At 100, Ford's Chicago plant has withstood recessions and a pandemic. Can it survive what's next?

As it marks its 100th year, the Ford factory on Chicago's Far South Side — one of the largest manufacturing facilities in Illinois — faces a challenge that may prove greater than the recessions, wars, labor battles and even the pandemic it's already weathered: the auto industry's transition to electric vehicles.

No other factory in Ford Motor Co.'s portfolio has been in continuous operation longer than the one on Torrence Avenue at 126th Street. Along the way, the plant has produced everything from the Gran Torino and the Granada to the Thunderbird and the Taurus.

“There aren’t very many (plants) that make it to this age,” said Kristen Dziczek, an auto industry researcher who is a policy adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. “They’ve continued to invest in that plant. There are a lot of plants in the 60- to 80-year-old range ... and a handful that are over 80.”

With 4,700 employees, Ford is the largest manufacturer in the city and among the top three in Illinois.

Nearly 1,100 more workers are at the stamping plant in Chicago Heights that supplies the Torrence Avenue factory, which now produces the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Aviator, along with crossover vehicles for law enforcement use. Although Ford doesn’t provide employment numbers for companies in the supplier park near the plant, they’re estimated to provide more than 2,500 jobs.

All of which underscores the stakes for Illinois manufacturing — and for a South Side in need of jobs and investment — as Ford and its Detroit 3 brethren navigate the emergence of hybrids, EVs and, perhaps down the line, hydrogen-powered cars. 

For the South Side where it's been a fixture since 1924, “Ford’s been there through thick and thin, and has been an anchor,” said David Doig, president of Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, a nonprofit real estate developer that works in nearby Pullman. “They’ve stayed while others have left.”

Chicago is rarely mentioned as an automaking hub, and the Ford plant often is overlooked, even by those who live there, because it’s tucked along the Calumet River in the South Deering neighborhood, just a few miles from the Indiana state line. Political leaders, however, are acutely aware of the high-paying blue-collar jobs the plant provides. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson attended a 100th anniversary open house on Aug. 4 at the plant for workers and their families.

“I grew up three blocks away,” says Peter Chico, the Chicago City Council member who represents the 10th Ward, which includes the plant. “I know dozens and dozens of families, people whose parents worked here and they came here. It contributes to the vibrancy not only of this ward but the entire city of Chicago.”

Shifting priorities
The auto industry is notoriously cyclical. Fortunes can change fast, and longevity is no protection, as workers and residents of Janesville, Wis., found out in the early days of the Great Recession, when General Motors closed its oldest factory there.

Torrence Avenue “had its runs between 1924 and now, when things got slow,” said Ted Stalnos, CEO of the Calumet Area Industrial Commission, an economic development and training organization on the Southeast Side that counts the Ford plant as a member. “I thank God it wasn’t affected like so many others in the automotive industry. The question is, what’s going to be its future?”

That question has gnawed at a succession of Chicago mayors and Illinois governors, who have worked with Ford over decades, scraping together a variety of tax breaks and incentives to keep the plant going. Mayor Richard M. Daley and Gov. George Ryan came up with more than $100 million in incentives in 2002 to enable a supplier park near the factory. In 2009, with automakers struggling to survive the Great Recession and head count down to 1,200, Gov. Pat Quinn reworked the state’s income tax incentives to rebate payroll taxes, as well.

“What you’ve got to remember is they look at their portfolio every five or so years and ask: 'Should we continue to invest?'” said Jack Lavin, CEO of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, who worked with Ford when he led the state's Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity two decades ago. “We need to make sure we’re doing everything to make it possible for them to say, 'Yes, we’re going to reinvest in the plant.' You can’t take them for granted. What companies want are mayors and governors asking them, ‘What do you need?’”

The developer of Ford’s supplier park is seeking a $14 million property tax break from the city.

Profit machine
Torrence Avenue is as enigmatic as it is iconic. It’s said to be one of Ford’s most profitable and most productive factories, a point starkly underlined a year ago when the UAW chose the plant to participate in a strike that ultimately resulted in one of the most lucrative contracts for the union in recent memory.

