Brush Park is a 24 block neighborhood east of Woodward Avenue. Mansions and houses are built in the Late Victorian, Empire and Mansard Roof styles. This area is recognized by the National Register of Historic Places, however many buildings have been demolished due to advanced neglect, decay and structural damage. Brush Park was an area which housed Detroit’s wealthy elites until the area’s decline during the Great Depression. Restoration efforts after the 1990′s eventually led to successful renovations of several Brush Park mansions. New townhouses and apartments were also built in the surrounding area.

This area is generally quiet unless there’s a Tigers baseball game or large scale event downtown. A strange gathering of  large Victorian mansions are unevenly scattered amongst empty lots. Plots of land between houses had more in common with prairie fields as giant fluffy clouds hovered over the landscape like impossible castles in the sky.

Reference

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Somewhere on the west side is this school and it has seen better times. The steady hum of traffic permeates the open windows devoid of glass. Inside is still and timeless as the entire site gradually falls into ruin.

The Bright Center For Continuing Education was formerly known as the Willard School to honor Frances Willard (educator, temperance reformer and women’s suffragist). A dedication plaque inside the building confirms this. This facility closed in the early 2000’s.

Reference

A59-2 Archive

1)The N.B.C building is a seven story fortress like warehouse. This Chicago School style building consists of a concrete structure with a brick facade, and accented by applied masonry. At first the only information available was that it was a bakery before WWII.

After some research a source clarified more details about the building. Apparently the National Biscuit Co. eventually became known as Nabisco during World War I. Quotes from an article by Lu Donnelly for the Young Preservationists Association address the history, function and design of the N.B.C buildings:

(2) “The success of Nabisco’s branding and advertising caused demand to exceed supply and the company launched a building campaign to provide enough bakeries for their popular crackers. The buildings commissioned by now company president Adolphus Green were different from the common manufacturing buildings of the World War I era. Green hired an architect full-time to design factories that would have enough style and dignity to inspire loyalty from the workers and act as shining models of modernity to the communities in which they stood (Cahn, 125). He hired Chicagoan Albert G. Zimmermann (1866-1947) to design the buildings using a soft colored brownish-orange brick with cream-colored brick trim and ranging from three to eleven stories. Zimmermann’s earlier practice had consisted mostly of residences and apartment buildings until his work for Nabisco. His Nabisco designs were featured in the American Architect magazine in both 1912 and 1916.”

Another excerpt from the article indicates when the Detroit N.B.C building was built.

(3) “After the war, between 1918 and 1925 new bakeries were built in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. The new factories had a consistent look, similar reddish brick, multiple stories and stair towers increased the company’s ability to transport products to the grocer and people’s homes. (Cahn, 196)”

N.B.C is located in Detroit’s New Center area and seems to have been abandoned for some time. N.B.C’s close proximity to the railways may have given the company a competitive edge in product distribution to major areas of the American Market.

References
(1) www.emporis.com

(2)(3) Historic Review Commission of Pittsburgh. National Biscuit Company Bakery Historic Nomination, Lu Donnelly for the Young Preservationists Association, Page 3,4

74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:OOPTiGRFGC4J:www.youngpreser…

Sources

The American Architect, “The Buildings of the National Biscuit Company,” by W. F. Wilmoth, Volume 101, June 19, 1912, part 2 number 1904, pp. 270-272.

The American Architect, “Building for the National Biscuit Company,” Volume 109, March 22, 1916, part 1, number 2100.

The Builders’ Bulletin, Volume 1, #37 (Supplement) , May 12, 1917: Building Permit issued “National
Biscuit Co., Owners; Turner Construction Co., Contractors; Foundation, Penn & Lambert St., 12 Ward.”
Other relevant issues 1917-1919.

Cahn, William, Out of the Cracker Barrel: The Nabisco Story From Animal Crackers to Zu Zu’s. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.

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