By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
A 1956 Ford, built in Buffalo.
There have been volumes written about the famous Buffalo-built cars like the Pierce-Arrow, the Thomas Flyer, and even the postwar two-seater the Playboy. And those names are only the tip of the iceberg. Dozens of different makes and models were built in Buffalo, especially in the early decades of automotive history.
While the names Ford and Chevrolet don’t instantly bring Buffalo to mind, it is in the early stories of both of those lions of American industry that Western New York and Western New Yorkers have made the greatest impact in the history of motoring.
Millions and millions of Fords and Chevys were built in Buffalo by thousands of our blue-collar fathers and grandfathers – but it wouldn’t have happened without the Danish immigrant who quit his job with the railroad to come to Buffalo as a bicycle mechanic.
William S. Knudsen would eventually become president of General Motors and was President Roosevelt’s point man for war supply production during World War II.
William Knudsen, 1922 photo.
But in 1906, Knudsen was living on Buffalo’s Victoria Avenue, a few blocks from the John R. Keim factories on Kensington Avenue at Clyde Avenue. He worked at the factory that produced machined metal parts – first for bicycles, then more and more for automobiles. As Keim became one of Ford’s leading suppliers for axle housings and drip pans, Henry Ford visited Buffalo in 1910 to buy out the factory.
Knudsen became one of Ford’s trusted lieutenants, and was the superintendent of the factory that became Buffalo’s first large-scale auto assembly plant. Before moving to Detroit to serve in a corporate capacity with Ford, Knudsen oversaw the building of the new Ford plant on Main Street in 1915. More than 600,000 Model-T Fords were churned out of the factory which, after years as a Bell Aircraft and Trico factory, still stands today as the Tri-Main Building.
Ford’s new Model A was unveiled in Buffalo at the factory where tens of thousands of them were built on Main Street near Fillmore.
Henry Ford called Knudsen “the greatest production genius in modern time.”
In 1930, Ford purchased a submerged plot of land on Fuhrmann Boulevard, and after backfilling more than 30 acres of land, a new Ford assembly plant was built. Between 1931 and the plant’s closure in 1958, about 2 million Buffalo-built Fords rolled off the line. The building still stands along Buffalo’s Outer Harbor as “Port Terminal A.”
The first postwar Ford rolls over the assembly line in Buffalo, 1946.
Meanwhile, after running Ford’s entire 27-plant production system after the end of World War I, Knudsen left Ford in a disagreement, eventually moving to GM with a chip on his shoulder. As a vice president at Chevrolet, his Danish-accented, one-line speech to workers became famous.
“I vant vun for vun” was printed that way in employee newsletters, and it was a bold challenge. He wanted one Chevy built for every Ford built. It was a huge dream – at the time, Ford was clearly at the top, while Chevy was America’s seventh-most popular car.
Among Knudsen’s first bold strokes in chasing Ford was to return to his adopted hometown of Buffalo to build a 600,000 square-foot, $2.5 milllion Chevy assembly and body plant on East Delevan Avenue.
Buffalo’s East Delevan Ave. Chevrolet Plant, with 1923 Chevys lined up in front
The first Chevys built in Buffalo hit the roads in summer 1923, and soon the factory was making 8,000 cars per month. The same “genius” level production mind that gave Henry Ford his first million car year helped transform, almost overnight, Chevrolet from an also-ran to the company that would be Ford’s greatest domestic competitor for almost a century and counting.
Buffalo’s first Chevrolet, 1923.
The Buffalo plant was a major player in Chevy’s surge to become America’s second-most popular automobile. After 18 years and well over a million vehicles, in 1941 the plant was converted to defense production.
After the war, the facility was refitted into an axle, brake and clutch factory. GM eventually spun off American Axle, which continued operating the plant until 2007. Efforts to remediate parts of the property for redevelopment have been ongoing since the plant’s closure.
While it’s been generations since Buffalo has rolled completed cars off of assembly lines, there are still about 1,400 GM workers creating components at the former Harrison Radiator in Lockport. GM’s Tonawanda Engine plant was opened in 1938 and employs about 1,600 workers. Opened in 1950, the Ford Stamping Plant in Hamburg continues to employ around 1,200.
And Buffalo’s link to the earliest days of the “Ford vs. Chevy” battle lives on.
