From an auto plant to a grocer distribution center to a recycling center and art park to a residential community, this complex of five industrial buildings near New Center has seen as many transformations as the city itself.
Today, the development known as Dreamtroit is home to 76 apartments and 38,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space, the acclaimed Lincoln Street Art Park and one of the more ambitious adaptive reuse initiatives in the city. But it’s also home to Detroit automotive history.
And that history at Lincoln Street and Holden Avenue began with the Warren Motor Car Co.
‘Dashy roadsters’ and ‘graceful torpedo cars’
Though Detroit is synonymous with the Big Three of Motor City automakers, at the turn of the 20th century, there were nearly 60 car companies in the United States. By 1907, three years before the Warren Motor Car Co. had this facility built, there were more than 240 automobile manufacturing firms in the United States, and by 1917, Detroit had two dozen automakers and 132 auto suppliers alone, employing a combined 137,000 Detroiters.
While this was incredibly impactful to the City of Detroit, it also meant that competition was beyond fierce. Even then, automobiles were not cheap, and there were only so many Americans who could afford to buy one - and only the ultra wealthy bought more than one - and they had plenty of choices to choose from.
It was into this cutthroat world that the Warren Motor Car Co. was born in 1909. Its founder was Homer Warren, a wealthy real estate developer and former Detroit postmaster. It would be this fledgling automaker that had this complex built, with the first pieces opening in 1910. The factory buildings were designed by the Detroit architectural firm Rogers & McFarlane.
"It is almost impossible to estimate the increased valuation of Detroit real estate as the result of the centering of the automobile industry," Homer Warren told the Detroit Free Press for a May 19, 1910, front-page article. "We of today cannot realize fully the miracles that are being wrought by the automobile."
Stockholders of the Warren Motor Car Co. held their first meeting Sept. 15, 1909, and iIts articles of incorporation were filed the next day. Its incorporators included industry men from Michelin tires, Hudson Motor Car Co., Olds Motor Works, the Wilson Body Co., and the Pope-Hartford and Pope-Toledo firms. Homer Warren would serve as the company’s president. The firm was capitalized with $100,000 (about $3.6 million in 2025 valuation, when adjusted for inflation).
"The cars put out will be of the light runabout and touring car tyr (sic), and will be known as the Warren-Detroit," the Detroit Free Press reported Sept. 17, 1909, in announcing the firm’s founding. "The car will be on the market in 1910."
To hit that quick turnaround, and racing against the competition, the upstart company didn’t have time to buy land and erect a factory from the ground-up. Instead, its first home was an existing factory building at what is now 2600 22nd St. on the city’s west side. This two-story brick industrial building still exists today, though it is vacant.
Just nine months after the company was founded, Warren Motor was shipping 12 cars a day and was on pace to hit its annual goal of 1,000 cars by the end of that July. Vehicles were being shipped to Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, New York and Kansas City, and inquiries were coming in from Texas and other states.
"Our car has made a hit wherever it has gone," John G. Bayerline, the automaker’s vice president and general manager, told the Free Press for a June 5, 1910, article. "The automobile-buying public has been quick to realize that the Warren-Detroit '30' is standard construction but more than standard value." Warren Motor offered eight Warren-Detroit models that cost between $1,200 and $1,750 (the equivalent of $42,000 to $62,000 in 2025). By comparison, Ford Motor Co. kept its costs low and quality high by offering just two options of the Model T in 1911, and the cheaper of the two cost half the lowest-priced Warren-Detroit model. And again, there were a lot of competing brands.
Homer Warren set out to set his company apart, saying in an ad in the June 5, 1910, edition of the Detroit Free Press, that it did things differently. "We are a reputable and responsible producing company and a potent factor in Detroit's present and future prosperity," it read, presented as an open letter to the public. "We are not paying tribute for universal ideas abridged to anybody's obsolete methods of motor car construction. We are building good cars and selling them at reasonable prices."
