GM built its first stamping plant in Wyoming — and 28th Street grew up around it

The corner of Buchanan Avenue and 36th Street holds a two-million-square-foot ghost. General Motors put its very first metal-stamping plant on that 92-acre patch of Wyoming in 1936 — the place that pressed flat sheets of steel into car bodies and fenders and shipped them off to be bolted onto vehicles elsewhere. Before that, Wyoming was farm fields south of Grand Rapids. After it, Wyoming was a factory town.

At its peak the plant ran more than 3,000 people through its gates, and those paychecks built the neighborhoods around it. When US-131 was finished in 1957, it gave the workers a fast road and turned 28th Street into the retail strip it still is today — the stores followed the wages. For seventy-some years the stamping presses thudded away, the kind of steady industrial heartbeat a city sets its watch by.

Then it stopped. GM closed the plant in 2009, late in the wave of shutdowns that hollowed out so much of Michigan’s auto map. Two million square feet went dark all at once, and the city was left with the biggest empty building it had ever owned.

What happened next is the more hopeful half. The city took the land, cleared the old structure, and rebranded the scar as “Site 36.” In 2022 a developer bought the 74-acre property and started lining up new manufacturers to fill it. Stand at Buchanan and 36th now and the old plant is gone, but the address still does the only thing it has ever done: wait for the next people who’ll come there to make things.