GM’s decline is sobering at the corner bar
I listen to Bonnie Brown, and I can almost see them, lined up three deep at the bar, drinking away the day’s weariness.
Guys coming off the second shift at GM’s Tonawanda plant packed the place by midnight, their paychecks cashed at the bar, no questions asked. Workers on first shift stopped by midday to squeeze in a quick lunch. Plates of food and pitchers of beer already were on the tables when they walked through the door, all of it slammed down and the bill paid in the 30 minutes before the assembly line restarted.
Brown started a quarter-century ago at Town Line Inn on Vulcan Street, three short blocks from the gate at Plant 1. A few years ago, when the Town Line closed, she moved around the block to the Dalmatia Hotel, the closest watering hole—as the Camaro flies—to the engine plant.
The Dalmatia is a comfortable corner bar with wood-cabinet beer coolers and tables in back. Brown knows everybody’s name, which is not too hard, since the only patrons on a recent weekday afternoon are a couple of bikers and a few screwed-to-bar-stools regulars. One rosy-faced guy with startled eyes meanders into Brown’s domain, prompting a “Hey, other side of the bar, please” reminder.
I stopped in to chat about the GM bankruptcy—the Tonawanda plant was saved, but layoffs will hack the work force to barely 600. It is a skeletal remnant of the 4,350 who toiled there 20 years ago, overspilling into neighborhood bars and businesses.
“We didn’t close back then until 4:30 in the morning,” Brown said. “Now there’s not even a third shift. We shut before midnight every night of the week.”
Brown has straight blond hair and is built as solid as a Silverado. She delivers a nice mix of firm attitude and easy manner, which is how she managed to stay soft on the edges despite years of duty in workingmen’s bars. Like many folks in this neighborhood, General Motors made her, and General Motors let her down. GM workers left the tips and padded the paycheck that helped Brown to buy a house in Riverside and to raise two kids. Now, she is lucky to get a few stragglers from the plant on any given week.
“I knew hundreds of those guys,” she said. “Most of them took retirement and got out . . . I got a retiree sitting right there.”
Thomas Billings sat hunched over a mug at the end of the bar. Nicknamed “ZZ” for his long, white beard, Billings— who lives in a house behind the bar— logged 30 years at the plant.
“I’m worried about my [pension],” he said. “With this bankruptcy, you don’t know what is going to happen.”
Billings had a stolen car rap on his resume when GM plucked him off the street at 22 and plopped him onto an assembly line. First day on the job, he looked at the row of engines disappearing from view and asked his boss where it ended.
The guy laughed and said, “For you, it ends in about 10 hours.”
There is a sense of sadness that hovers over this and a lot of other places in Buffalo, places haunted by the ghost of better days. Bonnie Brown had a front-row view of GM’s decline, as—over the years—three-deep at the bar devolved to three guys on bar stools.
Technology and cheap Third World labor and miserable management and outdated union rules hacked away the plant’s jobs and buckled the neighborhood businesses that fed off of the behemoth. The left-behind feeling lingers like a bad aftertaste. Around here, GM’s bankruptcy merely confirmed the obvious.
“Even the corner stores are hurting,” Brown said. “This used to be a great location. It’s not so great anymore.”
No, not anymore.
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