How to be better stewards of the nation as we move toward 300 years

Abandoned infrastructure of the cotton boom, the auto industry and mining shows us what not to do as data centers are debated and built

- LZ GRANDERSON

DOUG CHAYKA For The Times

OF ALL THE WONDERS that American ingenuity has produced over its first 250 years-from shrinking the globe via the airplane to improving the hamburger by adding a slice of cheese-perhaps our deepest imprint on modern society was made in Detroit.

Henry Ford, the son of an Irish immigrant, was born in 1863, built his first car in 1896, and by the nation's sesquicentennial in 1926, had turned his Model T into the best-selling car in the world.

In the early days, it took more than 12 hours for Ford's workers to produce a single vehicle. Then in 1913, using a series of conveyor belts, Ford introduced the world's first moving assembly line. That cut production time down to 90 minutes per car. Ford's innovation made it cost-effective to mass produce automobiles and became the template for other products.

More importantly, during World War II, the auto plants were reconfigured for weaponry, ultimately producing a third of all U.S. war materiel.

By the mid-1940s, the G.I. generation had lifted the Motor City from outside the Top 10 in U.S. population into being the most important metropolis in the world.

And after the war, their children basked in its glory.

Their grandchildren saw cracks in the foundation.

Everyone else grew up in the rubble.

Sometimes literally.

Not far from where I lived as a child in Detroit stood the crumbling Packard Plant, a 3.5-million-square-foot behemoth that at its peak employed more than 40,000.

Opened in 1903, the plant closed its doors half a century later. Over the decades, developers balked at the cost of reimagining the 80-acre wasteland. The decaying architecture was more than an eyesore.

The community was trapped in an unrelenting loop of structural decline, with abandoned plants undermining the potential to grow the tax base needed to revitalize the area.