And so many more of the city's companies were somehow related to the auto industry, from machine tool manufacturers to auto supply companies to parts suppliers. By the onset of the Great Depression, car manufacturing completely dwarfed manufacturing concerns in Detroit. Over the next thirty years, the auto industry took off. At the turn of the twentieth century, the manufacture of motor vehicles was among the city's growing-but still relatively small-industrial concerns. Leading Detroit industries included stove manufacture, tobacco goods, drugs and chemicals, metal working, and food production. As in the case of most nineteenth-century industrial cities, its manufacturing clustered along the river, whose water provided power and easy transportation for incoming supplies and outgoing goods. Most of its population lived within a few mile radius of downtown. The thirteenth largest city in the United States in 1900 with 285,000 residents, Detroit was compact. Before the invention of the motorized, self-propelled auto car, Detroit was a second-tier industrial city with a diverse, largely regional manufacturing base. ![]() And no place better demonstrates the social, economic, geographic, and political changes wrought by the automobile industry than Detroit, the Motor City.ĭetroit rose and fell with the automobile industry. Where we live, how we work, how we travel, what our landscape looks like, our environment have all been profoundly shaped by the car. No technology has had a greater impact on American everyday life than the automobile.
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