A century of Ford cars made at Torrence Avenue

The Ford Model T automobile was made of wood. The car required 250 board feet of hard maple, the reason the company’s Chicago Assembly Plant was built on the Calumet River, at Torrence Avenue and 125th Street. Henry Ford had announced he wanted all of his new plants located on navigable waterways.

“Making possible lake shipping direct from the Ford Plants at Detroit and establishing water connection with the Ford lumber supplies in Northern Michigan,” the Ford News noted in 1923, celebrating the completion of the “‘Last Word’ in Progress Toward Ideal Factories.”

Wood construction of autos didn’t endure. But the riverside facility did. Operations at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant began Feb. 24, 1924 — 100 years ago last Saturday — and continue to this day, bigger than ever, a miracle in an era where factories shutter and manufacturing seems always either moving overseas or to the cheap labor South.

Torrence Avenue is Ford’s oldest continually operating plant, chugging away for a solid century — with occasional breaks, for strikes or remodeling. I was slightly surprised at the lack of attention — every 15-year anniversary of a brew pub gets ballyhooed by what’s left of the media. But nobody seemed to notice, never mind celebrate this milestone. Ford says that’s coming in the months ahead.

No need for us to wait, though. The history of Ford and Chicago is closely bound together, and not just because the first Ford motor car sold — a two-cylinder, 8-horsepower, Model A in red, the only color then available — was purchased for $850 by Chicago dentist Ernest Pfennig and delivered to 18 Clybourn Avenue at the end of July, 1903.

Ford’s assembly line inspired by stockyards

Two years later, Ford opened its first branch office in Chicago; the first assembly plant began operation in 1914 at 3915 S. Wabash.

Ford also was inspired to create his revolutionary assembly line by watching the overhead dis-assembly of cows at Chicago’s Union Stockyards.

Sun-Times file photo

“The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef,” Ford noted in his autobiography.

It took that kind of vision to put an assembly plant at that riverside location in Hegewisch — Ford had to first create the land it sits on, dredging a channel on the river and dumping clay and cinders on the 66-acre triangular site.

When built, it was the second largest of Ford’s 29 plants — a main building a quarter mile long and 500 feet wide, covering 11 acres. It employed 2,500 workers and could produce 75 cars an hour. After bodies were constructed, they were painted and the enamel hardened in large ovens — all in black, to speed production and make sales simpler. “You can have any color you want,” the famous quip went, “so long as it is black.”

Quinn Harris/For the Sun-Times

The plant had its own powerhouse, electricity generated by Ford steam generators. It also had qualities that would someday be considered green — eight acres of glass, mainly in the ceiling, to provide natural illumination. The roof’s sawtooth construction was intended to use wind to improve ventilation.

Despite its landscape gardening, Torrence Avenue never became “one of Chicago’s beauty spots,” as the company predicted, though it did throw its doors open to the public in 1933, during Chicago’s Century of Progress fair.

A lot of history is jammed into that 100 years. Some of it is tragic — that first year, five workers were killed when a fender baking oven exploded.

The Great Depression saw the work force dip to 1,000. During the bloody labor strife of 1937, three United Auto Workers organizers were beaten by company police in front of the plant, and 22 employees were fired for joining. The UAW struck for 66 days in 1967, and again in 1976.

Duane Hall/Sun-Times file photo

During World War II, it made armored scout cars for the U.S. military.

In the late 1950s, there was a multi-million dollar expansion — the entire plant was rebuilt no fewer than 14 times and more than doubled in size. Little remains of the original structure, just a section of brick wall and an entrance.

From 1985 to 2019, Torrence Avenue produced the wildly popular — and at first, problem-plagued — Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable.

Sum of its parts

If you visit Torrence Avenue, as I have, you’ll realize that two major tasks are being accomplished there. First, the obvious: putting together cars from roughly 10,000 parts — from washers to wheels, doors to engines — aided by nearly 1,000 industrial robots, looking very much like large mechanical dinosaurs, probing into half-made chassis with their metal beaks, sparks flying as they weld. A symphony of whirs and beeps, often without a person in sight.

There are overhead conveyors, and that points to the second, less obvious, achievement. Ford has to get the right part to the right place at the right time or the factory can’t work. That could be done with enormous warehouses with the thousands of necessary components stacked to the ceiling. But Ford realized that every hour a bolt sits on a shelf adds some fraction of a penny to the cost of a car.

Sun Times file photo

So instead they have a “just-in-time” system. Parts arrive an average of three hours before they are used — meaning when a shift starts in the morning, the pieces that would be assembled this afternoon are still on the trucks, being delivered.

In 2019, the plant underwent a billion-dollar upgrade. The company claims most of it was done in a single month. Cutting downtime is a big priority — no cars being made means no cars being sold. There are 41 break rooms, so workers don’t have to go very far to get a cup of coffee. Factories used to have to shut down for weeks retooling to shift production from one model to another. Now they can produce different models at the same time on the same line. Currently, there are about 4,600 hourly workers at the Chicago Assembly Plant.

Ford stopped making the Model T in 1927. Since 2011, Torrence Avenue has made the Explorer, the Police Interceptor Utility vehicle, as well as, since 2020, the Lincoln Aviator luxury SUV, which yes, still does contain actual wood, inlaid in its dashboard.

Chicago History Museum/ST-20003083-0001, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum

Sun-Times file photo

Sun-Times file photo

Sun-Times file photo

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times file photo

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times file photo