Old car factories ignite excitement among auto enthusiasts

Excerpts from the article:

More than 1,200 postings are online at the site (http://detroityes.com) run by Detroit-area photographer Lowell Boileau.

"It's absolutely astonishing what's happened," said Boileau. "It's taken on a life of its own with no planning on my part. A whole community has built up around finding and showing these old buildings."

The first posting to the Old Car Factories Archives discussion forum began almost a year ago, on Feb. 21.

For years now Boileau has been photographing old buildings and architectural sites around town, displaying them on an area of the site he calls "Fabulous Ruins of Detroit."

Boileau's photos struck a nostalgic chord and sons and daughters of those who used to toil in the plants, even a few of the former workers, began writing to him. That led to the creation of the discussion page, which now has become an amazingly detailed and constantly growing collection that traces the city's manufacturing history.

Found in their writings are hundreds of long-forgotten names of long-closed companies. Typical is one from last week filed by a regular called Sven1977 that shows an 1897 map of the once thriving Boydell Building at Brush and Champlain streets "where the Dodge brothers tinkered around."

Boileau, meanwhile, is surprised daily by the amount of interest the forum is generating.

And, he says, it has made him even more proud of Detroit.

"These factories that are now piles of rubble in many cases changed the world," he says. "What an amazingly rich history we have."

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