Museum which used to be housed in the Cadillac plant complex on Clark Ave. in Detroit, the collection is open only by appointment or special request. Not as easy to find as the Clark Ave. factory once was, it is well worth the effort.

I toured the original Cadillac museum at the Clark Avenue complex shortly before the manufacturing facility was completely vacated in the mid-90s (all that was left were admin types, security guards, and a caretaker staff). Clark Avenue used to be Cadillac’s one and only assembly plant, beginning sometime in the early 1920s and running until the mid-1990s. My buddy Greg was an engineer with Cadillac at the time, working on the famous Northstar motor. (Aside: Greg holds several patents on the supercharged Northstar found in the Cadillac STS-V, specifically its induction system. I wrote about it here.)

As a member of Cadillac’s engineering division (before the many, many restructurings at GM), Greg knew the Clark Avenue complex was scheduled for demolition and was worried about the fate of the Cadillac Museum. And he also extended an invitation to me to go visit…which I snapped up post-haste. As with the current Cadillac Museum, the Clark Avenue museum was available “by appointment only,” and Greg had greased it superbly. Our guided tour was conducted… for about the first 15 minutes… by an elderly retired Cadillac engineer who was a “principal” at the museum. After the initial 15 minutes had passed the elderly gent made his apologies and said he was required elsewhere, but we were free to wander about the premises on our own. And so we did, for hours.

After we’d lingered over, around, and through the various displays, Greg took me to the now-empty production facility where literally thousands upon thousands of Cadillacs… including the one I owned… had been built over the years. It was an eerie experience, to say the very least. There was only silence… dead quiet… where hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women had formerly toiled in a maelstrom of activity and deafening noise. All the great stamping presses, the overhead tracks, the assembly stations… gone. Nothing remained but a vast empty space, the emptiness broken only by massive concrete and steel pillars every 20 feet or so and shafts of pale, diffused light coming through high windows streaked with years and years of accumulated industrial grime. The facility was so large, the space so grand in scale, that the experience reminded me of being in a cathedral, and it was… sorta. An industrial cathedral built by and run by men who designed and assembled fabulous motor cars for the men and women who built America. That was another age and another time. The Clark Avenue plant is nothing more than a memory these days.

Finally… There are some fine photos at the GM Heritage Center link…assuming you’re into cars, Gentle Reader. If you’re not…don’t bother.

―:☺:―

In other news…some big Democrat politician got busted for whoring around. Or so I heard. You can’t get away from it, actually.

Sad. On many, many levels.