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Does anyone know what this building was? It looks as if it has a lot of heavy machinery and some old vehicles scattered throughout. It is a large industrial building, located at East Jefferson, Iron Street, Wight Street, and Meldrum Street. It is located next to the old Parke & Davis Building.
I thought it might have been Briggs, but that was further up Meldrum.
It says "Something Something Iron Works" on it somewhere.
The building it is next to is a Boydell property, the Iron St Lofts. It was formerly a Parke & Davis facility? I used to live there and had always wondered what it was originally.
Is that grassy strip where the old railway ran?
It was the Detroit Iron Foundry for many years. Ended it's days as Global Metals, as it says over the Iron St. entrance. The train tracks used to run down Wight St., and their remaining shadow under the pavement can actually be seen in the photo posted above.
I worked at Parke Davis from 1968 to 1972 but back then most of those building were occupied... a friend of mine has a business on the corner of Iron & Jefferson...there is a huge building across the street but I don't know what it is...last summer a bunch of artists painted murals on the side of the building facing Iron St. There are several very nice businesses on Iron St. on the right side going towards the River. But on the left side is that huge abandoned building. This is a picture of one of the murals on the building.
Calling PapillonAquatique!!! :D
The Global Metals Corporation sign is very faded. There are no trespassing signs all around it.
Thank you guys for the information! :D
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My grandfather used to work here. I've got an old hourglass type, phone timer with casting sand in it from there. I'll try and take a photo of it.
I used to go through the Iron Street Lofts before it was a lofts building. I'm shocked they managed to build anything in that old building - it was in terrible shape. None of the floors in the east side were usable, there was some sort of industrial waste dumped all over the dirt on the ground floor. Someone had tried putting a penthouse and renovating the top few floors of the south-west corner, overlooking the coast-guard station, but vandals had wrecked it.
As scary as that building was, Global Metals was a lot scarier. Homeless people used to congregate in there, you could push the metal garage door on Iron street up and slide in underneath. You could smell the fires they lit in the winter.
The maps and aerial images show it pretty clearly. The belt line came down beneath Jefferson and immediately turns SW paralleling the river, and it ran for a few blocks down Wight Street in the area of Meldrum and Iron. The "Green" area as was referred to above was an industry lead between the plants, a trailing switch if traveling southbound. You can see the curved face of the building fronting Iron Street which was where the track curved around. This would be a neat little area to develop if it were possible to loft-ize more of the old industrial buildings. Maybe some could be saved in this fashion....but I'm sure some of these are too far gone.