Dearborn City Hall Complex

About this property

The Dearborn City Hall Complex is a complex of three government buildings located at 13615 Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, Michigan. The complex includes the 1921 Dearborn City Hall (originally the Springwells Municipal Building), the 1929 Police and Municipal Courts Building, and an office/auditorium concourse addition constructed in 1981. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. The settlement of Springwells, located around what is now the Dearborn City Hall, was first established along the Michigan Central Railroad line in 1837. Although Springwells was assigned a post office, it was not incorporated as a separate political jurisdiction until 1921, when the Village of Springwells was incorporated. That year the village commissioned architect Marcus Burrowes to construct the Springwells Municipal Building, Construction cost just over $200,000 (equivalent to $2.78 million in 2024). Burrowes envisioned the Municipal Building as the first of a complex of connected structures. Although his plan was never completely realized, additional structures were built in the 1920s to make a municipal complex. With the tax base from the Ford River Rouge Complex and associated workers, Springwells rapidly grew into one of Detroit's largest and most prosperous suburbs, and the government complex grew along with it. A few years later the village was incorporated as a city, and in 1925 Springwells changed its name to Fordson. Also in 1925, the Fire Hall and Garage was constructed adjacent to the Municipal Building; the Fire Alarm Building was also constructed around the same time. In 1929, the City of Fordson consolidated with the nearby Village of Dearborn and Dearborn Township to form the City of Dearborn. In the same year, a Signal Bureau Building was added, along with the Police and Municipal Courts Building. The Dearborn City Hall was the seat of power in Dearborn. The first mayor of the consolidated Dearborn was Henry Ford's cousin Clyde M. Ford, who served from 1929 to 1935. Orville L. Hubbard was mayor from 1942 to 1978. In 1979, three of the smaller buildings in the complex—the Fire Hall and Garage, the Fire Alarm Building, and the Signal Bureau Building—were demolished make room for the 1981 concourse addition. The Dearborn City Hall Complex occupies a nearly an entire block along Michigan Avenue near downtown Dearborn. The complex consists of three buildings: the 1921 Dearborn City Hall which faces north on Michigan Avenue, the 1929 Police and Municipal Courts Building which faces west on Maple Street, and the 1981 office, auditorium, and parking structure addition to the southeast, which connects the two other buildings. The site also includes a landscaped public park, a small paved war memorial plaza, and a small surface parking lot.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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