 "Photo: Josh Shannon")
 "Photo: Josh Shannon")
Christmas trees took their place on the factory floor, alongside machinery and conveyor belts. Light-up snowflakes illuminated the rafters. A University of Delaware flag flew over the former Chrysler Assembly Plant.
An intensive, multi-million dollar clean-up process awaits the site bought by the university last month, but for university officials, this was a night for celebration.
“This land is big, very big, but the opportunities it gives us are even bigger,” university President Patrick Harker said.
The university showed off its latest acquisition in grand style Tuesday night, as Harker and the Board of Trustees hosted a holiday cocktail party on the floor of the Chrysler plant.
Nearly 500 university employees, local and state leaders, donors and students were treated to a buffet dinner, entertainment and golf cart tours of the shuttered plant.
Held in an area of the factory once used as the end of the assembly line, the party also served as the first public celebration of the purchase.
While guests dined inside, workers replaced the Daimler-Chrysler sign from in front of the building with a University of Delaware sign – a move, Harker hinted at during his closing remarks, intended to surprise guests as they departed.
Harker told the crowd that the site is a once in a lifetime opportunity for the university, one that expands the school’s footprint by 22 percent.
“This property is our vehicle for a vision – a vision that will propel us down the Path to Prominence,” he said.”
Demolition and clean-up of the site is expected to take up to three years, but long-range plans call for the site to house the Delaware Health Sciences Alliance – a partnership with Jefferson University – as well as transportation upgrades and other research and development projects.
The university has also built a strong partnership with the Army for research opportunities at the site and is already piloting a training program at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Harker said at the Board of Trustees meeting, held earlier in the plant’s executive board room.
In a videotaped message shown on screen during the party, Vice President Joe Biden praised his alma mater for buying the site.
“This is a big, big deal to a community that has been devastated,” Biden said. “I truly believe this is an investment that’s going to pay off in ways we can’t even imagine.”
For too long, he said, Americans have pointed at closed manufacturing plants and talked about what they used to be. Now, that’s beginning to change.
“Families are going to ride down South College Drive, they’re going to go by that same Chrysler factory gig that we’ve ridden by for so many years, and they’re going to turn to their kid, their husband, their wife and say ‘That’s going to be,’ ” Biden said.
Harker noted that the plant has gone through transitions before. Originally built in 1951 to make tanks for the Army, it was converted to a car manufacturing facility five years later.
“It’s now time for the plant’s third act,” he said. “And what a great third act it will be.”
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