Dry Dock Engine Works-Detroit Dry Dock Company Complex

The Detroit Dry Dock Company/Dry Dock Engine Works complex meets national register criterion A for its long history in relation to Detroit and Great Lakes - and even national and international - maritime history as a ship repair and outfitting facility and manufacturer of marine propulsion systems. The existing Dry Dock Engine Works complex is important for its history from the early 1890s to the mid-1920s of building engines for Great Lakes and ocean shipping, including the engines of the largest sidewheel steamers of the early twentieth century. The engine works are also notable under criterion B for their association with Frank E. Kirby, a nationally and internationally recognized naval architect known especially for his innovations in icebreaking technology and for his Great Lakes and east coast sidewheel steamers that, built over a fifty-year career, included the largest sidewheel steamers ever built. Kirby's direct association with the engine works complex is that he designed propulsion systems built at the engine works, including the engines that powered the 1924 Greater Detroit and Greater Buffalo, the two largest and most powerful sidewheel steamers ever built. Built between 1892 and about 1920, the engine works complex is also significant under criterion C as a showcase of the evolution of American factory construction methods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Particularly notable from an engineering standpoint are the 1892 machine shop and 1902-03 loft buildings. The machine shop (Building A) is historically significant for its steel structural framing system that, designed by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company, was likely one of the first uses of steel framing in a Detroit industrial plant. The 1902-03 loft building (Building E) is also important from an engineering standpoint for its innovative structural system in which the two upper stories are suspended from the roof trusses so that the ground story can be left free of interior support columns. The two dry docks of the Detroit Dry Dock Company meet criterion D for their potential to provide information about the history and technology of dry dock construction and ship outfitting and repair in Detroit and the Great Lakes region during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They and another dry dock in Bay City are the only wooden dry dock structures known to still exist in Michigan. Dry Dock #1, apparently constructed ca. 1855-57, is the oldest of these survivors, and Dry Dock #2 was the largest on the Great Lakes at a length of 375 feet when it was built in 1890-91.

The Dry Dock Engine Works/Detroit Dry Dock Company complex consists of two related late nineteenth and early twentieth-century shipbuilding facilities: the Dry Dock Engine Works, and across Atwater Street and adjacent to the Detroit River, the two dry docks that survive at the site of the Detroit Dry Dock Company shipyard. The Dry Dock Engine Works consists of a rectangular block of six connected steel frame brick-wall buildings. The Engine Works' tallest and earliest structure is three stories tall, and is supported by a steel frame with non-load-bearing brick exterior walls. The remaining five buildings reflect 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. Most of the various roofs of the interconnected buildings have light monitors to allow for additional daylight into the structures. The various roofs range from a slight pitch to flat. The structures sit on concrete and brick foundations, and do not have basements. To the south of Atwater Street the two dry docks stand within Tri-Centennial State Park. To the west is Dry Dock #2, now a mooring slip that forms an inlet off the Detroit River. Dry Dock #1 is located east of #2 and just west of a low modern office/restroom building that itself stands just to the west of the marina's west pier. It survives but has been filled in since the 1930s so that nothing is visible.