Contract Manufacturing | 6200 East Broad Street, Columbus, 24 July 2001 — The Phone Company Sells the Factory It Was Built Around

The Bell System used to make its own telephones. That is the thing to hold on to while standing on East Broad Street, because almost nothing about the arrangement survives. Columbus Works went up here in the late 1950s. The Columbus Metropolitan Library's catalogue record dates the start of construction to 1957, and the plant's own club history says operations began the same year. It was a Western Electric plant dropped into Ohio farmland, staffed with local hires and with people moved out from New York and from Hawthorne Works in Chicago. It made crossbar switches, the electromechanical machinery that connected telephone calls before software did. The plant's own amateur radio club, whose members worked there, records the scale: 858,000 square feet of manufacturing behind a four-storey office building, more than 12,000 people across three shifts, a thousand of them Bell Labs staff, three unions, two dining halls, a library and a rail spur. Western Electric was AT&T's manufacturing arm, and the unwinding of that took twenty years. AT&T was broken up, then in 1996 spun out its equipment business as Lucent Technologies, and Columbus Works went with it. On 24 July 2001 Lucent agreed to sell the plant to Celestica, a Canadian contract manufacturer that had itself been IBM's factory arm until 1996. The terms are in Celestica's filing: inventory, machinery and the Columbus real estate bought outright, a second plant in Oklahoma City leased, between US$550 million and US$650 million paid, and a five-year agreement under which Celestica would supply Lucent with the circuit boards Lucent had made for itself. That is the whole trade in one sentence: the same boards, the same building, a different company's name on the payroll. It did not hold. By early 2002 the United States Department of Labor was writing about workers at Lucent Technologies, now known as Celestica, Columbus Works, and their claim for trade adjustment assistance. The first determination went against them. On reconsideration, signed 30 May 2002, the government found that a major portion of the plant's production had been moved abroad, to Canada and to China, and that more than half of it was being imported back into the United States. Workers separated on or after 10 October 2000 were certified as eligible. Manufacturing at Columbus Works ended that year. The same club history records what became of the site: Lucent bought it back in 2006 and broke it up, the front office became a billing centre for Mt. Carmel Health, the land behind became small houses, the front lawn became strip malls, and the plant stood mostly empty until it was demolished in 2014. Alcatel-Lucent moved the last laboratory staff to Dublin, Ohio in the autumn of 2011, fifty-four years after the plant opened. There is no factory to visit. The address is a commercial strip on the far east side of Columbus, and the cover photograph, dated 1960, is the view north from East Broad Street when the lawn and the flagpole were the front of a Bell System works. The second image is the plant from the air the same year, a white slab in open farmland. The third is a tinted presentation view, hand-lettered with Broad Street and the B&O and Pennsylvania railroad running past it. Photos: David Lucas and Columbus Metropolitan Library, via the Digital Public Library of America, public domain.