Dry Dock Engine Works, 1801 Atwater Street, Detroit, Wayne County, MI

Significance: The Dry Dock Engine Works is significance, first of all, because of its role in manufacturing and repairing marine steam engines and boilers for Great Lakes freighters and passenger vessels from 1867 until the mid-1920s. Secondly, it is significant as a showcase of the evolution of American factory construction methods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The six extant buildings that make up the Dry Dock Engine Works complex were erected between 1892 and 1919. The first of these, a machine shop, was designed and built by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company of East Berlin, Connecticut, and is an early example of an industrial structure entirely supported by a steel frame with brick curtain walls. The remaining five buildings (a foundry, an industrial loft building, an addition to the machine shop, a chipping room, and a shipping and receiving space) were built between 1902 and 1919 and show the evolution of steel-frame construction as riveted connections became welded, solid webs gave way to lattice webs, and builders began to use reinforced concrete.
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N942
Survey number: HAER MI-330
Building/structure dates: 1892-1919 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: 1892-1919 Initial Construction