For more than a decade, no one came up with a plan for a factory floor in South Bend, Indiana, that was once the site where Studebakers rolled off the assembly line. It might otherwise have been quickly bulldozed and buried in a landfill, as many old industrial buildings are. Rather, the old Studebaker Plant 8 was disassembled by a firm named Mother Earth, LLC, and nearly every piece of its scrap was sold.
As per an EPA fact sheet on Brownfields, the recovery of the building material accounted for an estimated 99 percent of the building's value and made what appeared to be industrial junk $1.4 million in revenue. After a generation that has seen the demolition of traditional architecture in cities without bother, this one deserves to be examined and even given a slight side-eye for its continued rarity rather than the norm.
The company's long-lived plant
Studebaker, founded in South Bend in the 1850s as a wagon maker, built the 34-acre Plant 8 complex in the 1920s; car production there ran until the company's collapse in 1963. It was used for storage after that, and then sat vacant for about twelve years, from the early 1990s until 2005, a stretch of dereliction typical of Rust Belt decline. In 2005, the company called Mother Earth, LLC bought the property, planning to put a recycling and transfer facility there. But there was a downside: the land was contaminated with lead, and the walls were covered in asbestos sheeting, the typical junk that accompanies old industrial sites.
