The Hammond Building: Detroit's First Skyscraper, the First Passenger Elevator, and Why It Was Demolished in 1956

The Hammond Building stood at the southeast corner of Fort and Griswold streets in Detroit's Financial District from 1890 to 1956. It rose ten stories on a steel skeleton, carried the city's first passenger elevator, and was the first building in Detroit that anyone called a skyscraper. A wrecking crew brought it down in the spring and summer of 1956 to clear the block for the National Bank of Detroit Building, a twenty-six-story slab designed by Albert Kahn Associates and Smith, Hinchman and Grylls and completed in 1959.

The trivia question—"elevator demolished in 1956 building"—almost always refers to the Hammond. No other Detroit building of that vintage combined the first-skyscraper claim, an early Otis passenger car, and a mid-century demolition for a downtown bank tower. This post answers the question in full, with the dates, the architect, the address, the structural facts, and the chain of events that led from the ribbon-cutting in 1890 to the dynamite charges sixty-six years later.

The site at Fort and Griswold

The southeast corner of Fort and Griswold sat at the spine of nineteenth-century Detroit commerce. Griswold Street ran north from the river through the heart of the banking district. Fort Street carried the federal building, the post office, and the city's better hotels. The corner had held a four-story stone block, the older Hammond Block, owned by the lumber and shipping merchant George H. Hammond, who made his fortune supplying refrigerated railcars to the dressed-beef trade. Hammond died in 1886. His widow, Ellen Berry Hammond, and his estate financed the new building as both income property and monument.

The Hammond estate selected George H. Edbrooke of Chicago as the architect. Edbrooke had trained in the office of William Le Baron Jenney, whose Home Insurance Building of 1885 is conventionally credited as the first skeleton-frame skyscraper. Edbrooke brought the Jenney method east. Ground was broken in 1889. The building opened in 1890. Local newspapers, including the Detroit Free Press, ran columns on the elevators, the height, and the speed of construction. Silas Farmer, the city historian, recorded the moment in his 1890 supplement: Detroit had its first true skyscraper.

What was new about the building

The Hammond Building rose on a steel frame, not on bearing masonry. The exterior brick and stone hung from the steel as a curtain wall rather than carrying the load. Otis elevators ran in a central core, and one of them was the first passenger lift in any Detroit building. The arrangement was new to the city in 1890, and the building drew sightseers for years afterward.

For a survey of the buildings that followed in the Financial District, see our entries on the Guardian Building and the Penobscot Building. Both rose within a quarter mile of the Hammond and reflect the next generation of Detroit skyscrapers, in which the steel skeleton became routine and the architectural conversation moved on to ornament, height, and color.

The 1956 demolition

By the early 1950s the Hammond was sixty years old and tired. The National Bank of Detroit, formed from the 1933 merger of several local banks, wanted a headquarters block large enough to consolidate its operations downtown. The bank bought the corner, contracted with Albert Kahn Associates and Smith, Hinchman and Grylls for a new building, and brought the wrecking crew in 1956. The new NBD tower opened in 1959.

If you photograph downtown Detroit and want the corner where the Hammond once stood, see our page on architecture photography or book a session through our booking page.