New Orleans, Arabi, Detroit South? Well, not quite. But in the early 20th century, the Ford Motor Company constructed an immense auto assembly center on North Peters Street in Arabi. The cars are now long gone, but the vacant factory building still stands today, awaiting a new life.
Built between 1922 and 1923, the 227,000 square-foot reinforced concrete, brick and steel plant was part of Henry Ford’s plan to build more than a dozen assembly facilities across the nation to meet increased demands for his Model-Ts and Model-As. Ford figured it was economically more efficient to ship automobile parts to assembly plants than to transport finish-made cars.
Looking at a period map of the New Orleans region, Ford’s Arabi location was an ideal spot. The 27-acre site is located on the Mississippi River with a railroad line that connected the Ford plant to auto parts manufacturers all across the nation. Once the cars were assembled, they could be transported by ship and rail to markets throughout the Gulf South, Cuba and to Central and South America.
A National Park Service history notes the plant set a production record in 1929 with 300 cars a day rolling off the assembly line. The plant also had strong years in 1930 and again in 1931 but “it was not enough to survive the Depression.” The plant closed in 1931 but reopened in 1932. The following year, Ford sales increased over 300 percent in the New Orleans region. Even that dramatic increase wasn’t enough. The assembly lines shut down in 1933.
Although the plant no longer assembled cars here, Ford used it as a distribution center for its automobile parts. Later during World War II, the U.S. Army Port Quartermaster seized the building as a warehouse for war materiel. When the war ended, Ford’s auto parts distribution center was back in business for the next two decades.
Then in 1971, according to a 2014 Times-Picayune article by Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella, Ford sold the building and grounds to the car importer Southern Service Company. Four years later, Toyota bought out Southern Service’s parent company Amco.
“With the New Orleans area enriched by an oil boom and the rest of the nation buying smaller imports to save gas,” Campanella wrote, “Toyota saw its sales skyrocket, and Amco brought the Arabi plant back on line to receive, clean, repair, accessorize and test newly arrived Toyotas from Japan. Throughout the mid-1970s, thousands of Celicas and Corollas rolled through Arabi, just as Model-Ts and Model-As passed through 50 years ago.”
By the late 1970s the Arabi Toyota plant had become obsolete with the coming of interstate highways, changes in rail transportation and more convenient ports on the West Coast. Southern Service sold the building to a warehouse company in 1977.
From the late 1970s to 2005, the plant lived a quiet life as an import-export freight warehouse. That is, until the building flooded in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina. Since then, except for storage, the massive facility has sat vacant. It was back in the national spotlight in the late 2024 and early 2025, however, when the historic old building hosted a major art installation sponsored by Prospect 6, the New Orleans international citywide contemporary art festival.
The building and surrounding 27 acres are now owned by Chalmette lawyer and arts patron Sidney Torres III who has a multi-phase plan to transform the site into “a hub for creative industries.” that will be a “small city’” including, entrepreneurial business incubators and residential units.
A promotional website describes the project as an “opportunity zone” and “assembly place for creative minds” that will target industries ranging from Hollywood studios and tech industries to artists and indie filmmakers. Torres hopes to launch phase one perhaps next year.
