The Hammond Building: Detroit's First Skyscraper and Its 1956 Demolition

The Hammond Building stood on the Fort Street block between Woodward and Griswold in Detroit's Financial District from 1890 to 1956. It rose ten stories — what the Financial District's National Register nomination calls the city's first real highrise office building — 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 fourteen-story steel-frame building designed by Albert Kahn Associated Architects and Engineers and completed in 1959.

The trivia question—"elevator demolished in 1956 building"—almost always lands on the Hammond, and the record adds a twist. The National Register nomination for the Detroit Financial District credits a different neighbor, the Moffat Building at the southwest corner of Griswold and Fort, as the first Detroit building to have an elevator, in 1871 — and the Moffat is gone too. What the Hammond combined was the first-skyscraper claim 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 wrecking crew sixty-six years later.

The site at Fort and Griswold

The 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 worked in the Chicago skyscraper tradition that William Le Baron Jenney's Home Insurance Building of 1885 had set in motion. He brought that 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 to a height no Detroit building had attempted, on a site the Financial District's National Register nomination describes as fronting in three directions — over Woodward Avenue, Griswold Street, and the old City Hall on Campus Martius. Ten stories 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, organized in 1933 with backing from General Motors and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the banking crisis, wanted a headquarters block large enough to consolidate its operations downtown. The bank bought the corner, contracted with 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.