If you’re not too late, a memento—a bona fide brick from the Janesville General Motors plant—could be yours.
That’ll be how it goes for anybody who heads out Saturday afternoon to Blackhawk Community Credit Union’s drive-through distribution of bricks salvaged from the ruins of the former GM assembly plant in Janesville.
Volunteers—most of them former UAW workers at GM, some members of the credit union—are continuing to clean up and place on pallets at least 2,500 bricks that came from a wall inside the 100-year-old plant on Industrial Drive.
Steve Knox arranges GM plant bricks on a pallet Wednesday in Janesville.
Angela Major
Blackhawk, which originally was run as a credit union for Janesville’s GM plant workers, plans to distribute the sandy, reddish-tan bricks for free—up to two bricks per vehicle—to whoever shows up Saturday to claim them at the credit union’s corporate headquarters at 2640 W. Court St.
Steve Knox, a member of Blackhawk’s board of directors and a volunteer in the GM brick distribution, said volunteers initially readied about 2,000 bricks for distribution, but earlier this week Blackhawk got access to about 500 more.
The bricks are being made available to Blackhawk by the GM site’s new owner, Commercial Development Company. For months, Commercial Development has been demolishing the 4.8 million-square-foot former GM plant to ready it as an industrial redevelopment site.
On Wednesday, Knox was cagey about exactly how many bricks would be available by 1 p.m. Saturday, when the distribution starts.
“Enough to get us through 4 o’clock,” he said.
Volunteers have worked with the Janesville Police Department to set up a traffic route for the brick distribution. Officially, vehicles will line up on North Crosby Avenue. They will be routed south to West Wall Street, then through the credit union’s parking area, where volunteers will distribute bricks in a “drive-through” operation.
“That’s to keep West Court from getting congested with cars waiting in line,” Knox said.
The bulk of the bricks people will get Saturday are from a dividing wall between the plant’s former Fisher Body and Chevrolet divisions. They’re among the oldest bricks at the plant.
Knox said the credit union has a tentative date set for a second distribution, and Commercial Development might make more bricks available to Blackhawk at a later date. At some point, the credit union might get bricks from the iconic GM smokestack that demolition crews toppled Sunday.
On Wednesday, former GM autoworker Cindy Jensen was one of about 10 volunteers who combed through a rubble pile that contained hundreds of whole and half bricks.
Had the GM plant not effectively shuttered in 2009, Wednesday would have been the 100-year anniversary of its official opening May 1, 1919, volunteers sorting bricks told The 69.
The volunteers’ sorting work is being handled at a location volunteers want to keep secret. That, Knox said, is to try to prevent anyone from carting off piles of bricks before the credit union can distribute them Saturday.
Knox said he has heard from people who aim to get GM bricks Saturday and enshrine them on their mantles at home. One person, he said, plans to use a GM brick as a cornerstone in an outdoor patio.
Jensen worked at the GM plant in inspection and quality control for nearly 29 years. She wants to keep a few GM bricks herself. She said her whole family from her grandfather up through her generation were autoworkers—some at GM, some for Chrysler and others for Ford.
“I’ve got motor oil in my blood,” Jensen said. “Keeping a brick would be to remember a little bit of that. It’d be for my grandfather all the way up through my generation.”