Even before demonstrating success, the company foresaw quickly outgrowing its small temporary quarters. Just months after its founding, the automaker bought 2 acres of land at Holden Avenue and Lincoln Street and what the Detroit Free Press described March 27, 1910, as a "partially erected building" for about $25,000 (about $878,000 in 2025) from the Detroit Column & Manufacturing Co.
On this site, Warren Motor announced it would erect a massive plant designed by the firm Rogers & MacFarlane that would increase its capacity fivefold, to 5,000 cars a year. However, it appears the young company was burning through its initial capital stack too quickly, and those plans - which included a four-story, 600-foot-by-60-foot structure - would be scaled down.
Instead, Rogers & MacFarlane drew up plans for several smaller buildings, the largest of which was 280 feet by 69 feet, and the tallest being two stories and 176 feet by 69.
"This new plant is a tribute to the immediate popularity of the Warren-Detroit ‘Thirty,’ conceded by experts to be one of the highest grade low-priced machines on the market and incidentally it shows what a group of experienced, able, aggressive 'live wires' in the automobile field can accomplish in an incredibly short time," the Detroit Free Press wrote April 3, 1910. "No company ever started on its career with a stronger organization."
It is worth noting that the Warren Motor factory buildings were one of the last jobs that Rogers & MacFarlane would have taken on, as the firm folded the same year the factory opened.
Short-lived success
On Sept. 1, 1910, Warren Motor Car threw a house-warming and dance for employees and dedicated the new factory. Homer Warren opened the party by giving remarks in which he gave his employees credit for the progress the automaker had made in its first year. More than 300 couples attended and two orchestras performed.
A month later, Bayerline announced that the company had increased its capitalization from $100,000 to $300,000, about $10.5 million in 2025 valuation.
At the same time as Warren Motor was getting up and running and building its new home, the sheer flood of options on the market - and Ford Motor’s cheaply priced Model T - was driving down the cost of cars and increasing the demand for cheaper models. In 1907, it was estimated that a third of all cars sold in the country were “less expensive” models. Just 10 years later, that number would increase to about 90 percent of all car sales.
On top of this, Warren Motor was retooling its lineup each year, which came at great cost. Again, using Ford as a comparison, the Model T was produced from 1908 to 1927, and more than 15 million were sold.
In announcing its 1911 models, the company took out an ad that read, "The Warren Motor Car Co. presents eight new models ranging from the dashy gasoline tank roadster to the graceful torpedo car. This enlargement of the Warren-Detroit line is in harmony with its policy of expansion and up-to-dateness. The Warren 1911 policy, as usual, will be to offer a bigger value than any of its competitors. There has been a slight increase in price, but the increase in value is many times that in money."
The public wasn’t buying it - or Warren-Detroits.
On April 23, 1912, the Bosch Magneto Company, one of the automaker’s creditors, filed a petition in federal court for a receiver to be appointed. The court agreed, appointing the Detroit Trust Co. to run the company. Meanwhile, Warren Motor’s board tried to dig the firm out of its financial hole through refinancing and restructuring. It was all for naught. By June 1913, the company had gone bankrupt - less than four years after it was founded.
In summing up the failure of Warren Motor Car, the complex’s 2020 nomination for the National Register of Historic Places says, “Despite the early success and international appeal of Warren automobiles, the Warren Motor Car Co. did not seem to have a firm grasp on the developing automobile market, failed to develop a niche of its own, lacked a coherent marketing and manufacturing plan, and suffered from numerous changes in company management.”
The company’s factory on Holden and Lincoln was auctioned off in the summer of 1913, with the Rands Manufacturing Co. being the winner with a bid of $120,000, about $3.4 million in 2026 valuation.
The world’s biggest auto parts plant
Rands Manufacturing was an auto parts supplier founded by William C. Rands in 1900, who saw the former Warren Motor plant as an opportunity to boost his company’s output. Indeed, with its purchase, "Detroit is to have the largest manufacturing plant for automobile equipment in the world," the Free Press announced June 29, 1913.
The former Warren factory gave Rand three plants, with the other two being located across from each other at Beaubien and East Fort streets. In addition to adding the 73,000-square-foot Warren plant, Rand planned to add new buildings on 2 acres of yet-undeveloped land on its new site. The company made mostly windshields and automobile tops, but said its new facility would allow it to expand into steering wheels, lamp brackets, tire irons and more. What’s more, the company said the new facility would allow it to double its work force of 400 to 500 men.
