---
title: "What Would You Do With AMC’s Abandoned Detroit Headquarters?"
description: "The ultimate karting complex? Or something even more creative…"
date: "2015-12-28"
modified: "2015-12-28"
authors:
  - name: "Max Prince"
    link: "https://www.thedrive.com/authors/max-prince"
url: "https://www.thedrive.com/vintage/1458/what-would-you-do-with-amcs-abandoned-detroit-headquarters"
categories:
  - "Culture"
  - "News"
tags:
  - "Detroit"
---

# What Would You Do With AMC’s Abandoned Detroit Headquarters?

![](<https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/images-by-url-td/content/archive-images/14250-plymouth-road.jpg>)
*\<em\>www.thedrive.com</em>*

As a [former resident of Detroit](<https://www.thedrive.com/article/324/driving-a-mercedes-benz-sprinter-to-the-best-damn-city-in-america>), I can say firsthand: Times are tough in Motown. Unloading industrial real estate is especially difficult, as the Wayne County Treasurer well knows. In October, some 25,000 properties went up at a massive tax foreclosure auction. One of them, the former American Motors Corporation headquarters, sold for $500. But the buyer, Nicholas Casab, refused to pay back property taxes, which totaled roughly $232k. Wayne County [voided the sale](<https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2015/10/26/wayne-county-voids-sale-former-amc-headquarters/74653250/>), and is now [offering the ex-AMC property to the city](<https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/2015/12/22/old-amc-hq-offered-detroit-after-failed-auction/77745774/>). Detroit has until Jan. 4 to figure out if it wants the massive complex.

And this place is *massive*. The building, located off Plymouth Road in west Detroit, measures 1.5 million square feet on 57 acres. It originally housed the Kelvinator Crop. during the Twenties; after Nash Motor Co. merged with Kelvinator, and then with Hudson to form American Motors in the mid-Fifties, the building served as AMC’s corporate headquarters. Chrysler used the facility until 2009, eventually selling it off to a corporate entity, which in turn fell into tax arrears of $2 million. The building has since been scrapped of metal and left to rot.

But it’s a neat place, huge and vast and isn’t as dilapidated as some of Detroit’s other evacuated auto industry monoliths. The AMC building [has history, too](<https://www.detroiturbex.com/content/industry/amc/index.html>): In the Eighties and Nineties, it was Chrysler’s Jeep and Truck Engineering Center, responsible for the design of both the [Dodge Ram pickup](<https://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/490/when-a-ram-truck-becomes-a-battering-ram>) and Grand Cherokee.

We’re still partial to Fernando Palazuelo’s old plan to [turn the Packard Plant into the ultimate go-karting complex](<https://www.freep.com/article/20131126/BUSINESS06/311260036>). Given the keys to the old American Motors building, what would you do?

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://twitter.com/themaxprince>)