Kodak Built a Private City for 60,000 People. Then It Blew Up Its Own Plant.

In 1976, ninety percent of the film sold in America came in a small yellow box. That box was made in one place: Kodak Park, an eleven hundred acre private industrial city on the edge of Rochester, New York, with a twenty two mile perimeter, thirty miles of its own roads, its own power plant, its own fire department, its own railroad, and, under Building 82, a nuclear reactor loaded with three and a half pounds of weapons grade uranium that the public did not learn about until 2012. In 1982 Kodak employed 60,400 people in Rochester and paid roughly a quarter of the salaries in the metropolitan area. By 2019 it employed about 1,300. The part everybody gets wrong is the part about being blindsided. In 1975 a Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson built the first self-contained digital camera out of a Super 8 lens, sixteen batteries and a cassette deck. It weighed eight pounds and took twenty three seconds to record one 100 by 100 pixel image. He demonstrated it to Kodak management, who were curious, skeptical, and unmoved. Kodak patented it in 1978 and did not build it. In 1981 the company's own head of market intelligence delivered a study concluding that digital would replace film and that Kodak had about ten years. The study was right. Then came the physical problem nobody talks about: 212 numbered buildings, built for a product that no longer existed, and no second tenant on earth for a light-tight film coating hall. So Kodak began demolishing itself. Building 9 went on 30 June 2007 and people drove in to watch; by the end of that year the count was down to 104. Building 53 came down in July 2015, ninety two years old, in about eight seconds. And in August 2025 Kodak told the SEC there was substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern, with a plan to cover the debt using roughly $300 million taken out of the Kodak Retirement Income Plan. This is File 007 of The Collapse Files: how billion-dollar companies die. CHAPTERS 0:00 The little yellow box 0:41 Kodak Park 2:00 The Whistle 3:34 The Drawer 5:33 Ninety Percent 6:59 The Subtraction 8:41 The Implosions 10:17 What Is Left 11:42 The Kodak File Sources: the Wikipedia entries for Kodak, Eastman Business Park and Steven Sasson; the Rochester Beacon and Rochester Business Journal on Rochester employment from the 1982 peak of 60,400; the Center for Land Use Interpretation on Kodak Park; Democrat and Chronicle reporting on the reactor under Building 82; coverage of the Building 9 and Building 53 implosions; IEEE Spectrum on the $525m patent sale; and Kodak's Form 10-Q of 11 August 2025. Archival images via Wikimedia Commons, public domain and CC0 where marked, plus CC-licensed photographs by Deveycx (Brownie camera avec son viseur, CC BY-SA 3.0); Sonicenvy (Kodak Brownie Target Six-20 with o..., CC BY-SA 4.0); ArildV (Photographic printing BW 645, CC BY-SA 4.0); Tannoy (Woodwards building Vancouver demol..., CC BY-SA 3.0); El Grafo (Kodak ColorPlus 200 135 film cartr..., CC BY-SA 4.0); El Grafo (Kodak Ultramax 400 135 film cartri..., CC BY-SA 4.0); Coyau (8 mm Kodak safety film reel 01, CC BY-SA 3.0); Coyau (8 mm Kodak reel 01, CC BY-SA 3.0); missbutterflies (Films - Color (33427999531), CC BY-SA 2.0); missbutterflies (Films - B&W (33556559075), CC BY-SA 2.0); Lightbrush (Muehlebach Implosion 1996, CC BY-SA 4.0); Anubis BR (Woodmen of the World Building Demo..., CC BY-SA 3.0); T Douglas-Walker (Cockenzie Power station demolition, CC BY 4.0); Patafisik (Camera Kodak Instamatic M9 - coll..., CC BY-SA 4.0); National Museum of Health and (Kodachrome display (Reeve 089929),..., CC BY 2.0); TRexEditorNJ (KODAK ROCHESTER, CC BY-SA 4.0); Parzeus (Rochester July 7-8, 2025 by Pedro..., CC BY 4.0); Tomkinsc (Rochester aerial aug 17 2007, CC BY-SA 3.0); Steve Morgan (Kodak Carousel 4400 projector with..., CC BY-SA 4.0); w_lemay (Otto E. Eckert Power Station, Isla..., CC BY-SA 2.0); Willwongprd (Kodak Gold 200 Film Retail Package, CC BY-SA 4.0); Thistle33 (Kodak Gold 200 Film, CC BY-SA 4.0). Archival footage from the Prelinger Archives on archive.org: Rochester: A City of Quality, Part I (1963); Rochester: A City of Quality, Part II (1963); Steel: A Symphony of Industry (1936); The Big City (1950); This Is Automation (1955). Music from the YouTube Audio Library: "Missing Persons" (Jeremy Blake) and "Little Drunk, Quiet Floats" (Puddle of Infinity). Additional scene illustrations were created for this film; no real person is depicted, and the demolition scenes are illustrations, not footage of Kodak Park. Narration is synthetic. #Kodak #KodakPark #Rochester #RiseAndFall #Documentary #CorporateCollapse