I’ve been puzzled by the locations Hudson used for their promo pics. They knew the ad agency would retouch the photos, inserting pleasant upscale backgrounds. But why did they make the retoucher’s job so hard?
In the 30s they photographed cars near the factory,
often with an even drabber factory in the background.
In the 40s they generally used the factory roof. They could have helped the retouchers by laying white tarps over the walls and floor!
A new (to me) book adds more puzzlement. Hudson owned BEAUTIFUL upscale scenes in their own proving ground, which would have been more secret than the factory roof. (Sources say the ugly roof was easily visible from a Chrysler building.)
The ’39 front end echoed the elegant gate:
Hudson’s self-image always had a British accent. They chose British names for the Dover trucks and Essex cars. The proving ground shows the same theme. Why didn’t they use it more often?
After the Nash merger, Nash used its own drab scenes. These locations clearly aren’t in a factory, presumably just a Kenosha neighborhood.
As it happens, these locations resemble the only place I ever saw a ’55 Hudson. It was on South Grand in Enid, parked at the repair garage on the left. The scene hasn’t changed much since the 70s.
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Thinking from another angle… Packard had an equally beautiful and better documented proving ground, also with a cottage housing the resident estate manager. Both companies felt testing was important enough to justify luxurious surroundings for the testers. Modern companies try to skip QA entirely, or at best allow engineers to spend a few minutes on QA when it doesn’t interfere with more important work like training Altman’s machine to replace their jobs.
Later again, looking at the pictures on the Packard website, the two are the same place! Same gate, same cottage. I know Packard built the place before WW2 and continued using it afterward, so it belonged to Packard when these Hudson pics were made. Was Hudson renting Packard’s estate?
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Semi-related oddity. Given Hudson’s British flavor and large factories in England and other Commonwealth countries, you might think part of Hudson’s stock was held by British aristocrats. Instead, about 20% of the stock was owned by the DUTCH royal family. This was still true in 1954 when Nash bought Hudson, and required a tricky negotiation. The books don’t say why the DUTCH royals decided to own 1/5 of an American company with no obvious connection to Holland.
Polistra's Mill 