STATEMENT OF HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
The Workers Row House is a three-unit, two-story, balloon frame row house with clapboard siding. It was built in 1849 and it still stands on its original site.
Significant for five primary reasons:
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Very few mid-nineteenth-century buildings still stand in Detroit, especially on their original site.
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The other extant structures are larger grand single family homes whereas this house is a modest working-class house that has not been modified in any major way.
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The Row House has survived as a row of attached single-family homes even when other similar houses built in the neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth century have been demolished.
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Much is known about the Andrews family who owned the property when the Row House was built.
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The Tenants over time illustrate Detroit’s economic transition from a commercial town to a major industrial city.
Furthermore;
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The Workers Row House represents a type of working-class housing fairly common to nineteenth-century Detroit that has completely disappeared.
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Just as important as the House, is the fact that the House’s past tenants and their stories represent the history of working-class residential Detroit.
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We know the names, origin of birth, age, education and type of work of many tenants from the years 1850-1924.
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In a nation of immigrants there is not a more significant historic site than a tenement
“Come and walk in the foot-steps of the courageous ordinary”
- Ruth Abrams, Founder of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, NYC.