Griswold Street: The Wall Street of Detroit

Griswold Street: The Wall Street of Detroit

How a single downtown street became the financial engine of a Midwest industrial capital, and one of the finest collections of early American skyscrapers.

Walk down Griswold Street in downtown Detroit today, and you pass beneath a wall of early twentieth-century skyscrapers, terra cotta cornices, arched windows, and carved stone entrances stacked one after another for blocks. It is easy to admire the architecture and miss the reason it is all clustered here: for roughly a century, Griswold Street was, quite literally, Detroit’s Wall Street, and the buildings still standing are the physical record of that history.

From Riverfront Fort to Banking Row

The ground beneath Griswold Street has been central to Detroit since the city’s founding. Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church, one of the first buildings constructed in Detroit, was built in 1701 near the corner of Jefferson and Griswold, inside the stockade that Fort Pontchartrain.  Later a new fort was built near the intersection of Fort Street and Shelby Street. After the fort was demolished in 1827 and the streets platted in the grid pattern that survives today, banking arrived quickly. The Bank of Michigan built its first headquarters near Jefferson and Woodward in 1831, and a cluster of new banks followed through the 1840s. By the 1850s, that commercial and banking activity had pushed north up Griswold itself, and in 1858 a Federal Building rose at the corner of Griswold and Larned, pulling substantial new office construction into the surrounding blocks.

“The Wall Street of Detroit”

By 1884, the pattern was unmistakable enough that Detroit historian Silas Farmer gave Griswold its lasting nickname: “the Wall Street of Detroit.” The label was not a stretch. By 1899, 22 of the city’s 23 banks were located within what is now the Financial District, and 20 of them sat directly on Griswold, with nearly every substantial office building near the Federal Building keeping at least one bank on its ground floor. That concentration of capital set the stage for what came next: as Detroit’s auto-driven economy boomed in the early twentieth century, Griswold’s low-rise banking row gave way to something taller.

The Skyscraper Boom

Detroit’s first skyscraper, the ten-story Hammond Building at 632 Griswold, opened in 1889 (demolished in 1956; Chase Tower – The Qube -now stands on the site). It followed a design revolution that began in Chicago four years earlier, when architect William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building introduced the steel frame that let buildings climb far higher than masonry alone could support. In 1896, Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler codified the look that would define the era: a grand ground-floor entrance, uniform office floors stacked above, and a decorative cornice capping the composition, a template drawn from Italian Renaissance architecture.

Griswold Street embraced that template and then complicated it. Through the 1910s and 1920s, Detroit architects solved the light-and-air problem – with no air conditioning readily available for skyscrapers – with distinctive U, L, and H-shaped floor plans – and other shapes too. They were common enough to earn the buildings a nickname of their own: the “alphabet buildings.”

The pace of construction was extraordinary. The thirteen-story original Penobscot Building rose on Fort Street in 1905, followed by the eighteen-story Ford Building in 1907-08 and the twenty-three-story Dime Building (now Chrysler House) in 1912. The 1920s brought the district’s two most famous towers: the 40-story Guardian Building, an Art Deco showpiece now a National Historic Landmark, and the 47-story Greater Penobscot Building, completed in 1928 as the world’s eighth-tallest building. It was Detroit’s tallest for about 50 years – until 1977.

A District Frozen, Then Preserved

The Great Depression halted construction almost overnight, and Griswold’s skyline changed little until the late 1940s, when a Federal Reserve Bank annex went up, followed by a National Bank of Detroit Building in 1959 and a handful of Cold War-era towers in the early 1960s. The result was a neighborhood built out in two distinct bursts, separated by decades of depression and war.

That architectural time capsule is largely why the area was listed in 2009 on the National Register of Historic Places. The historic district encompasses 36 buildings, 33 of them historically contributing, designed by architects including Albert Kahn, D. H. Burnham & Company, and Minoru Yamasaki, who reportedly used his One Woodward Avenue building here as a model for his later work on the World Trade Center, the former Twin Towers. Eighteen of the buildings originally housed banks or financial institutions outright, and the American Institute of Architects calls it one of Detroit’s highest concentrations of quality commercial architecture.

Why the Street Still Matters

Griswold Street’s buildings are more than a backdrop for a downtown walk; they are a legible record of how Detroit’s money, and its architectural ambition, concentrated on a few blocks for the better part of a century, from a riverfront fort site to a nineteenth-century banking row to a skyline of Jazz Age towers built on auto industry wealth. The Guardian Building and Chrysler House remain mostly office space today, and the People Mover and QLine both still run past buildings whose bones date to the late 1800s and early 1900s. Few American cities can walk visitors through that much continuous financial history on a single street, and fewer still have kept the buildings standing to prove it.

Sources: Rod Arroyo, FAICP, “Early Skyscrapers in Detroit: The Alphabet Buildings,” City-Photos.com; Financial District, Detroit, drawing on National Register of Historic Places documentation; City of Detroit, detroitmi.gov.