The Roosevelt Warehouse, more commonly known as the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, is a building on 14th & Marantette Street in

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 ...

. It is understood to have been designed by Albert Kahn and that it was originally a

Post Office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional se ...

before being used as the Public Schools' surplus equipment depository. It is currently owned by

Ford Motor Company Ford Motor Company (commonly known as Ford) is an American multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, United States. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. The company sells automobi ...

who renovated it, as part of its new Michigan Central Mobility Innovation District into a innovation center. Major tenants signed to move into the building include New Lab, a multi-disciplinary technology company.

History

The building caught fire in 1987. The fire and efforts to extinguish it heavily damaged much of the supplies inside, which included science and sports equipment, scissors, crayons, and books, many still unused and in their original wrapping. After the fire the building was abandoned, along with all of its contents. The reason why the building's contents were not salvaged by Detroit Public Schools is unknown. Over the years of abandonment, the building and its contents were heavily vandalized and further damaged by

scrap Scrap consists of recyclable materials, usually metals, left over from product manufacturing and consumption, such as parts of vehicles, building supplies, and surplus materials. Unlike waste, scrap has monetary value, especially recovered m ...

pers. In 2009 a frozen human

corpse A cadaver or corpse is a dead human body that is used by medical students, physicians and other scientists to study anatomy, identify disease sites, determine causes of death, and provide tissue to repair a defect in a living human being. Stud ...

was found in the basement in a lift-shaft. It took 24 hours before the authorities attended to the scene. Previously easy to enter, the building was then boarded up. The contents of the warehouse were removed over the summer of 2012 in preparation for possible conversion into a parking garage. In 2018, both the warehouse and the Michigan Central Station were purchased by the Ford Motor Company. In 2021, it was announced that New Lab would be the first major tenent in the building.

References

External links

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The book depository at Detroiturbex.com

A video tour of the warehouse soon after the body was found in the elevator shaft
{{Ford Motor Company Corktown, Detroit Ford Motor Company facilities Mill architecture