The South Side factory also has among the highest property tax bills of any Ford site but also some of the company's lowest energy costs, sources familiar with the operation said. Ford officials have expressed concern in recent years about break-ins and thefts from vehicles coming off the assembly line, as well as those belonging to employees.

Ford declined to discuss the profitability of the plant or its products, nor would it confirm how the plant’s property taxes compare with other facilities.

Lavin said the relationship with Ford has been on the upswing. “There was a period of time when I think people were taking them for granted," he said. "Conversations with the company are happening. They’re continuing to invest.”

As part of the most recent UAW contract signed last year, Ford said it would invest $400 million over four years. The company declined to address its plans beyond that.

“We need to be a good partner to them to keep it open,” said Chico. “It’s always a little worry. But I’m confident with the workforce here, what they’re doing here, they’ll continue on for decades.”

Hugh Ferguson has worked at the Torrence Avenue plant for 55 of its 100 years, starting out on an assembly line that made LTDs. His favorite product is the Taurus SHO made about a decade ago.

Today, the plant operates three shifts a day making Explorers, but Ferguson has seen it down to one shift and just 800 employees. He is one of a handful of active employees who have worked at Torrence Avenue 50 years or more.

“It’s a good place to work,” Ferguson said, but a half century in the auto industry has taught him to take nothing for granted. “They’d close it tomorrow if they wanted to.”

History of survival
The Torrence Avenue plant has proved to be remarkably resilient. In 1931, when the Depression forced Ford to close 25 of its 36 plants, the Chicago factory was among 11 that remained open, according to a 75th anniversary history. The plant survived the energy crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the onslaught by foreign competition that followed.

It took nearly 30 years for the factory to produce 2 million vehicles and almost 20 more years to hit 5 million. Today, the number of vehicles that have come off its assembly lines tops 16 million.

Along the way, the South Side factory has roughly quadrupled in size to 2.8 million square feet and has become highly automated, although head count is more than 50 percent higher than it was 25 years ago.

The plant’s first robots — affectionately known as Larry, Moe and Curly — arrived in 1973. A decade later, there were 140 of them. In 2019, more than 600 robots were installed. There are also 65 cameras coupled with proprietary machine vision software that are used to help workers spot manufacturing defects.

Investment in a plant is just one factor — its products also must sell. Explorer sales fell 10 percent last year to 186,799 vehicles, the lowest level since 2012, according to the Automotive News Research & Data Center. However, sales have picked up slightly in the first half of 2024, which could lead to the first year-over-year growth since 2020.

Historically, the Ford Explorer is the bestselling utility vehicle in the U.S., and a redesigned model began rolling off the assembly line in June. The plant also just began making a hybrid version of the Police Interceptor version of the Explorer.

Vulnerabilities
Longer term, the bigger question is how the Torrence Avenue factory fits into the broader transition to EVs. There were concerns as Ford, which previously predicted half its vehicles would be electric by 2030, began announcing which sites would transition to EVs and Chicago wasn’t among them.

To many, that news highlighted one of the plant’s drawbacks when it comes to EVs, which generally require more space because automakers tend to favor having battery production facilities close by. The 113-acre site is landlocked because Ford located the plant along the Calumet River in an effort to provide easy access to lumber shipments from northern Michigan, which was a strategic advantage when cars were made largely of wood.

But the pace of the EV transition has slowed both at Ford and at other automakers, amid signs buyers aren’t as enthusiastic about such vehicles as they once seemed. Detroit's rethinking of its EV priorities could, in the end, prove to be an advantage for plants like Torrence Avenue.

Auto industry researcher Dziczek said third-party research firms predict Ford will continue making products at Torrence Avenue for at least another 11 years, which is the limit of such forecasts. “Forecasters seem to think there is a future for that plant beyond being 100 years old,” she said.

“Just because you have an EV product doesn’t mean your plant is guaranteed a certain future or the ramp-up to that future isn’t going to be kind of rocky," she said. "The market acceptance is uncertain. If you switch to EVs, there could be a long period where they’re not fully utilizing the plant.”