Automotive Hall of Fame opens up on plans to relocate to downtown Detroit

Photo by Shawn Wilson.

Of all the cities in the world important to automotive history – Turin, Stuttgart, Indianapolis, Coventry, Yokohama – the Automotive Hall of Fame currently resides in Dearborn, Michigan, leading some to presume a partiality to neighbor Ford Motor Company. So to dispel that notion, the hall’s officials have decided to seek out more neutral ground in downtown Detroit.

The hall’s president, Bill Chapin, announced the move during this year’s induction ceremony a couple of months ago at Detroit’s Cobo Center, though he didn’t provide any specifics on when the hall will make the move or where exactly in downtown Detroit hall officials hope to relocate. “We feel there is a need to develop a visitor destination downtown that will tell the global stories of automotive innovators,” Chapin said at the time.

More recently, in a post on the hall’s website stating the hall’s board of directors’ reasons for wanting to move the hall, hall officials wrote that they “feel that the time is right for the Hall to move to Detroit to become part of the City’s rebirth… While moving downtown will certainly allow the Hall of Fame to better leverage Detroit’s automotive history and heritage, the presence of the Hall of Fame there will provide the City with a premier automotive attraction for car enthusiasts and tourists.”

Photo courtesy Automotive Hall of Fame.

Founded in 1939 in New York City during the World’s Fair, the hall later called Washington, D.C., and Midland, Michigan, home before moving to Dearborn in 1997. The latter move came from a desire to be closer to Detroit, according to the hall’s website. “There was not a whole lot going on in downtown Detroit then, so Dearborn was an appropriate location,” Chapin said.

The hall, which includes more than 250 automotive pioneers from Detroit and from around the world, currently occupies a 25,000-square-foot building smack dab between The Henry Ford and Ford’s product development center. As Chapin noted, Ford’s recently announced expansion plans for its product development center and other facilities in the area “will soon have Ford 360 degrees around us,” thus forcing Chapin and the board of directors to look at a move.

“Everybody thought we were a part of Ford, and that made for a real marketing challenge,” Chapin said. Moving out of Dearborn would “allow the Hall of Fame to stand on its own,” Chapin wrote on the hall’s website.

As far as a location, Chapin said he’s been inundated with proposals from downtown developers, and it’ll take a couple of years to sort through those options. “I don’t know if we’ll find an existing facility or if we’ll build from the ground up,” he said.

While Chapin wouldn’t rule out the former Packard plant as a location (“I’d love to be there,” he said), he preferred to find a more neutral location not tied to any one marque.

Plans are in the works, though, for adding cars relevant to the hall inductees. “We currently have an experience without cars, and I don’t understand the rationale for that,” Chapin said. “We won’t add the cars just to have the cars; it’ll still be about the people.” Chapin noted that the hall likely won’t build a collection of its own, rather display cars from automakers’ collections and from private collections.

Because the hall intends to display cars with the new location, Chapin said he’s benchmarked three existing facilities already: the Petersen Automotive Museum (“inside is phenomenal”), Museum Enzo Ferrari in Modena (“how they tell the story is really spectacular”), and the GM Performance and Racing Center (“contemporary and modern”).

As for whether choosing a location in Detroit still represents some sort of partiality to American auto manufacturers – particularly those from the motor city – Chapin said the hall still has a definite global focus. “Obviously the history here in Detroit helped develop the global auto industry… it’s all linked easily to Detroit,” he said.

Chapin is currently pulling together a steering committee to study the move and said the hall will soon begin a capital campaign to fund the move.

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