When he was sixteen, Henry Ford moved from his family’s farm in the opposite direction, to downtown Detroit, where he worked as a machinist and later as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. Ford worked so close to his home at 58 Bagley Avenue that he would often sneak off to his own workshop (while still on the clock) to tinker away at the one-cylinder internal combustion engine that would power his quadricycle. When the time came to take it out for a test drive, he discovered that the door to his workshop was too narrow, so he famously knocked down a wall to drive the vehicle out into the streets of the sleepy, horse-drawn metropolis. They say Henry didn’t invent the automobile, but that night he might have invented the garage door with his sledgehammer.
A few years later, Detroit was in the midst of its gilded age and was the fourth-largest city in the United States. If you couldn’t find work in the auto factories there were jobs building skyscrapers meant to rival those in Chicago and Manhattan, or plenty of other jobs serving the growing population. Historic old Detroit needed to make way for the new. During this time countless historic structures were demolished to make way for new construction. By 1926, Henry Ford’s former home and workshop stood in the way of a new theater to be built on the site and was reportedly demolished before construction began. Completed in August, the 4,050-seat Michigan Theater was designed in the French Renaissance style, with a four-story lobby decorated with European oil paintings and sculptures, faux-marble columns, and giant chandeliers. At its unveiling, the Michigan Theater seemed to embody Detroit’s decadent optimism for the century ahead, fueled by the surging sales of the automobiles the city and its citizens built. A plaque on the outside of the theater identified it as sitting on the spot where sparks met the tinder of the burgeoning industry.
Meanwhile, in suburban Dearborn, Henry Ford was nearing the end of his decade-long effort overseeing the construction of a sprawling new factory down the Rouge River from his Fairlane estate. The Rouge was Ford’s opus, the largest vertically integrated factory in the world, and embodied nearly all of the innovations and ideas he had spent his lifetime developing. Upon its completion in 1928, he walked away from it, retreating to a plot of land just upriver from the factory, where he’d built a painstaking replica of the childhood farm where he’d learned so many early lessons about hard work. The man who’d helped usher in a new, twentieth-century way of living abandoned it to focus his energy on re-creating the nineteenth-century past he’d left behind. He spent much of his time and wealth collecting the artifacts and buildings that would become a different part of his legacy, the major regional tourist attraction known as Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum.
Today 1.5 million people annually visit nearly one hundred historical buildings “preserved” in the walled 240-acre compound, many of them chosen and situated to represent a typical American village between 1870 and 1910. Many of the buildings represent people or places significant to Ford’s vision of industrial progress (the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratories), but the heart and soul of Greenfield Village are the buildings associated with Ford’s own life and the growth of his automobile company.
Ford deeply regretted not saving his former home and workshop, which stood in the way of the Michigan Theater, and he was forced to settle for a full-scale replica of the workshop.
But then in 1929, Ford’s friend Charles B. King discovered that the original home had not actually been destroyed, but jacked up on rollers, moved, and turned ninety degrees so that it now faced Grand River Avenue; 56–58 Bagley had been given a modern facade at 514 Grand River and was open to the public as the Lola Bett Tea Room. The house where Henry Ford lived when he built his first car was now where the before-theater crowd went for pots of Earl Grey and cucumber sandwiches.
Ford rushed downtown and confirmed it. After negotiating with the owner to buy and remove the house, and replace a large number of its bricks, he ordered his workers to incorporate the bricks into the replica workshop he’d already built at Greenfield Village. According to Ford biographer Sidney Olson, the workers accidentally took bricks from what would have been Number 56 Bagley—the wrong half of the duplex—and to this day at Greenfield Village you can visit the bricks from Henry Ford’s neighbor’s home that were used to re-create a replica of the workshop where he built his first automobile.
The Lola Bett Tea Room was later demolished to no fanfare. The site, like so much of historic downtown Detroit, is now a parking lot. The lavish theater that originally displaced Henry Ford’s workshop met a better-documented fate. By the 1960s, the decadent optimism of its unveiling had faded with its carpets as Detroit faced recompense for its Jazz Age giddiness. The badly neglected Michigan Theater barely survived to show grindhouse double features and host rock concerts. In 1976, it closed for good. When it was discovered that demolition would compromise the structural integrity of the adjoining office building, the interior of the theater was gutted to create a 160-space parking garage. Today, commuters park in a three-story garage with gilded seraphim of the old proscenium arch looking down at them from above the shredded remnant of a