In June 1916, Rands merged with five other auto parts suppliers - Diamond Manufacturing of Detroit, Diamond Manufacturing of Walkerville, Ontario; Superior Manufacturing of Ann Arbor; Mich.; Universal Metal of Detroit; and Vanguard Manufacturing of Detroit - to form the Motor Products Corp. This new company planned to build what the Detroit Times called on June 5, 1916, “an immense plant in Detroit to replace four of the present factory buildings” as well as a new factory in Walkerville, Ontario, and an enlargement of the plant in Ann Arbor. This new mega corporation was capitalized at $10 million - the equivalent of more than $300 million in 2025. William Rands headed the new company.
The news "stirred the motor world," the Detroit Times reported Sept. 7, 1916. The Detroit News wrote Sept. 17, 1916, that the merger "is the most unique recent organization in the automobile industry. ... It is not a holding company which will operate five or six different plants, but rather a working organization which will take over the business of its predecessors and operate them under one management."
By moving all the Detroit factories under one roof, the new company dramatically slashed costs and overhead. It made hub caps, radiator parts, tubing, exhaust tubes, muffler pipes, molding for auto bodies, windshields, clutch cones, curtain carriers and more. It also could make custom die work and stamping.
Instead of building new, however, it was announced on Sept. 6, 1916, that a factory swap would see the Motor Products Co. acquire the 250,000-square-foot Lozier Motor Co. factory - designed by Albert Kahn in 1910 - on Mack Avenue and all its land holdings for $1 million. The property encompassed 62 acres, only 15 of which were covered by factory buildings, so Motor Products Co. had plenty of room to expand. Lozier had filed for bankruptcy in 19XX and been bought out by the Frank brothers, who were seeking to restructure and downsize the company in order to keep it solvent. Having more space than it needed - and more overhead costs than it could afford - the deal was a major win for both sides. As part of the deal, Lozier would relocate into the smaller former Warren Motor plant on Holden Street. The Flint Daily Journal reported Sept. 8, 1916, that "the new plant has the same amount of factory floor space as the present plant occupied by the Lozier." Motor Products moved into the Mack Avenue plant and started production on Sept. 16 of that year, and Lozier took over its new home around the same time.
The luxurious Lozier
In the early 1880s, Henry A. Lozier Sr. founded the Lozier Manufacturing Co., with the Cleveland Bicycle being its most successful product. In 1897, he sold the bicycle business to the American Bicycle Co. for $4 million, or an inflation-adjusted $157.3 million in 2025 - a wise move considering the bottom dropped out of the market shortly thereafter. Lozier took his newfound fortune to Plattsburg, N.Y., where three years later, he began producing marine engines, but it wasn’t long before he got into making automobiles.
Lozier died May 25, 1903, at age 57, and his son, Henry A. Lozier Jr., took over. Under his leadership, the company would seek to design “a better Mercedes,” and they found quick success. The trouble was, the Plattsburg plant had a capacity of only about 600 cars a year. In 1909, a group of Detroit businessmen approached him about moving to the Motor City and taking on Packard in the luxury market. They made the case that there was more skilled labor, easier and cheaper access to parts, and better steel to be had.
They moved into the Kahn-designed plant in February 1910, and two years later, the automaker introduced 24-carat gold striping and crowned fenders. The result was one of the most stylish but expensive cars on the market in the U.S. However, with more competition and increased desire for cheaper makes, Lozier’s business plummeted. The final nail in the company’s coffin was when, in May 1914, Lozier introduced a four-cylinder model that could outperform the popular four-cylinder Cadillac. The trouble was, just a few months later, Cadillac introduced its first V8, the 1914 Cadillac Type 51.
Creditors began demanding that the court step in and appoint a receiver. On Sept. 23, 1914, U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Tuttle did so, tapping Detroit Trust Co. for the role. He also ordered that Lozier be shut down while the issues were sorted. Just three years after its peak, Lozier filed for bankruptcy.
