History Continued Cleveland Chandler Auto Company, Cleveland Ohio
With the completion of those additions in the early part of 1917, The Chandler Motor Car Company was ready for an annual output of 20,000 automobiles. But, the manufacturing restrictions that came with the onset of World War I reduced Chandler's production to the 1916 level of 15,000 vehicles. Nevertheless, Chandler made a $1,206,000 profit in the first six months of 1917. That profit came from the company's production of Holt 10-ton artillery tractors for the U. S. Army, one of Cleveland's largest war contracts.
The company made only minor additions to its plant in 1917. Following the designs of Ernest McGeorge, The Crowell-Lundoff-Little Company built an elevated steel framed bridge between buildings #2 and #3. The bridge contained a monorail and had a live load rating of two-tons. The Van Dorn Iron Works supplied material for another bridge, 114 foot by 9 foot, between building Other 1917 additions included a 60-foot by 16-foot tool shed and a 40-foot by 20-foot saw storage shed.
That year, Chandler also bought a semicircular property across E. 131st Street for the storage and shipment of vehicles. The company built a 290-foot loading dock along the site's rail siding. On Coit Road, at the end of E. 131st Street, Chandler bought a triangular property for the testing of its army tractors. A 240-foot by 30-foot tractor paint shop and a 220-foot by 44-foot tractor test shop faced Coit Road.
In 1918, Chandler produced 9,172 automobiles in addition to its army tractors. The Sam W. Emerson Company began, in March of that year, Ernest McGeorge's plans for a 400-foot by 80-foot plant, building #6, on the company's new semicircular site. The one-story structure was completed in July 1918. Its flat-slab reinforced-concrete structure was "to be extended to four floor" That extension came in October 1919, when John Gill and Son fireproofed the first floor, erected two elevator housings and a stair tower, and added three additional floors. A tunnel connected building #6 to the existing plant. At the same time, Gill and Son completed McGeorge's plans for a four-story, 420-foot by 60-foot extension to building #3, covering the one-story service building with the same flat-slab concrete construction.
Factory layouts of the 1919 Chandler plant remain. Building #1, in addition to its boiler house and air compressor building, contained the machine shop, a receiving and parts storage area, a repair department, and a time study department. Materials handling equipment included inclined chutes, moving waisthigh belt conveyors, rails with moving chains embedded in the floor, and monorails with moving chain guides attached to the ceiling. The machine shop made extensive use of specialized machine tools, with separate departments making the steering mechanisms, the transmissions, the cylinder heads and blocks, and the axles. At the east end of building #1 stood an elevated bridge leading to building #2. Chassis assembly, painting, and storage occupied that structure. A moving assembly line extended the entire length of the building, with toilets, locker rooms, and storage areas in mezzanines spanning the 40-foot by 20-foot bays.
Finish body work, storage, and shipping occurred in building along a monorail to a hoist, which lifted them to the third floor of building #3. That building housed Chandler's final assembly line. The fourth floor contained a general storage area, with smaller areas for sheet metal and pattern storage. At the east end of the fourth floor stood a 220-foot by 50-foot enameling department, containing two 80-foot long ovens, a 30-foot square washing room, and a 20-foot by 10-foot buffing machine.
On the third floor, underneath the enameling department, stood a 100-foot by 60-foot rim storage area. A rim chute ran along one wall of the adjacent 140-foot by 60-foot tire room. Two tire rack areas, 75 feet by 28 feet, stood along the opposite wall. Once the rims were attached to the tires they moved down a tire chute to an adjacent 240-foot by 60-foot, paint and wheel department. That room had storage racks plus three paint dibs spaced 40 feet apart. The body assembly department occupied the rest of the third floor. The body hoist from the building #6 tunnel stood at the west end of the department. The bodies moved on a ceiling-mounted rack, past a 20-foot square experimental room, to a 200-foot by 60-foot storage room. Along one wall stood a tube storage and windshield storage area which contained a series of vacuum tanks. The bodies were put on a conveyor, where the windshields and other trim pieces were attached. A hoist then lowered the bodies through a hole to the second floor.
The second floor received both chassis and motor from the bridge and elevator at its eastern end. The chassis was placed on a conveyor, turned over, spray painted in two adjacent booths, and sent through a 120-foot oven. A 280-foot motor conveyor paralleled the chassis conveyor, lowering the motor onto the chassis when it left the oven. The tire chute from the third floor then lowered tires for attachment to the chassis. Further down the moving line, bodies were lowered and attached. The last 220 feet of the conveyor was devoted to the final assembly of trim.
