Detroit Masonic Temple

The Detroit Masonic Temple is historically significant as the home of the oldest order of Mason's in Michigan and as a monument to the culmination of the growth of Freemasonry in Michigan. It is architecturally significant as the largest Masonic Temple in the world and as one of the most ornate and structurally complex buildings of its kind ever constructed. It is also significant for its role in the cultural and artistic life of Detroit.

The Detroit Masonic Temple is located about one-half mile north of the central business district to the west of Woodward Avenue, facing Cass Park, a large landscaped city park. Although the area was developed in the late nineteenth century as a middle class residential area of detached single family houses, by the 1920s it was being redeveloped to accommodate large institutional structures and apartment buildings. Today Cass Park houses a large city-owned vocational high school, the Detroit Institute of Technology (the former Kresge World Headquarters listed in the National Register on December 19, 1979), several apartment and office buildings and the Masonic Temple. Remnants of the Victorian residential fabric survive on the side streets around Cass Park.

There has been no new construction in the area since the 1920s. The Masonic Temple was built both as a lodge hall complex for forty-seven fraternal orders and as a civic center for the city of Detroit. As a result, it is comprised of four distinct structures that are unified by a single exterior architectural treatment. Basically, the Temple is composed of the Shrine Club, a ten-story tower, the Ritual Building, a fourteen-story tower, and the Auditorium Building, a long, low, seven-story wing that connects the two towers.

All are flat-roofed structures sheathed in Indiana limestone and unified by the same austere vertical English Gothic architectural treatment. The fourth part of the structure is the vast, three level, subterranean entertainment and recreational complex.