The Graybar Electric Company Building is located at 55 West Canfield Street in Midtown

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at t ...

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and t ...

. This

warehouse A warehouse is a building for storing goods. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial parks on the outskirts of citie ...

building was rented to the Graybar Electric Company from 1926 into the 1940s.Graybar Electric Company Building
from the city of Detroit It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...

in 1997.

History

The Graybar Electric Company was founded in 1869 in

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S ...

to sell communications equipment to the public. The company was instantly successful and soon

Anson Stager Anson Stager (April 20, 1825 - March 26, 1885) was the co-founder of Western Union, the first president of Western Electric Manufacturing Company and a Union Army officer, where he was head of the Military Telegraph Department during the Ameri ...

, General Superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company bought in and moved the company to

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

. In 1872 the business was incorporated as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. The company grew rapidly after the 1875 invention of the telephone, becoming more involved with manufacturing telephone apparatus, as well continuing to manufacture and distribute a range of electrical equipment. By 1926, Western Electric was so enormous that it spun off a separate entity specifically to handle the distribution of electrical supplies and equipment. This new entity was named

Graybar Graybar is an United States of America, American employee-owned corporation, based in Clayton, Missouri, Clayton, Missouri. It conducts a wholesale distribution business for electrical, communications and data networking products, and is a provi ...

, echoing the company's original 1869 name. The new company was immediately the country's leading wholesaler of electrical supplies and equipment, with 59 distributing houses across the US. This building in Detroit was constructed in 1926 by C.F. Haglin & Sons for the Graybar Electric Company. Haglin leased the building to Graybar, who occupied the building well into the 1940s. The building later was used by the

Detroit Board of Education Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) is a school district that covers all of the city of Detroit, Michigan, United States and high school students in the insular city of Highland Park. The district, which replaced the original Detr ...

as their Audio-Visual Department. In 2000, the building was converted into loft space.

Description

The Graybar Electric Company Building is a three-story, brick and concrete, industrial style building, originally constructed to house offices and warehouse space. The brick front facade is symmetrical, divided into bays by brick piers which rise from a stone string course between the first and second stories. The piers terminate in a stepped parapet, with both parapet and pier tops made from cast stone. The entrance is off center, with garage door openings to one side. Windows on the upper floors are grouped between the piers, with three windows per bay on the inner bays and two windows per bay on the outer bays. Above each outer bay is a cast stone panel bearing a shield.

References

{{National Register of Historic Places in Michigan National Register of Historic Places in Detroit Industrial buildings completed in 1926 Warehouses on the National Register of Historic Places Industrial buildings and structures on the National Register of Historic Places in Michigan Industrial buildings and structures in Detroit