Why losing industrial jobs hit differently in Detroit, Milwaukee and Chicago

Chris Gerben grew up in the metro Detroit area in the 1980s and ’90s, and even as a child, he noticed a lot of major shifts in the city.

“We were a steel mill town, and in the mid ’80s is when a lot of this kind of emptying-out of the city was happening,” Gerben said.

He remembers going to at least three different elementary schools because teachers kept getting laid off.

From the peak of Detroit’s auto industry until Gerben was born, roughly three decades, the city lost over 200,000 jobs — more than during the Great Depression. It also lost more than half a million people.

Gerben now lives with his family in Chicago, and he wonders if what happened in Detroit happened across the Midwest in the same way. How did deindustrialization hit Milwaukee? And why was Chicago seemingly spared?

“If you don’t know any better … it would seem like, ‘Oh, [Chicago] is privileged in some way,’” Gerben said.

Deindustrialization shaped the Midwest in ways seen and unseen. We look back at how things differed across cities when it came to the industries that built them up and how each city dealt with the fall out of losing so much.

The Motor City

More than a century ago, the “Big Three” automakers — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — made a home in Detroit, which led to more cars being built in the Motor City than anywhere in the world.

These factory jobs attracted the first wave of the Great Migration — African Americans leaving the rural South for the urban North, starting in the 1910s — as well as immigrant workers. Marsha Battle-Fillpot said her dad, Joe Von Battle, was one of those early workers coming up from Georgia.

“The auto industry here allowed for a relative prosperity that was unprecedented,” Battle-Fillpot says. “It’s sort of not viewed like that, with all the bells and whistles of, say, a New York, but this place is no joke.”

Von Battle was laid off from the auto plant when white workers returned to the factory after World War II. This gave rise to the axiom “last hired, first fired” with regard to Black workers.

“He was so despondent about [facing] a reversal like that, he vowed at that point he would never work for another man,” Battle-Fillpot said.

With the prosperity of the auto industry lifting all boats, Von Battle decided to start his own business. In 1945, he opened Joe’s Record Shop in the city’s historic Black Bottom neighborhood. It was an instant hit: In the first two years, he had over $100,000 worth of records in stock.

But in the ’50s, the Big Three started pulling out of the city, moving to the suburbs for cheaper land.

This began well before the “Rebellion of ’67,” five days of racial unrest in late July 1967 during which 43 people died, hundreds reported injuries and police arrested more than 7,000 people.

“There’s a whole narrative that says that, well, Detroit was basically doing okay until 1967 and all the whites left, and then Detroit fell into decline,” Battle-Fillpot said. “That’s just so wrong-headed. There’s no statistics that bear that out.”

In over 20 years since opening, Joe’s Record Shop became a symbol of Black art and opportunity that defined the time. During the Rebellion, it was looted.

“When my father walked back into that store … and he saw the destruction, I really say that my dad really died then,” Battle-Fillpot said. “He tried to reopen after that, even, but he was just unable to gather it back altogether.”

Today, headquarters for the Big Three automakers are still in metro Detroit, but jobs in the city never bounced back.

‘The Machine Shop of the World’

The story of industry and its demise echoed in Milwaukee, the home of beer and brewing, heavy manufacturing, and iron and steel, also called ‘The Machine Shop of the World’. There, industry here was more diverse than Detroit, which went all-in on the auto industry. With a bustling port and growing rail system, Milwaukee was critical to the economy of the Wisconsin region.

“‘Blue-collar’ in Milwaukee meant middle class,” says Adam Carr, a public historian and artist in the city. “That’s entwined with the history of socialism here, that the worker was not a chump in Milwaukee.”

An image that, for Carr, exemplifies the city’s indigenous roots, its peak in industry and the decline is Three Bridges Park — an old brownfield turned into a sprawling park, filled with walking paths built over a freeway that cut through the city.

The loss of jobs and wealth in Milwaukee, specifically Black and Latino Milwaukee, went down just like in Detroit. Urban renewal brought in freeways but also displaced families in lower income neighborhoods. Redlining discriminatorily shut people out of certain neighborhoods. This stunted generational wealth, a history the city is still dealing with. Like Detroit, industry jobs never bounced back.

“I heard someone say, ‘Pie in the sky in Milwaukee was the factory job,’” Carr remembers. “We thought the gravy train would never end. And I think we haven’t found exactly who we are after industry yet.”

The Second City

In Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood, built on a graveyard of old industry, you’ll find the University of Illinois Chicago’s Cuppa Hall and the Great Cities Institute.

Associate director Matt Wilson studies the long shadow of deindustrialization in Chicago. He says historically, the city had a lot of the same advantages as Milwaukee and Detroit: natural resources, a bustling port. What separated Chicago was the rail system — and as the country pushed west, Chicago became a major hub.

“Chicago still has that identity of the crossroads. A lot of goods flow through here,” Wilson says. “It’s really easy, when you go on the river, to see barge traffic, and when you go to any of the ports that are around the city, you see the large-scale movement of goods.”

Industry varied in Chicago. The famous Union Stock Yards was considered the meatpacking center of the world. Then, in the 1980s, the city pivoted.

“Chicago needs to compete with other cities to attract jobs in corporate headquarters,” Wilson says. “It needs to bring in tourism and make sure all the hotels are filled and that there’s a nightlife.”

Tax incentives and tax dollars were funneled to rebuild Downtown, though not other parts of the city.

“The neighborhood of South Chicago, on the southeast side of the city, it feels like [it’s] from the historical archives I’ve read, that the center of gravity was the steel plant,” Wilson says.

Until the early 2000s, that included Pressed Steel, Republic Steel, Wisconsin Steel and the big one, U.S. Steel. These plants were the source of middle-class employment, which stabilized the housing market and both retail and commercial businesses.

“Both my grandfathers worked [in the plants]. My dad worked there and I worked there,” says Michael Lisecki, who grew up in South Chicago. “It was like everybody worked in one of the mills, whether it was U.S., Wisconsin. It was devastating when we all got laid off.”

Lisecki started working in the mills in 1978 when he was 18, making better money than he ever dreamed possible. Three years later, he was laid off and the neighborhood was never the same.

Chicago pivoted to a post-industry chapter earlier than Detroit and Milwaukee. But no matter the city, deindustrialization left a hole, and it’s clear the bones of the past are still with us.

Curious Midwest is a limited series collaboration with Curious City, Bubbler Talk at WUWM in Milwaukee and CuriosiD at WDET in Detroit. It answers listener questions about the connections between the three cities.