Get Your Tickets Now for MotorCities' 25th Anniversary Gala

Tickets are now available for the MotorCities National Heritage Area’s 25th Anniversary Gala event, scheduled for Wednesday, November 8, 2023 from 5:30 – 9:30 p.m. at the Ford House Visitors Center, located at 1100 Lake Shore Road in Grosse Pointe Shores.

Guests will enjoy dinner, drinks, a silent auction, the opportunity to view exhibits and stroll the grounds, special guests including a keynote speaker and MotorCities’ annual Milestone Award winner, the announcement of the 25th anniversary Awards of Excellence, and a tribute to a quarter century of MotorCities’ achievements. This celebration also marks the observance of MotorCities’ 10th annual Michigan Auto Heritage Day, with special recognition from Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Michigan Legislature.  

Tickets for the Gala are $100 for MotorCities members and $125 for nonmembers. RSVPs are required by October 24, so reserve your place now at www.motorcities.org/25th-anniversary-events.

Proceeds will help MotorCities continue to fulfill its mission of preserving and promoting Michigan auto and labor heritage.

Visit Detroit is the Presenting Sponsor for the Gala. General Motors is a Founding Partner/Award of Excellence Sponsor. The UAW International Union is our Michigan Auto Heritage Day Sponsor. Supporting Sponsors include Albert Kahn Associates, Choose Lansing, Destination Ann Arbor, and The Henry Ford. Event Sponsors include Doeren Mayhew, Don Nicholson Enterprises, Ford House, Gilmore Car Museum, Grigg Graphics, and Project Arts and Humanities.

The Automobile National Heritage Act was authored, co-sponsored and championed by former Congressman John Dingell and former Senator Carl Levin and signed by President Bill Clinton on November 6, 1998. The law created what is now known as the MotorCities National Heritage Area Partnership, one of 62 organizations that are part of the National Heritage Area System of the National Park Service. Its mission is to preserve, interpret and promote the region’s rich automotive and labor heritage while enabling, supporting and respecting its diversity, equity and inclusion. Regional programs inspire residents and visitors with an appreciation for how the automobile changed Michigan, the nation, and the world.

Each year, MotorCities generates $489.7 million in economic impact, supporting 5,343 jobs and producing $40 million in tax revenue in Michigan. Over its 25-year history, MotorCities has awarded more than 300 grants for a total investment in local programs of more than $1.7 million.

Story of the Week
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Robert Tate Exhibit: An Appropriate Salute to a Life in Automotive

by Bob Sadler, MotorCities Director of Communications

Last Friday, the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn opened the Robert Tate exhibit to the public for the first time with a reception and conversation with Tate moderated by MotorCities Deputy Director Brian Yopp.

Anyone who visits this space every Wednesday knows Robert Tate. He’s the primary author of these Story of the Week features, which are by far the most popular content on our MotorCities website.

Tate contributes this content to MotorCities on a weekly basis wearing his “historian’ and “researcher” hats, but this exhibit rounds out Tate’s story by featuring still another hat – that of “collector.” You may noted in last week’s story, when we presented an encore presentation of his February 2023 interview with Yopp, that Tate’s collections of automotive publications, models and other memorabilia rivals (and maybe even surpasses!) some museums.

A small portion of that collection is shared with the public as part of the new exhibit, but it also provides a retrospective on Tate’s life, inspirations and career in the automotive industry.

To learn more about the exhibit and see more images, click below.

This Week's Story

Celebrating 25 Years with Great MotorCities Programs

As part of the celebration of our 25th Anniversary, today we are continuing a series highlighting 25 MotorCities Programs introduced over the last 25 years.

The 17th is the Passport Program.

Passport seekers travel the country from Alaska to the Everglades and from Niagara Falls to Pearl Harbor, collecting stamps and making memories. Since 2004, passport seekers have also been able to visit many of the sites around our heritage area to receive a coveted stamp the same as what would be available at any other National Park Service site. For a number of years, our MotorCities attractions offering a stamp have been collected in their own book form. It is a great honor to be recognized on a national level for the stories of the people, places and ideas that put the world on wheels. Visitors travel from near and far for the authentic auto heritage experience. For many visitors, these places are at the heart of our story and being official sites on the NPS passport listing makes them all the more alluring.

The 18th is the Uncle Jessie White documentary.

