Vinton Building

The Vinton Building is significant for its historic association with one of Detroit's oldest and most important building firms, founded in 1858 by Warren A. Vinton. Built for Robert K. Vinton, grandson of the firm's founder, the Vinton Building has architectural significance as the work of noted architect Albert Kahn, and as a notable example of the eclectic, steel-frame office buildings of the early twentieth century.

Warren A. Vinton established a carpentry business on Detroit's lower east side in 1858. Since Detroit remained a city of wooden buildings until late in the century, Vinton's first commissions were residences and frame business blocks. Beginning in 1868, however, Vinton's firm began receiving commissions for larger institutional structures: the Detroit Opera House (1869), the City Hall (1871), and religious structures such as the Woodward Avenue Baptist Church and the First Congregational Church (both now listed in the National Register).

In 1895 the elder Vinton turned over active management of the firm to his son Guy Jay Vinton. Vinton expanded the firm's operations to general contracting, equipping the company to handle even the biggest jobs. Vinton's company comprised eleven complete departments, permitting the firm to undertake the entire work of any contract, from turning the first sod to the decorating and furnishing of the completed structure. The Vinton Company factory, located at Woodridge and Beaubien streets, occupied an entire block and by 1910 had a work force numbering nearly fifteen hundred employees.

Albert Kahn began his association with Vinton when the firm built his Palms Apartment Building in 1902 and the Belle Isle Horticultural and Aquarium structures two years later. Between 1905 and 1915, Vinton served as the principal building contractor both for Kahn's early factory commissions (the Packard, Hudson, Hupp and Chalmers motor car factories) and for several of Kahn's downtown Detroit structures: the Grinnell Brothers Music Building, the Detroit Free Press Building, Detroit Trust Building, and the Detroit Athletic Club. While Kahn pioneered in the use of reinforced concrete in his automobile plants, he sensed that concrete was an expensive and inappropriate building material for high-rise commercial structures. Beginning with the 1908 Grinnell Building, Kahn began experimentation with architectural terra cotta on his commercial designs, using it for spandrels and other trim items.

In 1916 Robert K. Vinton commissioned Kahn to plan a high-rise commercial structure on Woodward Avenue at Congress. When completed in April, 1917, the Vinton Building was then downtown Detroit's tallest office structure.

600 Woodward - Vinton Building - Steel-frame twelve-story building faced in light grey glazed brick with terra cotta details (1917). Albert Kahn, Inc., architect. George A. Fuller Co., contractor. Already listed in the National Register. The building stands at the northwest corner of Woodward and Congress and fills out its lot. The two street-facing facades are treated alike, with narrow vertical piers separating banks of single double-hung windows that fill most of those facades. The facades display an Arts-and-Crafts-influenced Commercial Style feeling, but with a modicum of Romanesque-inspired detailing. Terra-cotta spandrel panels contain foliage ornament set in a central lozenge outlined by triangles. The upper row of windows has arched heads. Attenuated twisted columns outlining the façade’s edges run up to a shallow gabled treatment with an arcaded cornice above a rosette-decorated frieze. The Vinton name is displayed at the gable-shaped parapet. The roof is flat with the exception of an elevator penthouse and separate equipment storage shed. The alley facade is faced in common brick. The storefront was recently refurbished to something closer to its historic appearance than the former enameled metal panel one. Robert K. Vinton, secretary-treasurer of the Vinton Company, general contractors, commissioned the building. The Vinton Company was then Detroit’s oldest building firm, founded in 1858 by Walter A. Vinton, Robert’s grandfather. The Vinton Company initially had its offices on the eleventh floor of the office building. The Guaranty Trust Company bought the building by 1925 and by the end of the decade occupied the first and second stories. The bank was a casualty of the 1933 bank holiday (Vinton Building historic district study committee report).