This Midwestern City’s 100-Year Auto Industry Was Wiped Out And A Depressing Time Capsule Still Exists On Chrysler’s Media Site

It was June of 2007, and the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin — a place with a rich automotive history — was celebrating a huge win. Chrysler, as it was then known, had just promised to build a new plant that would manufacture an engine that would sell in volumes of over 10 million, be placed in more than 16 models, and be named one of Wards 10 Best Engines six times. This deal didn’t just mean auto manufacturing would remain in Kenosha for a little while at a small scale, it promised an enduring, high-volume powertrain plant in a city that had pioneered the mass-produced car, started an auto workers union even before the now-famous UAW, and served as home to American Motors and its forebears since the early 1900s.

That plant didn’t happen as Chrysler pulled out at the last minute. Fast forward just a few years after this “huge win” and the last vestige of the city’s once-great auto industry has completely disappeared, leaving no factories — only a big dirt field. Amazingly, this moment of false triumph and industrial betrayal still exists as a gallery on the website of Stellantis, the company that Chrysler eventually became.

“Chrysler Group Broadens Powertrain Offensive” is the title of Stellantis’ (then Chrysler LLC) press release from just a single month after Daimler announced its intent to sell Chrysler, thereby ending the grand “DaimlerChrysler” experiment (or “merger of equals” as some falsely called it — to give you an idea of the power dynamic, a famous but probably made-up joke goes like this: A Daimler exec was asked how one pronounces DaimlerChrysler, and he responded with “It’s easy, the Chrysler is silent.”). The press release was all about fuel economy, promising:

• Mild-hybrid technology to debut in future Chrysler Group vehicle
• Chrysler two-mode hybrid program to expand
• 2009 Jeep_® Grand Cherokee BLUETEC: another 50-state clean diesel from Chrysler Group
• Company to explore development of 4-cylinder diesel for North American market, and expansion of 3.0-liter V-6 diesel
• New V-6 family of engines to include Multi-displacement System (MDS), resulting in fuel economy gain of 6 to 8 percent
• Significantly upgraded 5.7-liter HEMI^® V-8
• New 4.7-liter V-8 delivers 5-percent fuel economy improvement
• Dual-clutch transmission to result in fuel economy improvement of up to 6 percent
• Common axle program to improve fuel economy, axle efficiency and costs
• Weight reduction, aerodynamic and drivetrain improvements to raise fuel economy 5 percent

We won’t go into each of those, because plenty of them never really happened. Instead let’s focus on this little part of the press release:

In February, Chrysler Group announced that an all-new family of engines — known as “Phoenix” — will join the Chrysler Group lineup in 2010. Since then, the company has broken ground on new plants in Trenton, Mich., Kenosha, Wis., and Mexico — all of which will produce this family of engines.

The press release joined these photos taken in Kenosha, Wisconsin and published to the media site, which exists solely to make the company stand out in a positive light and certainly not to highlight a failure as massive as Kenosha. And, oh boy, was it a failure:

Chrysler’s caption for the above photo, taken in June of 2007, is:

Richard Chow-Wah, Vice President – Powertrain Manufacturing, Chrysler Group, speaks at a press conference announcing Chrysler Group investment to retool Kenosha Engine plant for new Phoenix Engine Program. At left is Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, and second from right, Dan Kirk, President local 72 and Kevin Sell, Manager, Kenosha, Wis., Engine Plant is at right.

The photo above comes along with the caption:

Richard Chow-Wah, Vice President-Powertrain Manufacturing, Chrysler Group, smiles at a press conference announcing Chrysler Group investment to retool Kenosha Engine plant for new Phoenix Engine Program.

Even the governor of Wisconsin and Mayor of Kenosha showed up. From Chrysler:

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle, left, Kevin Sell, Manager-Kenosha, Wi., Engine Plant and Richard Chow-wah,right, Vice President-Powertrain Manufacturing, Chrysler Group, hold wrenches after a press conference announcing Chrysler Group investment to retool Kenosha Engine plant for new Phoenix Engine Program.

