In this month's Cityscapes column for NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune, geographer Richard Campanella chooses another industrial subject. The Ford Motor Co. plant in Arabi, along the Mississippi River in St. Bernard Parish, employed hundreds of local workers, starting in the early 1920s.
The plant shut down during the time of the Great Depression, and began a long series of changes, from being seized by the government during WWII to one part of it serving as a school extension when Orleans Parish schools were being racially integrated. Today the plant, a classic example of auto industry architecture imported from Detroit, is for sale.