The second unwinding · 1985, 1989, 2011

1985 – 2012

Studebaker's closing was the catastrophe; the decades after it were an unwinding, plant by plant: In 1985 White Motor closed the original Oliver works — Factory No. 1 on the river, the plant of the chilled plow that had made South Bend a factory city alongside Studebaker. Its buildings stood vacant for seventeen years before most were demolished in 2002 for an industrial park; the powerhouse survived, restored. In 1986 Robertson's, the downtown department store, closed — the retail face of the same contraction. In 1989 AM General closed the Chippewa Avenue plant, ending vehicle production on the ground where Studebaker's wartime trucks had been built and its successor companies had built more than 92,000 five-ton trucks for the armed services across the postwar decades; the headquarters, which had come to South Bend in 1986, stayed. And at the close of 2011 Robert Bosch ended its South Bend operations, vacating the old Bendix works on Westmoore Street in October 2012 — the same ground where the sit-down of 1936 had begun the UAW. Honeywell's wheels-and-braking works continues there, the last industrial tenant of the Bendix story.

The unwinding is measured in the city's employment structure: In 1950 more than half of South Bend's employed residents worked in manufacturing; by 2000 the share was 16 percent. None of these later closings was an event on December 1963's scale — no front page, no presidential committee — and that is their character as history: the catastrophe happened once, loudly; the rest of the factory city's disappearance happened in announcements of a few hundred jobs at a time, across twenty-seven years, until the economy the closings were subtracting from no longer existed. This entry gathers them because their cumulative effect is a turning point even though no single one of them was.

Sources:

1. This build's Spine — White's closing of the Oliver Factory No. 1 in 1985, the seventeen vacant years and the 2002 demolition with the powerhouse surviving; Robertson's closing in 1986; AM General's Chippewa Avenue plant (over 92,000 five-ton trucks across the postwar decades) closed in 1989 with the headquarters remaining; Bosch's South Bend operations ended at the close of 2011 and the Westmoore Street works vacated in October 2012, Honeywell's works continuing on the Bendix ground; manufacturing's fall from more than half of city employment in 1950 to 16 percent in 2000.
2. This build's Businesses section — AM General's descent from Studebaker's General Products Division and its South Bend headquarters from 1986, all production in Mishawaka in the company's later form.