George, Edwin S., Building

The George or Garfield Building's history relates to the early twentieth-century industrial/commercial development of the part of Woodward Avenue between Grand Circus Park and the Cultural Center, of which this building was an early and large-scale embodiment; to Edwin S. George, who was a prime mover in the development of this then residential/institutional area of Woodward and of whose investment properties this building appears to be the most important survivor; to the development of Detroit as the auto-manufacturing center, in that the building housed in its early days various auto-parts manufacturers and suppliers and was an early part of the auto-related development of the main street of the Motor City; and to reinforced-concrete construction pioneer Albert Kahn, whose firm designed both the original and added sections.

The Garfield Building is a five-story, reinforced-concrete frame building. It is located at the northeast corner of Woodward Avenue and Garfield Street. The west (primary) and south elevations are clad in white, glazed terra cotta. The concrete structure and brick knee walls are exposed at the east and north elevations giving it the appearance of an industrial building at these elevations. Windows fill the openings between the beams and columns of the concrete structure at all elevations, except the north, where the openings are filled with brick, with only a few windows. The first floor was divided into sections for use by small commercial businesses. The upper floors were each divided in half by a north-south corridor and further divided into smaller spaces to accommodate a mixture of office and manufacturing uses. The building was constructed in two phases. The first two floors were constructed in 1908, the upper three floors in 1914. The Garfield Building is a decorated version of the plain industrial structures that were the forte of Albert Kahn, its architect. It has a flat roof and relatively slender structural members that create large openings which are filled with windows. The building is a nearly square parallelogram with dimensions of 92 feet by 140 feet. The long dimension is oriented north/south and is located on the east side of Woodward Avenue. The building is not square because it follows the lines of Woodward Avenue and Garfield Street. They are not perpendicular to each other, a characteristic common to most cross streets at Woodward, because Woodward does not run true north and south and the cross streets do.