Graybar Electric Company Building

The warehouse building at 55 West Canfield is historically significant as it was originally occupied by the Graybar Electric Company, the nation's largest independent electrical and telecommunications distributor, from 1926 into the 1940s. Elisha Gray, a physics professor and inventor of telegraphic equipment, and Enos Barton, an employee of a large telegraph company in Rochester, New York, founded the company in 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio. The business continually grew from a small business with the goal of bringing new communications equipment to public use in the late 1800s into an enormous distribution company, which by 1926 had fifty-nine distributing houses in important cities across the nation, including Detroit, Michigan. The Graybar Electric Company was also a pioneer in business practices, as they were the first large business purchased by their employees in 1929. The company has continued to expand and remains a successful company today. The Graybar Electric Company Building contributes to the Multiple Resource Nomination of the Cass Farm Survey Area within the context of Commerce.

The Graybar Electric Company Building is a large three story, brick and concrete, industrial style building with reinforced concrete frame located on the south side of West Canfield in Detroit, Michigan. The asymmetrical brick facade, featuring pilasters, a stone string course and cast stone details, turns the corner on the east side and covers the first bay. The side and rear elevations are utilitarian in design. The three story Graybar Electric Company Building was originally constructed as offices and stores. Its design is industrial in nature: the front of the brick building serves as an architecturally pleasing front piece to an otherwise utilitarian structure, as evidenced on the side and rear elevations. The symmetrical facade is divided vertically by buttress piers which originate at a stylized, denticulated string course between the first and second stories. The buttress piers then rise through the upper two stories, terminating below a stepped parapet wall. The tops of the buttress piers and the parapet wall are of cast stone. The simple, classically framed entrance is off center; to its right are three garage door openings. The window configuration on the upper two stories, from east to west along West Canfield, is 2-3-3-3-2. The windows are grouped between pilasters. Above each side bay on the front facade is a cast stone panel bearing a shield. A blind rectangular panel occupies the area below the central rise of the parapet wall. The east elevation contains large banks of industrial steel sash with reinforced concrete framing. The reinforced concrete frame of the west elevation is filled in with brick. A steel water tower with an elliptical bottom tank is located on top of this building and is a neighborhood landmark.