MAP CONTROLS: Use slider or mousewheel to zoom, and hold down left mouse button
to drag.
KEY: Location markers are coloured from Green meaning exact to Red meaning
gone or unknown (details here)
|
Click here or on the image for this location's profile page
The I-X Center, an exhibition building located at 6300 Riverside Drive in Brook Park, Cleveland, was originally built in 1942 as the Cleveland Bomber Plant, but was known through most of its history as the Cleveland Tank Plant. Owned by the U.S. Department of Defense during World War II, the facility was operated by General Motors as the Fisher Body Aircraft Plant No. 2 and made the B-29 bomber. When the war ended the plant closed. After a brief tenure as an exhibition hall and sales center, the plant was leased to National Terminals for soybean storage. By 1950, as the Korean War expanded, General Motors’ Cadillac Division selected the Bomber Plant as the manufacturing site for tanks. The Cadillac Tank Plant, as it was renamed, produced the M41 light tank until 1955. After closing in 1959, the plant reopened in 1960, when Cadillac was awarded contracts to build the self-propelled T195 and T196 howitzers and M114 armoured personnel carriers. In 1965 GM shifted management of the tank plant (now usually called the Cleveland Tank Plant or the Cleveland Ordnance Plant) to its Allison Division. Among the products of the Cleveland Tank Plant operation was the M551 Sheridan tank. Congress decided to discontinue the program when the GM contract was completed in 1972. The Defense Department announced its intention to sell the plant. Brook Park, Cleveland, and GM expressed interest but dropped out of the bidding for various reasons. In 1977 the Park Corporation of Charleston, WV, bought the facility to create an international trade mart. That plan never fully materialized, but in 1985 Park opened the former tank plant as the I-X Center, billed as the largest single-building exhibition facility in the world. (Source: Encylopedia of Cleveland History).
|