Eastman Chemical was spun off from Eastman Kodak in 1992.
The current issue of Forbes lists the top 100 companies since 1917 and what become of them. It indicated Eastman Chemical is all that remains of what was one of America’s largest companies.
I rode by the Kodak offices in Rochester a few years back and it was sad to see the large parking lots with weeds literally growing up in the expansion joints.
Meanwhile in Kingsport, Eastman Chemical has just completed a glass clad building that allowed employees scattered all over the plant to be in more or less one building. Eastman in Kingsport was always a plant, a utilitarian outpost of Rochester.
The new building is the certain evidence that the”plant utilitarian architectural mandate” from Rochester is dead and gone. That now holds true for all of Kingsport where splendid architectural efforts have been built. The Kodak architectural shackles have been broken.
The plant is divided into several zones and when there is any incident the affected zone is shut down to stop the ordinary traffic to insure the various emergency and security traffic is not impeded. Eastman is a city within a city and has lots of traffic on relatively narrow streets within the all encompassing jungle of pipes and pipes and more pipes and tanks. It is necessary to have employees in the non effected zones to curtail activity for a while to insure the traffic flow is not adversely impeded.
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