City of industry

ASSOCIATED PRESS
PART HISTORY CLASS, PART museum tour, part Disney, excursions to the revived historic Rouge industrial site provide a glimpse of the auto company Henry Ford founded 101 years ago and a taste of how it helped change society.
For 56 years, hundreds of thousands of people annually toured Ford Motor Co.'s 600-acre complex in Dearborn, Mich., to witness the miracle of automotive production: iron ore, coal and rubber entering one side of the site, shiny new cars rolling out the other.
It was a Mecca for motoring enthusiasts, a popular field trip for local schools. But tough economic times prompted the automaker in 1980 to end the public showings.
On May 3, Ford resumed the long-anticipated tours, showing off a $2 billion refurbishment of the Rouge, once the world's largest industrial complex. The tours take 90 minutes to three hours.
The new Rouge will enhance an already hefty offering of attractions in southeast and central Michigan for auto enthusiasts and give a boost to the state's $15 billion-a-year tourism industry.
Visitors will be able to watch workers build Ford's best-selling vehicle, the F-150 pickup, at the new Dearborn Truck Plant, the cornerstone of the Rouge revival. The facility, which features a 10.4-acre living roof of plants and other vegetation, will serve as a pilot for several environmental and technical concepts.
Prediction
The Henry Ford, an umbrella organization that runs the Henry Ford Museum and will operate the tours, predicts 300,000 people a year will visit the Rouge.
"Some people will go through and see nothing but an environmental showcase, and that's what they'll remember," Bill Ford, the automaker's chairman and chief executive, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "Others will see nothing but lean and flexible manufacturing, and that's what they'll remember. Kids and people who don't know anything about our business will go through and say, 'Wow, this is pretty neat. I had no idea trucks were built this way."'
Mark Pischea, executive director of the MotorCities National Heritage Area, said the new Rouge tour meshes nicely with his organization's missions to educate and to promote tourism.
"It's a great thing for Ford and the region," Pischea said. "It's who we are. It's part of our culture. When you stop to think about all the things we celebrate in the region, the car is a part of all of it."
A closer look
The heritage area, one of 24 designated by Congress, features 1,200 significant sites that help explain the region's rich automotive and labor history.
Some sites are as simple as the historic marker adjacent to the Rouge that tells of the infamous "Battle of the Overpass," where Henry Ford's security men attacked union organizers in 1937 as they handed out pamphlets near the plant. Pictures of bloodied UAW leaders appeared in newspapers nationwide and fueled the union's cause to organize at Ford.
Venues include the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, the Edsel & amp; Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores and the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing, where visitors can learn the evolution of Oldsmobile, from early buggies and bikes to the once-popular General Motors Corp. brand that ceases production this year.
No one person, however, was more important than Henry Ford, who developed the assembly line and helped usher in the Industrial Age.
History
The Rouge site, which Henry Ford bought in 1915, was first used by the company to build boats for the U.S. Navy in World War I. That experience revealed the company's vulnerabilities to price fluctuations and material shortages when using outside suppliers, so Ford committed to becoming as self-sufficient a manufacturer as possible.
Helping Ford's cause was the land's proximity to the Rouge River, which was widened during the Navy work and allowed the company to create a port for barges hauling raw materials.
By 1928, the Rouge complex included 93 buildings and employed roughly 100,000 people. It had its own railroad, fire and police departments and a hospital.
After Henry Ford's death in 1947, Ford Motor embarked on a new mission that stressed decentralization. The philosophical change, along with new environmental standards, caused the mighty complex to wither.
Tours were halted when economic difficulties almost prompted Ford to close the Rouge altogether. In 1999, Henry's great-grandson, Bill, announced the decision not to scrap the Rouge but instead to renovate, creating a "green," modern manufacturing plant and re-establishing the tours.
The tour
The start of the tour includes a 12-minute film telling the story of Henry Ford and the Rouge. A second film, "The Art of Manufacturing," is a multi-sensory experience in a 360-degree, multi-screen theater where visitors feel such things as the heat of a blast furnace and the gentle mist of the paint shop.
Another station provides an elevator ride to an 80-foot observation deck, which offers a view of the entire complex and the living roof, billed as the world's largest, covering the new truck plant.
Visitors also take a third-of-a-mile walk through the manufacturing plant and get a glance of five of the Rouge's most famous vehicles: a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster, 1932 Ford V8 Victoria, 1949 Ford Club Coupe, 1956 Thunderbird and 1965 Mustang.
Marvin Popyk, a stock broker who lives in Riverview, just south of Detroit, predicts many locals will visit the new Rouge, particularly those like himself who had relatives who worked there during its heyday.
Popyk's grandfather and godfather both worked at the Rouge. When his grandfather died in 1956, Popyk said the funeral procession made a slight detour and drove by the gate where his granddad stood as a watchman during the last of his 30 years at the Rouge.
"It was just the fact that they knew he was a working guy and it would mean something to him and the family," said Popyk, who was 8 at the time. "The place has special meaning to a lot of folks. I'm sure locals will visit. It's kind of like tying up loose ends."
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