One of the key, undervalued impacts of the auto industry is the way that it blends cultures. As workers found their way to Michigan to work in the early 1900s, they brought all of the elements of their cultures to share. You can imagine an assembly line with Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish and African-Americans all working side by side, sharing stories of their families, upbringing, food and music. The story of "Uncle" Jessie White fits that dynamic. He was born in 1921 in Mississippi but moved to Detroit to work at Ford. What he brought with him was the distinct musical stylings of a delta bluesman. His musical talent and magnetic personality made him a local legend. He became the center of a musical community, which was as much of a melting pot as the plant where he worked. Over the years, Uncle Jessie's home became a haven for music and love. During the 1967 riots, White provided a place for the universal language of music to continue to cross all divides. In 2016, after more than a decade of work, a full-length documentary premiered chronicling his life and contributions. MotorCities is proud that our grant supported the film, which has won awards near and far, but we are just as pleased that it provided another unique perspective on the influence of the auto industry.

Watch for two more programs in this space next week! Catch all the previous entries by clicking here.

This Week in Auto Heritage

On October 7, 1913, Henry Ford’s entire Highland Park, Michigan automobile factory ran a continuously moving assembly line for the first time. A motor and rope pulled the chassis past workers and parts on the factory floor, cutting the man-hours required to complete one Ford Model T from 12 1/2 hours to six. Within a year, further assembly line improvements reduced the time required to 93 man-minutes.

The staggering increase in productivity resulting from use of the moving assembly line allowed Ford to drastically reduce the cost of the Model T, thereby accomplishing his dream of making the car affordable to ordinary consumers. Before then, the automobile industry generally marketed its vehicles to only the richest Americans, because of the high cost of producing the machines. Ford’s Model T was the first automobile designed to serve the needs of middle-class citizens: It was durable, economical, and easy to operate and maintain. Still, with a debut price of $850, the Model T was out of the reach of most Americans. Ford Motor Company understood that to lower unit cost it had to increase productivity. The method by which this was accomplished transformed industry forever.

Prototypes of the assembly line can be traced back to ancient times, but the immediate precursor of Ford’s industrial technique was 19th-century meat-packing plants in Chicago and Cincinnati, where cows and hogs were slaughtered, dressed, and packed using overhead trolleys that took the meat from worker to worker. Inspired by the meat packers, Ford innovated new assembly line techniques and in early 1913 installed its first moving assembly line at Highland Park for the manufacture of flywheel magnetos (pictured). Instead of each worker assembling his own magneto, the assembly was divided into 29 operations performed by 29 men spaced along a moving belt. Average assembly time dropped from 20 minutes to 13 minutes and soon was down to five minutes.

Ford rapidly improved its assembly lines, and by 1916 the price of the Model T had fallen to $360, and sales were more than triple their 1912 level. Eventually, the company produced one Model T every 24 seconds, and the price fell below $300. More than 15 million Model Ts were built before it was discontinued in 1927, accounting for nearly half of all automobiles sold in the world to that date. The affordable Model T changed the landscape of America, hastening the move from rural to city life, and the moving assembly line spurred a new industrial revolution in factories around the world.

If you enjoy our historical content and would like to see it more regularly than weekly, please like MotorCities National Heritage Area on Facebook or follow us on Twitter or Instagram at @motorcities.

Events Coming to the MotorCities

Sunday: Auto Heritage Bicycle Tour with Wheelhouse Detroit

This Sunday at noon, join Wheelhouse Detroit for their final monthly auto heritage bicycle tour of the season, starting at their location on the city's riverfront.

Discover how Detroit became the center of the automotive industry on this tour. The tour takes in the Globe Building, Dequindre Cut, Packard Plant, the GM Detroit-Hamtramck (Poletown) Assembly Plant, Milwaukee Junction with a stop at the Piquette Plant, New Center (old GM Headquarters and Fisher Building) and TechTown, where we will learn how industry is evolving with advanced technology. On the return trip, we will pass the Michigan Theatre, the location of Ford’s original workshop, the Bagley Garage. This tour is conducted in partnership with Ford Piquette Avenue Plant and Motorcities.

Reserve your spot on Sunday's tour here.

Sunday, October 15: Michigan Historic Preservation Network Event in Southwest Detroit

Our Partners at the Michigan Historic Preservation are hosting their 29th annual Fall Benefit event on Sunday, October 15.

An optional pre-dinner event takes place from 3 - 5 p.m. featuring a bus tour developed with MotorCities of the Mexicantown neighborhood in southwest Detroit. Content from our newly revamped Southwest Detroit Auto Heritage Guide figures prominently into the tour, which costs $20 for those already registered for the dinner event to follow.

From 5 - 8:30 p.m., the Benefit event will feature a strolling dinner, complimentary beer and wine, a silent auction and an award ceremony.

The registration deadline has been extended to this Friday, October 6. More details and tickets are available here.

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