Search Results

On the Last day there would be a potluck and a drawing for some free appliances and $100 in cash. It was clear, though, that those still around in September 2004 could hardly wait for this drawn-out shuttering finally to be over. Crews were taking down the lighting, removing tables and cabinets, and gathering screws and air gun bits to toss in the garbage. “I don’t know if they are going to start with fresh tools down there in Reynosa or what the deal is,” Tracy Warner said. The crews also asked workers to remove photographs and newspaper clippings from their workstations. “They are dismantling it all around us, like they can’t wait for us to get out of there.” The lawn outside, usually covered in pop cans, plastic wrappers, and cigarette butts, was cleaned up and sprayed green by Chem Lawn. Management was trying to sell the old place. Warner’s imminent layoff was part of a sea-change in Illinois in the first years of the new millennium. The pace of the hollowing out of manufacturing in the fourth-largest manufacturing state in the country had been unprecedented. From June 2000 to November 2003, Illinois lost more than 100 manufacturing jobs a day, or one out of every six. Gone were over 150,000 jobs in a state of 12,500,000. In Rockford, the machine-tool industry wilted, and unemployment spiked at over 11 percent. In Harvard, located near the Wisconsin border, Motorola closed its cellphone plant. Developers wanted to turn the site into the world’s largest indoor water park. In Peoria, Decatur, and Kankakee, laid-off workers applied for jobs at Walmarts and Home Depots that would pay them maybe half their former wage. In suburban Chicago, Winzeler Gear went from making 2 million gears a month with fifty-five workers to making 16 million a month with thirty-five employees. A robot the size of a minivan increased the factory’s output while also eliminating human labor. Even with the productivity boost, the owner doubted the company would be able to stay competitive.

It was Late on a sunny, but bitterly cold mid-February afternoon. Michael Patrick, red-eared from the chill, cast a long shadow across the rough concrete that used to be the Appliance City factory floor. A few months earlier, two-thirds of the expansive ruin had been razed. It was now an extended chinhigh pile of crumbled bricks, broken cinderblocks, mangled rebar, and cornyellow insulation chunks. Patrick, dressed in a corduroy jacket, wool trousers, and a brown wool fedora, remarked that there was little now to stop the bitter Arctic winds that swept through the enormous demolition site. One could see clear through to the Henry C. Hill Correctional Center across the tracks and farther north on Illinois Route 41. The razed portion of the former factory was big enough to fit twenty football fields, side by side. The newest part of the factory was still standing, but vacant. The California-based investment company that owned the property hoped that clearing the “old, antiquated industrial real estate” would make the remaining property more attractive to potential buyers. “When you’re here,” Patrick said, “you think about the people. It was the blood, sweat, and tears of the workers that made this place run. It was ours, you know? We had different owners come and go but we made it run.” He pushed his hands deep into his jacket pockets and shrugged. It was early 2013, and Patrick could mark fifty-four years since he and Bob Dennison, Doug’s father, started packing insulation at Admiral’s Midwest Manufacturing plant on January 26, 1959. Patrick lived alone in a modest brick house on South Pleasant Avenue, just across the BNSF tracks, less than a mile away. The 72-year-old retiree hibernated in the winter, but managed to make each of his granddaughter’s sixth-grade basketball games. When the weather warmed, Patrick took his late model minivan to antique shows, estate sales, and collectors’ conventions. He collected license plates and license plate toppers, die-cast cars, and other trinkets. Earlier that day, over lunch at the Landmark Cafe, we had discussed the wage pressures, retiree obligations, and foreign competition that faced Maytag in the early 2000s.