A car drop hoist lowered the completed automobiles to a 200 foot by 20-foot final testing area on the first floor. Adjacent to that area stood a 280-foot by 40-foot repair department and the 160-foot by 60-foot service department, originally in a separate building. A 140-foot by 60-foot area on the first floor contained the factory office in addition to a final paint and varnish room and another testing area. At the east end of the first floor stood a 340-foot by 60-foot final equipment department, with its own stock room and conveyor, and a finished car storage area.
The Chandler employees had access to recreation rooms, a tennis court, a cafeteria in each department, and a large restaurant and auditorium for company functions. In addition, the company organized social outings for its workers, perhaps in compensation for the plant's reputation "as one of the most efficient in the industry."
The 1919 additions to its plant enabled Chandler to nearly quadruple its pre-war output, reaping it an end-of-the-year profit of $2,800,000. In February 1919, The Chandler Motor Car Company organized a subsidiary, The Cleveland Automobile Company. The company's $1,400,000 capitalization was financed through the New York office of Hornblower and Weeks, having been refused similar support from the Cleveland banks. Frederick Chandler served as chairman of the subsidiary's executive committee, with Chandler's engineer, John Whitbeck, as its president and Chandler's secretary, Sidney Black as its vice president. The Cleveland Automobile Company appealed to the large medium-priced automobile market. Its Cleveland car cost $500 less than the Chandler Light-Six and was sold through Chandler's dealerships, resulting in 30,000 advance orders by August 1919.
The Cleveland Automobile Company bought 17 acres at the corner of Euclid Avenue and London Road, adjacent to the New York and St. Louis Railroad tracks. Ernest McGeorge designed the plant and John Gill and Son began construction in April 1919. The building was completed by mid-July. The Cleveland Automobile factory closely resembles building #3 at the Chandler plant. Four stories tall, 80 feet wide, and 600 feet long, the building has a flat-slab structural system, 20-foot square bays, circular mushroom columns supporting drop panel concrete floors, and an exterior of brick spandrels and industrial-sash windows. A passenger elevator, two freight elevators, and four stairways serviced the original building. Company offices occupied the first two bays of the factory, set off visually with brick piers, a raised parapet, and a corner elevator and stair tower with stone-capped buttresses and a gabled parapet.
The plant contained "two progressive assembly lines. Two loading docks stood along the west side of the factory, "ideally located for quick shipments." While The Cleveland Automobile Company claimed that the "car (was) built entirely within the plant," the company merely assembled the cars there, for it was as dependent as its parent company on suppliers for its clutches, transmissions, electrical systems, and bodies.
In October 1919, Cleveland extended its plant with a 200-foot by 80-foot four-story addition. John Gill and Son completed Ernest McGebrge's plans in April 1920, at the same time beginning construction of a 240-foot by 80-foot machine shop also designed by McGeorge. Facing London Road, with its own rail siding, the machine shop parallels the Cleveland auto plant, 264 feet to the west. The flat-slab tao-story concrete structure was designed to support two additional floors and to expand south along London Road. The building thus has an exposed concrete frame on its roof and projecting bra concrete brackets along the south wall. Fifteen feet north of the machine shop stands a monitor-roofed structure originally used as a foundry. Eighty-two feet square, the building has a facade of stone-capped buttresses and a central raised parapet. The interior is well-lighted with banks of industrial-sash windows. Like the machine shop, the foundry was designed to expand, in this case, to the west toward the main factory.
At the back of the site, The Lundoff-Bicknell Company built a 44-foot square boiler house. Employing a forced hot water heating system, the building contained B. & W. Sterling boilers, Detroit stokers, Anderson air traps, and Illinois stop and check valves. Next to the boiler house stood a 7 1/2 foot diameter brick stack, 175 feet tall.
In October 1919, The Chandler Motor Car Company expanded its plant with a five-story administration building, building B. The reinforced concrete structure has 18-foot bays with a double-loaded corridor featuring marble wainscotting and door trim. Many of the offices have wood paneling with double walls. The exterior face brick is rusticated along, the first floor with a belt-course of vertical stretchers that is repeated in the brick and tile cornice. At the second level, opposite the building's one passenger elevator, stands a bridge connecting the administrative offices to building A.