Here are the remaining photos from Stellantis’ media site, showing how excited UAW leadership and local politicians were for the huge investment, which Reuters describes in its 2007 story “Chrysler Group plans to invest $450 mln in Kenosha engine plant”:

The company said the plant, scheduled to begin production in January 2011, will have an annual Phoenix production capacity of 400,000 units when it reaches full volume.

The Kenosha Phoenix Engine Plant will employ 700 full-time workers once it is fully operational,

But what seemed like such a wonderful moment — 700 full-timers, $450 million invested, many years of guaranteed employment — for a town that deserved every win it could get amidst decades of layoffs  — was short-lived. Very short-lived. Today, Kenosha’s auto industry is but a memory. I visited the town in 2019 as a bit of a pilgrimage to the place that had built the engines in all of my Jeeps. But what I found were few signs of an automotive history at all. There was this mural:

There was this sign next to, if I recall correctly, an AMC parts store:

There were definitely a few vintage AMCs on the street:

And there was the AMC museum, though it was closed due to a flood. I was able to see the 5 millionth Jeep 4.0 inline-six, though:

I did manage to find an absolutely epic AMC car collection, but it was hidden in a dark building, and in order to see it, I had to ask dozens of people around town about how I could catch a glimpse some cool AMC… anything — I had just driven six hours to pay my respects to the town’s auto history, and I wanted to see some! I’ll hopefully share that collection I saw at some point, but it was private, and I recall the owner wanting to approve my photos before publication.

The lack of obvious automotive… stuff in Kenosha was surprising given the city’s rich history, which Reuters discusses in its 2009 article about some bad news that I’ll get to in a moment:

Kenosha claims major innovations in auto history including the steering wheel, the seat belt, and the muscle car.

It was in Kenosha in 1902 that Thomas Jeffrey made a mass-assembly automobile, the Rambler, a year ahead of Henry Ford.

Kenosha was also instrumental in the history of worker rights. Auto workers in Kenosha unionized in 1933, two years before the United Auto Workers was formed.

Kenosha’s economy was once dominated by making cars. There were two major assembly plants, one on the lake that was shut two decades ago, and one a mile inland that operates today in a muted manner from the days when workers made Nash, American Motors, Renault and finally Chrysler cars there.

Kenosha, which has about 100,000 residents, is officially in the Chicago metropolitan area and claims to be the northernmost suburb of Chicago even though it is closer to Milwaukee (about 30 miles) than Chicago (about 55 miles).

But that’s sadly how history went. That huge $450 investment that everyone is celebrating in those photos never happened.

And what’s wild is that it really didn’t have to end up this way. In fact, if a few small things had happened differently — and I mean really small — Kenosha might still have an automotive industry.

One could argue that the beginning of the end started in the late 1980s.

The Incredible Story About How Kenosha Was Just Hours Away From Saving Its Auto Industry

The story of how Kenosha fell is remarkable because the town was so, so, sooo close to surviving — I mean, possibly hours away. In 1987, AMC was just finishing strike negotiations with the United Auto Workers union in Kenosha, with the UAW giving up “work classifications” in return for a new plant — namely that of the first-generation Jeep Grand Cherokee, codenamed ZJ, which had finished much of its development by that time despite not launching for another five years — the vehicle would be wildly successful, selling over 200,000 a year on average. Joe Cappy, the final AMC CEO before the merger with Chrysler, breaks it down in his book The Last American CEO, writing:

The negotiations with Local 72 in Wisconsin revolved around reducing the number of work classifications at the Kenosha Plant to levels already in place between the UAW and the Japanese transplants in the United States — from 22 classifications to 5. There were no requests for any other concessions. In return, American Motors would commit to build a new assembly operation in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for the next ultimate Jeep vehicle: the all-new Jeep Grand Cherokee, code-named ZJ.

This was a massive win for the union and for Kenosha!

But despite the parties having come to an agreement, just moments before AMC signed, something happened. From The Last American CEO:

The new facilities in Kenosha and the new product promised by AMC were going to be funded jointly from three sources: AMC, the state of Wisconsin, led by Governor Tommy Thompson, using the state’s credit support as a Loan Guarantee, and Chrysler Corporation, which wanted American Motors to contract-assemble some fo their older, lower volume cars still in demand for which Chrysler no longer had plant capacity to build.

