Anthony, are you ever going to love this...
I used to work in the very factory your're speaking of (in a way). First, let me set a few details straight...
The factory (which actually spanned from Conner to Mack Avenue, and was also known as Conner Ave) was owned by a bodybuilding company called Briggs (same company made plumbing fixtures too). This dates from the time when car companies spent most of their resources building chassis and drivetrains, then "farmed out" the actual car bodies. This works OK for body-on-frame vehicles (like today's trucks) but doesn't work for more modern unibody construction (not invented by Chrysler, but they were the first of the big three to switch to this method in 1957).
Briggs Body Company had two main customers in the early 50s, Chrysler and Packard. My grandfather worked at his factory after WWII and built both types of car bodies. (During WWII this plant built airplane wings. His wife, my grandmother worked there at the time!). Although this plant is often associated with Packard, or confused with Packard's still-standing plant on East Grand Boulevard, it was never owned by Packard.
Chrysler, planning their switch to unibody constuction in '57, purchased Briggs Body Company in '55. They continued to produce Packard bodies for a limited time.
last Packard built Packards came from a now gone plant on Conner Ave.
By '57, the Conner plant became a Chrysler (only) stamping plant. This undoubtably was one reason Packard bought Studebaker.
By the mid-60s, Chrysler had built more modern stamping plants in Warren and Sterling Heights Michigan, and the Conner facility was used for smaller stampings like hood hinges, door hinges, etc. In 1974, Chrysler built a million sq. foot addition to the Conner plant and eventually closed-off the old "Briggs" section.
As Chrysler fell on hard times in the 80s, this plant fell into disuse, with only a skeleton staff doing little work, and mostly storage.
However in 1991, a new chapter was written. Chrysler began converting the new section of the plant for assembly of the Dodge Viper! The Viper remained here until 1995, when it was decided that the HUGE old plant, and million sq. foot addition would be better used as a new engine plant. The old section was torn down. The old building's bricks were actually ground-up and used in cement for the new building. (I saved a few)
Today this site is known as the Mack I engine plant. It produces the 4.7 Liter V8 engine used in the Grand Cherokee and Dodge Trucks. Another engine plant was built next-door in 1997, (Mack II) This plant builds the 3.7L V6 used in the Jeep Liberty.
I might add that this new plant looks like a manufacturing "park" with green lawns, trees and bright-white building. It has revitalized the surrounding area, and improved infastructure.
A picture of the old site can be found at this link:
Conner/Mack plant pictures
(The Jefferson Avenue plant is at the top, along with some history of that plant written by me)
Now, a little editorial from me... 
The above story also shows one good example of the difference between American vs. Foreign producers, and why people who claim "It doesn't matter where a car comes from" are full of excrement.
During the 90s, while Chrysler was experiencing a huge turnarond, the company invested heavily in decaying, industrialized areas (like the example above, but also elsewhere in Detroit MI, Ohio and Indiana). The company did not abandon their workers and cities, but chose to build brand-new plants rather than build in a southern cornfield, (or overseas) thus avoiding higher wages, tougher environmental laws (and a higher number of minority workers, although that's a dirty secret that Toyota, Nissan and Honda would especially like you to forget). BTW, The Jeep Grand Cherokee built at one of these new urban factories has outscored the southern-built Mercedes ML-series SUV in quality rankings for every year either has been sold.
After the 1998 sellout of Chrysler, brought on primarily by former GM of Europe president lil' Bob Eaton, Chrysler's new owners have closed factory after factory, and spent billions investing in rual, southern cornfields (or out of the US entirely). Appearantly, even if this means losing money in the short-term (Such as ending prodcution of the Dodge Van built in Windsor, ON to sell less than 5000 Mercedes built vans per year). The results of this takeover to date?
$10 billion in Chrysler pre-takeover cash gone, and unaccounted for thanks to lax German financial disclosure laws.
$8 billion lawsuit pending against DaimlerChrysler by its largest shareholder.
$300 Million paid out out-of-court to Chrysler shareholders for fraud involving the Mercedes takeover.
30,000 US job losses with more on the way
2% of market share gone (so far)
Future engineering, reasearch and development of future Chrysler small, mid-size cars to be done by Mitsubshi (Japan's lowest quality automaker) not US workers.
etc. etc.
And for those of you who say, "Who gives a damn, I don't work in the auto industry, or live in an old city?" just remember that electronics, textile and workers in other now-dead industries likely said the same thing. With the dawn of the internet, service/information jobs can move to India with the click of a mouse. Will you keep ingoring the fact that those $150 Wal-Mart Chinese TVs, or $9000 Korean cars are often made in places where the workers are forced to work at the point of a gun, and the toxic waste stream dumps into the local river? It's amazng how much you can clean-up your image when you don't have a free press.
Not looking for protectionism, just an end to trade with those nations who refuse to end forced labor and enact minimum enviromental standards. Trust me, US manufacturers don't fear competiton from first-world nations.
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