Windows at birthplace of the Model T inspire teams of volunteers

DETROIT – The white paper sign on the wire cage door leading to a workshop at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant sums it all up quite nicely. “Home of the celebrated Window Team. We ONLY do windows.”

For the past 14 years, a team of volunteers – many retirees from Ford Motor, a few from General Motors, many who never even worked in the auto industry – have been painstakingly restoring 355 double-sash windows at an old Detroit factory that’s called the “birthplace of the Model T.”

Henry Ford had an office in the three-story factory, built in 1904 and reminiscent of an old textile mill. Its historic relevance is intensified by a secret room walled off in a corner of the third floor. There, Henry Ford and others nurtured the idea for a car that would be affordable enough for the masses. The Model T was born and, in 1908, it was introduced as a 1909 model.

The first 12,000 Ts were built at the Piquette plant, which sits on an industrial corner of Detroit’s Milwaukee Junction neighborhood. The quiet laborers have diligently showed up for years, creating their own workshop, donating tools and working hard to bring light back to a piece of Detroit history.

On the national and state registers of historic places, it’s now a trendy spot used for weddings and other events.

“We’re down to only 16 windows,” said Art Pope, 83, who was among the volunteers who started the project in 2003. The job could be done by late fall.

Guardian Industries, based outside the city, has donated many of the new glass panes. Edsel B. Ford II, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, and his wife, Cynthia Ford, donated money to adopt windows on the front of the building.

By one estimate, the volunteers have done about $1 million worth of work.

Pope supplies the 10 a.m. coffee and donuts to the crew of 18 to 20 volunteers who show up on Mondays from April to late November. There’s an annual breakfast in early December to honor the most valuable players of the season with baseball caps.

Even though the window work might be nearly done, volunteers expect to keep working, maintaining the restored windows and working on other projects at the plant, which is one of the oldest factories in the country open to the public. The window team has built doors and interior fixtures, too.

The plant is operated by a nonprofit organization incorporated as the Model T Automotive Heritage Complex, which bought the building in 2000.

“It’s not a pristine museum; it’s a real place. It actually manufactured 45,000 cars. People toiled here,” said Nancy Darga, executive director for the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant. In all, eight Ford models were built there.

The large, expansive windows provided maximum daylight to workers when cars were in production. But decades later, many of the windows were broken, and the building was full of pigeons and raccoons, according to Darga, who wasn’t even sure early on that restoring the building would be possible.

The Model T did well enough after early production at Piquette that Ford soon bought 57 acres to build the massive Highland Park Plant and began assembly there in 1910. The Piquette property was sold to Studebaker in 1911, and Studebaker used the building for auto production until 1933. Other owners followed.

But by the late 1990s, the Piquette building was in rough shape, much like the neighborhood around it. That’s when Jerald Mitchell, a retired professor of anatomy at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and others worked to save the building from being demolished.

Pope, who grew up in Tennessee, has long loved Ford. In high school, he bought a 1930 Model A for $275 he had earned working at an ice cream store.

“It was just a little two-door,” Pope said.

When he graduated from Tennessee Technological University in 1956, he had a couple of job offers but chose to work as an engineer at Ford. In January 1957, he went into the Army for two years, eventually returning to Ford before retiring in 1995.

Pope began volunteering at the Piquette plant in 2003, when a group of Ford dealers in metro Detroit wanted to make a sizable donation to help restore a small group of arch windows on the third floor. Pope and the others saw all the additional work that was needed and took things from there.

The restoration process has involved removing glass and hardware and stripping frames to bare wood. The windows are being restored to U.S. Department of Interior historic preservation standards.

Deteriorated wood needs to be hardened with a two-part epoxy formula. Missing areas of the wood are reconstructed. And volunteers take part in sanding, priming and reglazing of original glass, when possible.

“You can see here, the ones that are not clear are recycled glass,” Pope said.

Pope and others said the building’s historical value has given them motivation to keep working year after year.

“You can see a building that Henry Ford himself had worked in,” Pope said.

“Obviously, this is a historical shrine,” said Eugene Greenstein, who retired from Ford in 2005 as a mid-level engineering manager.

Greenstein has been volunteering for about eight years. He grew up in Cleveland, where he learned how to cut glass at his father’s hardware store.

Louise VanderKolk, who was a stay-at-home mom after working for the Michigan Credit Union League, said she had no idea how labor-intensive restoring windows would be when a neighbor sent her an email about volunteering.

VanderKolk, 77, ended up working on the project for the past seven years and is one of the few female volunteers. Some wives of team members also have pitched in periodically.

Her job has involved taking sanded frames and applying primer and a coat of dark green paint. After the glass is put back into place, she applies another coat of green. It takes roughly 40 hours to do one window completely – including about two hours of painting time.

“I like the idea that they’re saving a building,” she said.

Mike Maher, 72, a retired pharmacist, is a volunteer who owns a 1916 Model T. He bought the Model T about 10 years ago and paid about $10,000.

“It’s my chick magnet,” Maher joked. “My brother said the problem is all the chicks are over 90 years old.”

Many volunteers see the work at the Ford Piquette plant as a way to give back to the community and foster a legacy.

“You can’t just sit at home and look at a computer screen,” Greenstein said.

Darga said she’s working on putting a proposal together to see whether a documentary could be done on the volunteers.

“The volunteerism is what really saved this place,” Darga said. “This building was totally saved and run by volunteers up until 2013. They’ve done all the work at it, stabilizing it.”

“You’ve got to think about it, the whole world changed from what happened in this building,” Darga said.