General Motors today announced it could shut down its Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant at the end of 2019, and while the news of pending layoffs is not healthy for anyone (and here’s the disclosure from the boss: The mayor did say this morning that the City of Detroit’s workforce development team would aid in transitioning GM workers that might be affected), it is a reminder that the plant, which we know locally as the Poletown plant, needs retroactive placement as one of Detroit’s biggest blunders for everyone involved in the plant’s construction.

The Poletown plant was promised as a way forward for both the city of Detroit and for General Motors — just at the cost of the livelihoods of 4,200 residents who were displaced when 465 acres of the northern half of the Poletown neighborhood were bulldozed for the facility, initially designed to build Cadillacs but will roll out its last Chevrolet Volt at the end of next year. Thirty-seven years after groundbreaking, the ripple effects of Poletown are still felt here in the city and the surrounding suburbs.

A historian might look at the Poletown fiasco and rule it as a critical blow to maintaining Detroit’s population, which was already in decline long before the 1980s, as well as an acceleration of the dissolution of trust between residents and government. Considering that Detroit needs as many people as it can get right now, and back then, maybe it wasn’t wise to send thousands of them packing.

Before GM, Poletown was a thriving neighborhood named, clearly, for the Polish immigrants who settled in the area. The neighborhood took shape at the beginning of the 20th century and quickly became a neighborhood, according to “Poletown: Community Betrayed” author Jeanie Wylie, where Poles “live and retain their customs to such an extent that the whole region more nearly resembles a fraction of Poland than a part of a city in the heart of America.”

It was one of the first neighborhoods where Detroit’s rising Black population began to settle. Though there was friction between Poles and Blacks — and we’ll revisit this later, as its a key, if looked over, part of the Poletown plant debacle — on the floors of the automotive plants where they worked, as both groups jockeyed to be paid and treated fairly on the assembly line, they shared residential blocks in Poletown as early as the 1930s. By the 1980s, Poletown was Polish and Black, and also Ukranian, Cuban, Irish, Scotch, Albanian, Lithuanian, French, English, Turkish, Egyptian, Yugoslavian, Lebanese and Portuguese. Being one of Detroit’s most affordable (yes, we know — it’s a nice way of saying “poor”) neighborhoods, immigrants from all over could make their start here. Most stayed after planting roots.

Like many Polish neighborhoods nationwide, Poletown was home to several veterans of both World Wars, creating a strong fabric of Americana on the near east side. It survived the freeway expansions of the 1940s, seeing even more Black residents take residence in the neighborhood after Black Bottom was destroyed. And as other white ethnic groups left Detroit for the suburbs, Poles were “the ethnic group least likely to abandon Detroit,” per Wylie’s book.

In 1980, Poletown held 144 small businesses, 16 churches, two schools and a hospital. Chene Street was the neighborhood’s busiest corridor. The average home price at the time was $9,000. Despite its density and status as a starting point for Detroit’s new residents, it was shown to be a prime target for redevelopment at any cost and lead to the most massive and rapid relocation of citizens for a private development in U.S. history.

Folks who thought that cities were doing the absolute most to woo Amazon’s HQ2 should probably thank their lucky stars that it didn’t come close to what happened with Poletown. The late 1970s were brutal for General Motors, and the rest of the American automakers for that matter (Poletown’s largest employer, the Dodge Main plant just north in Hamtramck, shuttered in 1980), as it lost ground to Japanese automakers who happily shipped gas-friendly econoboxes to thrifty American drivers beginning to resent the big sedans and muscle cars of the day. GM needed to build a new plant, and fast, to pump out vehicles that could compete with the Japanese.