The luxurious materials used in the Chandler offices reflected the prosperity of the company in the early part of 1920. In the summer of that year, Chandler's production rate had reached a record 3000 cars a month. That prosperity ended with the recession that grew during the latter half of the year. By December, the company's production rate had fallen to 800 cars a month, resulting in an annual output of 23,832 vehicles. The Cleveland Automobile Company was similarly hurt by the recession. Its 1920 total of 16,000 automobiles fell by 3,800 in 1921. In 1922, Cleveland built 9,500 automobiles only 1,500 less than Chandler.
The two companies countered their declining sales with mechanical innovations and advertising gimmicks. In 1923, Chandler promoted its "Pike's Peak" motor, a more powerful version of its standard six-cylinder engine supposedly tested on Pike's Peak. Although the "Pikes Peak Motor (became) a sensation of the day," Chandler sales that year remained at 11,000. The lower-priced Cleveland car, for the first time, outsold its parent company, with an output of 14,500 automobiles in 1923. Chandler continued its innovations in 1924 with the introduction of the "Traffic Transmission," a new gear mechanism for smoother shifting at slow speeds. In 1925, Cleveland introduced a "One Shot' lubrication system, operated with a plunger under the dashboard. By 1926, Chandler's annual output had climbed to 12,600 automobiles, 6,500 less than the output of The Cleveland Automobile Company.
While both companies remained the two largest auto manufacturers in Cleveland, they could not compete with such companies as Chevrolet and Ford. In March 1926, The Chandler Motor Car Company decided to absorb its subsidiary, creating The Chandler-Cleveland Motors Corporation with $3,000,000 in assets.
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With that consolidation, the new corporation achieved enough financial stability to expand the Cleveland factory. The four-story, 100-foot by 80-foot extension to the rear of the plant was designed by Ernest McGeorge and constructed by the William Dunbar Company. In October 1928, the machine shop at the former Cleveland plant received a one-story, steel-framed extension that was completed in December.
December 1928, also brought the purchase of a majority of Chandler-Cleveland stock by the Detroit-based Hupp Motor Car Corporation. That purchase placed Hupp in 9th place in the nation's automobile industry. Hupp ended production of the Chandler-Six on May 1, 1929, using the former Chandler plant for the assembly of the Hupmobile Six and the former Cleveland plant for bodybuilding and finishing.
The Hupp Motor Car Corporation made minor alterations to both plants. In June 1929, it added a 17-foot by 140-foot steel frames bridge connecting building #1 and #2 at the Chandler factory, employing Ernest McGeorge as architect and the Sam W. Emerson Company as contractor. McGeorge also designed two 10-foot by 60 foot brick lean-to sheds along one side of building #1. At the former Cleveland plant, Ernest McGeorge designed and Sam W. Emerson built a 740-foot by 20-foot timber loading platform and a 44-foot by 20-foot addition to the boiler house.
The stock market crash ended all construction at the plants. Sales of the Hupmobile Six fell from 16,000 in 1929 to 8,700 in 1930, while the corporation's total output fell from a high of 66,000 automobiles in 1928 to 17,000 in 1931. The Hupp Motor Car Corporation closed the assembly line at the Chandler plant in October, 1931, maintaining the former Cleveland plant as a body building facility until October 1934.
In 1936, The Parker Appliance Company moved into the Cleveland Automobile plant. Now The Parker-Hannifin Corporation, a manufacturer of fittings for hydraulic transmissions, the company converted the factory into offices, laboratories, and storage space and has added several one-story steel-framed structures to the side. All of the original machinery and equipment, as well as the building's industrial-sash windows, were replaced. None of the original equipment exists in the former machine shop and foundry along London Road, buildings now owned by a few smaller manufacturers.
The Weatherhead Company also moved in the former Chandler plant in 1936. A manufacturer of automobile parts and accessories. Weatherhead has maintained the plant's boilers, compressors, and heating system, as well as the original drawings of the buildings. Building #6 of the former Chandler plant is separately owned and used as a warehouse.
At their peak, The Chandler Motor Car Company and The Cleveland Automobile Company were the second largest auto manufacturers outside of Detroit, producing almost 75% of the cars made in Cleveland, The companies failed for seemingly contradictory reasons. On one hand, they grew too rapidly after World War I, leaving themselves overextended and thus vulnerable during the 1920 recession. On the other hand, the companies did not grow fast enough to compete with the medium-priced auto companies in Detroit. Once again, it is surprising that Chandler and Cleveland performed as well as they did against such odds.