All of Lozier's assets were auctioned off at a bankruptcy sale on Feb. 4, 1915, at the Federal Building. This included the previously mentioned Detroit plant later acquired by Motor Products, as well as a plant in Plattsburg, N.Y. On Feb. 7, 1915, the company's assets were sold to a partnership called the Associated Lozier Purchasers - comprised of Charles Shongood of New York; Theodore Friedeberg of New York; brothers Samuel Frank and Harry Frank of Detroit; and the Harris Brothers Co. of Chicago - for $1 million, about $33 million in 2026 valuation. This included all of the company's equipment, patents, trade names and holdings - spread across Detroit; Plattsburg, N.Y.; San Francisco; Chicago; Philadelphia; Long Island, N.Y.; and Westchester, N.Y.. The assets had been estimated at $4 million, about $132 million in 2026 value, so the partnership got them for only a quarter of value.
The automaker's creditors received about 30 percent of their claims.
The purchasers reorganized the business and looked to keep it going, hoping that the Lozier’s luxurious reputation would lead to a revival under their cost-cutting moves, such as the moving into the former Warren Motor plant on Lincoln. But even that move wasn’t enough to stanch the bleeding, and in August 1917, Lozier sold the Lincoln Street plant to Lincoln Motor Car Co. founder Henry Leland, less than a year after Lozier had moved in.
In the end, Lozier’s new owners wouldn’t be successful, and production was ended in 1918. Over its 13 years of existence, from 1905 to 1918, there were only about 3,570 Lozier cars produced.
Honest Hank’s Lincoln
The former Warren Motor plant’s most famous tenants was Lincoln Motor Co., one of America’s most famous car brands.
The company was founded by Henry Leland, who also established the Cadillac Automobile Co., making him one of the biggest legends among Detroit auto men. He was born Feb. 16, 1843, on a farm in Barton, Vt., and spent his early years working for various manufacturers, honing his skills with metal and machines that would be crucial to his founding of the car companies. In 1890, Leland moved to Detroit to open the Leland & Faulconer Co. machine shop specializing in precision tooling. Years later, the shareholders of the Henry Ford Co. - forerunner of Ford Motor Co. - hired him to serve as an adviser in rooting out problems that the then-struggling company was having.
“Seeing an opportunity, Leland suggested that, rather than liquidating the company, the stockholders change the name of the company and manufacture automobiles utilizing an engine that Leland had designed for the Olds Motor Works that was never deployed by that firm,” the National Register of Historic Places nomination form for Dreamtroit says.
Much to Henry Ford’s chagrin, the stockholders backed Leland’s plan in 1902, and the Cadillac Automobile Co. was born. Leland & Faulconer made the engines for Cadillac utilizing interchangeable parts - a game-changer compared to the expensive custom parts unique to vehicles up to this point - and also came up with prototype models for the new automaker.
Two years later, in 1904, Leland & Faulkner merged with the Cadillac Automobile Co. to form the Cadillac Motor Car Co., and Leland was put in charge. But just five years later, Cadillac was sold for $4.5 million - about $164 million in 2025 valuation - to General Motors, which was compiling a number of smaller automakers into a giant company. Leland would remain at GM, and was credited with introducing the first mass-produced car with a V8 engine - that 1914 Cadillac Type 51 that helped put Lozier out of business.
On April 6, 1917, the U.S. entered World War I. GM head William “Billy” Durant refused to convert his factories over to war production, so Leland and his son, Wilfred Leland, quit, citing their patriotic duty. Four months later, in August 1917, the Lelands established the Lincoln Motor Co., named in honor of Henry Leland’s hero, President Abraham Lincoln, and continuing the patriotic inspiration for starting the firm. The father-and-son duo hit the ground running, buying the former Warren Motor plant and inked a contract with Uncle Sam to produce Liberty aircraft engines - all in the same month of its founding. Lincoln would be joined by Buick, Ford, Cadillac, Marmon and Packard to pump out a combined 20,478 engines.
