Sun sets on the Ford Rotunda
On this day in 1962 the famous Ford Rotunda stands in Dearborn Michigan for the last time the next day it is destroyed in a massive fire.Some 1.5 million people visited the Rotunda each year making it the fifth most popular tourist attraction in the U.S.(behind Niagara Falls Smokey Mountain National Park the Smithsonian and the Lincoln Memorial).Ford had commissioned the Rotunda for the 1933 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago and had moved it to Dearborn when the fair ended.
It was 130 feet high and designed to look like a stack of gears surrounding a 92-foot-wide courtyard.(In 1952 an 18000-pound dome was added over the courtyard it was the first real-world application of inventor R.Buckminster Fullers lightweight geodesic dome.) Outside the buildings steel frame was covered in 114000 square feet of Indiana limestone inside the walls were covered in murals showing the River Rouge assembly line.
On the Rotundas grounds were 19 reproductions of what Ford called the Roads of the World the Appian Way the Grand Trunk Road the Oregon Trail and Detroits Woodward Avenue.Many people who grew up near Detroit during the 1950s remember the Rotunda for its spectacular Christmas displays.Every year since 1953 it had had a 37-foot-tall tree an elaborate Santas workshop and a life-size Nativity that the National Council of Churches called the largest and finest in the country.Each years installation had a different theme the 1958 display boasted a 15000-piece hand-carved miniature circus for instance and the 1962 show was scheduled to be a woodland tableau featuring 2500 dolls.While workmen were preparing the Rotunda for that display someone overturned a firepot or heater on the buildings tar roof.
Just after lunch an employee spotted flames on the ceiling of the main floor.Within a few minutes after the first alarm The New York Times reported the octagonal top of the building resembled a huge chimney with smoke and fumes pouring out.Workers evacuated and the building burned to the ground in less than an hour.
A group of schoolchildren visiting the Rotunda from South Bend watched in horror from a cafeteria across the street.It would have cost at least 15 million to rebuild the Rotunda.The company opted not to spend the money and razed the buildings remains instead.Today a satellite campus of the Michigan Technical Education Center stands in its place.
