Milwaukee Junction
Milwaukeee Junction was once a hub of industrial activity, home to some of the earliest automotive factories. Before the automobile, horse carriages were manufactured here by a company which became Fisher Auto Body. Many buildings here go back to the nineteenth century. Two major railway junctions defined the area: the Detroit and Canada Grand Trunk Junction, and the meeting of the Detroit, Grand Haven and Milwaukee Railway (now Grand Trunk Wester Railroad). This area was the center of auto body manufacturing in the early twentieth century, but the old brick factories were replaced by larger, more sophisticated centers of mass production.
Notable landmarks here include the Piquette Avenue Plant, where Ford built the Model T and other early cars before its shift to mass production; the building is now a museum, showcasing the early history of automobile-building. Other companies soon recognized the convenience of being close to the major train lines, and moves into the area: Brush Motor Car Company, Dodge, Cadillac, Packard, Studebaker and Regal.
It is still, of course, a functioning railway junction. The surrounding neighborhood, though, looks like a microcosm of Detroit minus the skyscrapers: old empty business buildings stand next to overgrown empty lots, while along Grand Avenue, restored brick apartment blocks look almost new. A huge new residential complex went up recently and remains only half-occupied; right across the street is an empty commercial block covered in overlapping layers of graffiti. Old warehouses and factories, with grimy brick walls and shattered windows, stand next to shiny new buildings with "Space Available" signs. Pockets of apartment buildings sprout here and there, lonely empty houses stand amid weedy vacant fields, and several small independent churches proclaim their various faiths in painted lettering on their exposed souter walls. Here and there, a vacant area is fenced off, or a construction zone blocked off with plywood walls.
