Beyond the padlocked metal gate, beyond the silent train crossing, lie 4.8mn square feet of concrete — weeds and saplings pressing through the cracks, rubble heaped on the ground, environmental dangers lurking in the soil.
The immense site, especially dreary on the hard-rain, late-winter morning when I was back in Janesville, was the home of General Motors’ oldest assembly plant, long the heart and economic soul of this small southern Wisconsin city. In its heyday a half-century ago, the Janesville Assembly Plant boasted 7,000 workers. Even when the last Chevy Tahoe rolled off the assembly line two days before Christmas 2008, about 3,000 GM’ers were still there that final year to lose their well-paid jobs, and the factory’s closing and the bad economy swept away thousands of other jobs nearby.
I had first come to Janesville as the US was creeping out of the Great Recession. I was looking for a spot to write a close-up of what happens to a perfectly ordinary place when good work goes away, and this county seat surrounded by farmland about 100 miles north-west of Chicago seemed promising. I spent several years getting to know auto-working families stung by the disappearance of jobs, community leaders trying to coax the city out of the economic trauma, and the shifting texture of Janesville itself.