[…]

[AMC CEO] Cappy dressed and phoned his chief negotiator Dick Calmes… [who] was in Kenosha for one purpose — signing of the agreement with the UAW local. Cappy told Calmes point blank he was singing nothing. “Just stall for time” were Cappy’s orders and Calmes was instructed to get on a plane back to Motown as soon as possible. Calmes started to balk, arguing how long and hard his team had been working on an agreement with the union until Cappy interrupt: “Dick, a very important announcement will be made at noon Detroit time that will clarify my instructions. Do whatever you have to, but don’t sign anything.”

That announcement was that Chrysler was buying AMC from Renault. This excited the UAW in Kenosha, but that was the wrong response, for this was bad news. From The Last American CEO:

the UAW local 72 members were jumping for joy that Chrysler Corporation was buying American Motors and Lee Iacocca was “saving Kenosha.”

As the French would say: au contraire.

The truth was that Chrysler was not willing to make a long-term commitment regarding Kenosha. That’s why Renault’s Dedeaurwaerder had given Cappy the explicit instructions not to sign any labor agreement.

In the end, Chrysler would build a shiny new, state-of-the-art plant, but it would not be in Kenosha, but rather on Jefferson Avenue in Detroit:

Just to drive home how close Kenosha was to saving its auto industry, Cappy writes what would have happened if that union deal had been signed:

Had an agreement between AMC and the UW been signed earlier and the sale of AMC to Chrysler still completed, Chrysler Corporation would have been legally obligated to follow through with the new facilities and production of the all-new, groundbreaking, and mega-profitable Jeep Grand Cherokee in Kenosha, Wisconsin instead of a brand new mega-plant in Detroit, Michigan. The building of a new assembly plant generally guarantees production and jobs for 20 to 30 years. In the end, al of these jobs were lost due to a failure of good faith negotiations between management and union leadership, resulting from years of mistrust and difficult relationships.

The Car Plant Gets Shut Down

But that’s not all. Not only did Chrysler decide not to build the Jeep Grand Cherokee in Kenosha, the company also killed off the existing small-car plant due to economic troubles, keeping one in Detroit instead and leaving Kenosha without a single auto manufacturing facility outside of the engine plant, as I wrote in my old article at Jalopnik:

Closing the auto manufacturing facility—which at that point was building the Dodge Omni, Plymouth Horizon, Chrysler Fifth Avenue, Dodge Diplomat and Plymouth Fury, and which previously built AMC Eagles, Concords, Spirits, Gremlins, AMXs, Rambler Americans and tons more—on Dec. 22, 1988, and ending car production in Kenosha as we know it, was hugely controversial.

The iconic January 29, 1988 New York Times article titled “Time Runs Out at Old Car Plant” describes the turmoil surrounding Kenosha’s small-car plant closures after Chrysler acquired AMC in 1987 and faced

A sword has been hanging for years over the giant automobile factory here – the oldest operating auto-assembly plant in the country. The sword fell Wednesday when the Chrysler Corporation announced plans to close most of its Kenosha operations by the end of the 1988 model year.

Even though the plant has long been seen as living on borrowed time, many of the 5,500 workers who will lose their jobs by this fall are bitter. They accuse Chrysler of falsely leading them to believe that it had granted the plant an indefinite stay of execution. They were also hopeful that the plant’s exceptionally low defect rate would win it a reprieve.

Until last year, the Kenosha plant had been owned by the American Motors Corporation. When Chrysler acquired A.M.C. last summer and indicated that it might continue to produce the small cars the plant had been building, some workers decided Kenosha was in the automobile business to stay.

But Chrysler officials now say they made no commitment to keep the Kenosha plant in operation. ”We said it was possible that the product line could be built for three to five years,” said Steven J. Harris, a spokesman for Chrysler. ”But it’s our belief that we made no firm, contractual agreement to keep it there for five years.”

Some argue that Chrysler chose to close that small-car plant in Kenosha and keep the one in Detroit because of the Detroit Mayor’s support during Chrysler’s bankruptcy in 1979. From Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White’s excellent book Comeback:

The logical move was to close the aging Detroit factory where the K-cars were built. But the facility was Chrysler’s only assembly plant in the city of Detroit, and Mayor Coleman Young had worked hard in 1979 to help the Chrysler bailout effort. Union politics were important, too. The Detroit factory stood on Jefferson Avenue, just four miles due east of Solidarity House, the UAW’s headquarters. It was one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, where jobs were virtually nonexistent. Closing Jefferson Avenue, as the plant was called after the street that it straddled, would have touched off a powderkeg.

