A visit to the site of the Detroit Brewing Co.
Many of the former
breweries that used to exist in Detroit were demolished after closing. As luck
would have it, the buildings that were used for the Detroit Brewing Company
still stand in the Eastern market area in downtown Detroit. I visited the
buildings, accompanied by my brother-in-law John, for the first time in the
winter of 2001. The current owner took us on a tour of the main building, which
is now used for cold storage. We were allowed to take many photos and in the
following story, we will show some of the areas as they appear now.
Click on the highlighted text to see an image.
The brewery building
The exterior
of the building still appears much as it did during the 1940’s. One thing the
owner pointed out was the top portion of the building was removed at some point
after closing in 1949. You can see the area where the windowsills appear to be
cut in half. The reasons for doing this are unknown. The cornerstone
shows the date the building was first built, as well as the date it was
remodeled after a fire damaged part of the upper floors.
Inside the front doors is an elevator
that was added to the building in the 1950’s. During the years the DBC was
open, there were stairs at this location. On the second floor, near the front of
the building, is the area where the brewing tanks were held. Many of the
original columns are
still in place. If you look close, you can see areas on the far wall where the I-beams
that held the large tanks were cut off after the tanks were removed.
On the third floor, we found this old cart,
sitting on the original wood flooring, which dates back more than 100 years.
Some of the 100 plus year old beams
can be found on the upper levels. A real surprise was finding this door,
which was where the malt was stored.
We were taken down to the basement to the cellars
where the large tanks were located for storing the fermenting beer. The floor
still has depressions in it where the tanks sat. There used to be a tunnel which
led underground to the bottling building across the street, but it was bricked
up after closing.
The bottling building
The building that was used for bottling is still standing,
across the street from the brewery building. The exterior
of this building hasn’t changed much over the years. This photo
shows the building just before prohibition… sometime around 1910. The major
changes involved building a new loading dock area off one side of the structure.
This was done after prohibition in 1933 as seen in this shot.
Many of the windows were bricked in after the brewery closed in 1949. I took my
uncle, Alfred Martz Jr., who used to work there as a teenager in the 1940’s to
see the buildings in January of 2003.
The building is now used as a foods wholesaler. After meeting
the current owner, we walked down the stairs
into the basement and looked around. After the brewery closed in 1949, the
building was used as a meat processing plant. There are still some signs of
this, like the ceiling conveyor used to transport the meat. There isn’t any
indication that this building was part of a brewery, aside from the coolers
in the basement, which were used to store the beer before shipping it out. The
upstairs was also quite different from what it used to look like, as can be seen
in this comparison between this current
picture and this old
picture from the early 1900’s.
If anyone reading this should happen to have any old photos they would like to share of the brewery or it’s workers, please feel free to contact us and we will put them on the website!