 |
|||||||||
| Chevrolet Plant [ 1916 ] | |||||||||
| |
|
||||||||
CLICK
and HOLD SHIFT- zooms IN CTRL - zooms OUT |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
| Ground was broken for Oakland’s “Pacific Coast Chevrolet Plant” at Foothill Boulevard and 69th Avenue on Monday, February 28, 1916. During the next decade, several automobile manufacturing plants were built in Oakland, earning it the name “Detroit of the West.” By 1919, 1,000 workers in four large buildings at the Chevrolet plant were assembling 100 cars and trucks per day. In 1932, the Ford plant in Richmond and the Chevrolet plant in Oakland accounted for 46 percent of the country’s car and truck sales. Unfortunately, the Depression accounted for a 47 percent drop in cars sold in California between 1929 and 1931. By 1963, General Motors, which now owned Chevrolet, moved its manufacturing plant to Fremont. The Foothill Boulevard site shown in this photograph has since become the Eastmont Mall. (See The Spirit of Oakland, An Anthology, Heritage Media Corporation and Oakland, The Story of a City, by Beth Bagwell, Presidio Press) | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
| view another panorama | |||||||||