According to Cappy, Chrysler did offer the City of Kenosha a $200 million aid package if the city forwent litigation against the company. “Kenosha had no choice and accepted Chrysler’s offer,” Cappy writes.

Chrysler Goes Back On A $450 Million Promise, Killing Kenosha’s 100 Year-Old Auto Industry

So things were bad in Kenosha by the early 1990s. The car plant was closing due to tough economic conditions post-Chrysler acquisition, and the ZJ contract had not been signed and would ultimately never happen. But there was still the engine plant! In fact, Chrysler has a photo of that plant right here on its media site:

Seen below, that plant built the legendary Jeep 4.0-liter inline-six (which went into the Cherokee, Grand Cherokee, and Wrangler) until the Wrangler died in 2006 (but it had been building Jeep straight-sixes that were part of the same engine family since the 1960s), and in the 9’0s and 2000s it also cranked out 2.7-liter and 3.5 V6s for the Chrysler Sebring, Dodge Intrepid, Dodge Avenger, Dodge Journey, Dodge Charger, Dodge Magnum and others.

In 2010, the 2.7 and 3.5 V6s were the remaining outputs from Kenosha’s sole automotive facility, and it was time for them to be replaced. This brings us to the pictures at the top of this article. The Chrysler Phoenix engine was about to usher in a new era of efficiency for the company, so in 2007 Chrysler pledged a bunch of money to Kenosha for retooling. But this was during a dark period in Chrysler history, and in short order, the company was dealing with a bankruptcy that would require sacrifices, and among them would be the future of auto manufacturing in Kenosha.

So very shortly after the grips and grins and the wrenches and the photos and the press release and all the pomp and circumstance, Chrysler put the whole deal “on hold,” with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal citing “sharply lower industry sales,” according to Chrysler officials. Ultimately, the $450 million investment into a new plant would never come, and the newly renamed Pentastar engine — an unbelievably popular motor that’s been in production for almost 15 years now — would be built in Michigan and Mexico, with the latter location being very contentious. Progressive magazine The Nation breaks it down in its 2009 article “The Case for Kenosha“:

Chrysler was forced into bankruptcy proceedings that were portrayed by Obama as a painful but necessary step to give the company “a new lease on life.” Then, in bankruptcy documents describing “the new Chrysler,” came the news: the company, which had already accepted more than $4 billion in federal loans and which was maneuvering to collect $6 billion more, is preparing to use this largesse to jettison the Kenosha plant and seven others while ramping up production in Mexico.

The white cards spell out the plight and the hope of more than 800 workers and their families in Kenosha, a Lake Michigan waterfront city that started making cars during the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. “Dear President Obama,” they read, “I call on you today to intervene to save the Chrysler Kenosha Engine Plant…. It would be a betrayal of your goal of investing in America if Chrysler is allowed to close the Kenosha plant and import the very same engine from Mexico.”

Folks held out hope that Chrysler’s new owner, Fiat, would choose to save the plant in Kenosha, but the final death knell came at the end of the summer in 2009. This is that death knell:

I just found some incredible new footage from someone named Kevin Z showing the very final days of automotive production in Kenosha. I cannot embed the footage here, but please click that and witness the true end of an era.

So what’s the real takeaway here? There are numerous ones, but the one I tend to focus on is: Kenosha got screwed. And I realize that every town that loses a factory says this, but I think it applies to Kenosha more than most. The merger with Chrysler, the economic woes/bankruptcy — the timing of it all was just a disaster. And to see where the town is now — the factory just a big field of dirt and grass, with nary a sign of the city’s rich 100-year car history — it’s just heart-wrenching.

Those photos left on Stellantis’ media site are important historic artifacts, representing the city’s very last hope. To see the promise of prosperity and healing in the eyes of local Kenosha leaders permanently captured in photographs is emotionally moving, particularly because we know the suffering that would await.