Broadway Avenue Historic District

With its commercial buildings all constructed between the 1890s and the late 1920s, the Broadway Avenue Historic District typifies the evolution of formerly residential areas along the one-time downtown fringes into integral parts of Detroit's central business district and the rapid re-development with more intensive land uses that took place as the city's population exploded in the early twentieth century with the rise of the auto industry. Broadway Avenue served as the center of the 'women's trade' in Detroit for a time in the first decades of the twentieth century, and several buildings within the district survive of those that once housed important shops that catered to that trade. Several of the district's buildings reflect Detroit's German and Jewish history and one, the Breitmeyer or Breitmeyer-Tobin Building, is important for its role as one of the first downtown buildings to rent office space to African American tenants. The Broadway Avenue district's building stock dates from c. 1896-97 to 1925-26 and includes commercial buildings that are both unique today within Detroit's central business district and representative of broader architectural trends within the downtown. The district, like the city's downtown as a whole, is also notable for its distinguished display of architectural terra cotta, used in a majority of the buildings.

The Broadway Avenue Historic District is comprised of eleven commercial buildings located in the block of Broadway Avenue between Gratiot Avenue on the southeast and East Grand River Avenue on the northwest. The district includes seven buildings and a parking lot on the northeast side of the avenue and four buildings on the southwest side at the southeast end of the block. The buildings range in date of construction from c. 1896-97 to 1925-26 and in height from two to eleven stories, with one being two stories in height, six of them three to five stories in height, and four eight to eleven stories in height.