No Extinguishing The Firehouse

Hey, Father Time…you’re tickin’ me off. For auto reporters of a certain vintage, a favorite memory was the Chrysler/DaimlerChrysler takeover of a Detroit firehouse across the street from then-Cobo Center, during the North American Auto Show media days.

For those three days the firehouse became “The Firehouse” where the automaker offered journalists exhausted after a day of covering the show? and interviewing executives, free food, booze and fellowship.

What a kick ordering a cold beer from then CEO Dieter Zetsche who tended bar with a smile and a gleam in his eye.

I got to see it from the other side of the scrimmage line when I started working for Chrysler in 2005.

How popular was The Firehouse? If you didn’t file your story and get over there right away, you’d face a long line down Washington Avenue, waiting for some sodden scribes to exit so you could enter and join the fun.

Fast-forward to last Monday night. ?The city of Detroit long ago sold the firehouse and the buyers morphed it into a boutique hotel with a very fine restaurant. That’s where I ended up, along with a small group of auto writers, having been invited to a small dinner by a major automaker for a background session with an executive.

Before things really got underway, I was making small talk with a couple of the reporters sitting nearest to me. I say, “man, some great memories here.”

The one to my left has a blank look and replies, “Why? Were you a fireman?”

Heh. I’m 5’6”. I’m closer to a fire hydrant.

I look across the table to another, hoping for validation, or even a glimmer of recognition of the building’s colorful past.

All I got was a sad head shake and “I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Why would a company do that? Was this in the 2000’s.” Screw off babycakes.

So I explain the awesomeness they missed by being born too late and how relationship building between automakers and those who wrote about them involved a lot more fun and personal interaction than the results of ephemeral keyboard slapping.

They looked at me as if I was relating the results of a meal of hallucinogenic mushrooms.?

I hate to sound like the semi-retired, senior citizen that I am, but the auto beat was once a pack of brilliant, brawling ball-busters who weren’t shy about making big executives uncomfortable and quickly challenged them when the bullshit was coming from their mouths.

Those were the types of men and women who could also turn an off-duty firehouse into a ten-alarm party.

I’d love it if today’s beat writers had the same opportunity as we did to let loose at the end of a hard day on the very hard floor of the auto show as guests of an automaker that understood very well the fastest route to a reporter’s heart.

But the auto show held across the street from the old firehouse is much smaller now and so is the crowd of reporters. What was once three packed media days with dozens of news conferences and product reveals, is now barely a day as the once mighty North American International Auto Show shrinks to the regional Detroit Auto Show.

Not so many reporters anymore. The bacchanalian Firehouse was extinguished during the bad old days of the bankruptcies of 2009, morphing into that ?sedate hotel and restaurant too expensive for most writers.

It was still nice to enter the building again under any circumstance. And twice as nice when a familiar face who’s been on the beat about as long as I have over heard my story to the young pups and piped in, “Oh yeah..The Firehouse kicked ass!”

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