The first Liberty engine prototype was made at the factory on Holden Street.
Lincoln was contractually obligated to make 6,000 Liberty engines, which it accomplished in just eight months. However, that requirement was increased, and Lincoln’s factory on Holden was not going to cut it. In September 1917 - just a month after the company was established and moved into its plant - the Lelands bought land at West Warren and Livernois avenues and broke ground on a 600,000-square-foot factory. On Nov. 7, 1917, 500 carpenters building the new Lincoln plant went on strike over pay. Lincoln expected the strikers to return to work the following day as a settlement was being negotiated to bring the issue to a close. The factory would be completed - despite the war diminishing the labor and building supplies available - in February 1918, but work began in the unfinished factory in late 1917 because of wartime urgency.
For instance, every department at the Lincoln plant worked through New Year's Day 1918. Henry Leland posted a notice around the factory that read, "We are at war. We, as a nation, are in a most desperate state of unpreparedness. The war cannot be won without the essential equipment of a modern successful Army. Aeroplane engines are one of those essentials. Those who are fighting these battles for us are not limited to hours, holy days or holidays. Constantly day and night they face death. Every day's delay means 6,000 lives of our noble boys, the patriots of our country and of our allies. It also means each day the loss of hundreds of millions of wealth, represented in equipment. Hence, every house, every minute, of unnecessary delay is a crime - real treason - toward those who are fronting these dangers and who patiently are enduring these hardships for you and for each of us. ... Our job, to help end the war, is to make motors for airplanes. We have really accomplished nothing until we are turning out motors in quantities."
Trouble for the noble patriot
Key to Lincoln’s story, however, was that the company was organized with a cost of $10 million fronted by the U.S. government - about $256.4 million in 2025 inflation-adjusted money. Following its completion, the Holden Street location was still used for machining operations, as it was only about 3 miles east of the company’s new factory. With millions of men heading overseas to fight in World War I, Lincoln hired women to work at the Holden factory.
The end of World War I in 1918 was good for just about everyone but the Lelands, though they . The end of the war meant no more government war contracts — and the factory had only been completed that same year. Leland bought the plant from Uncle Sam at 55 percent of its initial cost and decided to get back into the luxury car business. But a short recession came in the war’s wake — never good for luxury car brands - as did an erroneous tax bill of $4.5 million, about $82.7 million in 2025 valuation. On top of all this, the government investigated the factory deal and found the Lelands guilty of fraud. The trouble was that they did not take into account that the buildings and equipment were purchased at inflated wartime prices, and that much of the equipment was so specialized for aircraft engines that it was essentially useless for making automobiles. The Lelands challenged and succeeded in getting their bill from Uncle Sam reduced to $500,000 - but by then, the fledgling automaker had been permanently crippled and was sent into receivership in November 1921.
A few months later, on Feb. 4, 1922, Henry Ford bought Lincoln for about $8 million — the equivalent of $115 million today — in order to expand his reach into the luxury car market. Some say, as a bonus, it was a way to exact payback against the man who had forced him out of the Henry Ford Co. two decades earlier, but there is no evidence of the auto tycoon reveling in any kind of revenge. Ford would hire Kahn to expand the Lincoln plant to 1 million square feet after acquiring the company.
The Lelands thought they would be in charge of the Lincoln division on behalf of Ford Motor, but they were wrong. Just four months later, Wilfred Leland was escorted from the plant, and his father resigned in protest.
Meanwhile, Ford had also acquired Lincoln’s Holden Street factory, and retrofitted it to manufacture two-door Model Ts starting April 1, 1923. It is believed that Ford shut down the plant around the same time it shut down production of Model Ts, in May 1927.
Next in assembly line
Following Ford Motor Co.’s run, it is believed that the Holden Street factory was taken over by Dietrich Inc., an auto design and manufacturing firm founded by Raymond Dietrich in 1925. Dietrich did not appear to stay long in the facility, however, possibly only two years.
In addition to doing custom body work for Lincoln Motors, Dietrich also supplied Packard Motors. According to the National Register of Historic Places nomination form for the Holden Street plant, “Raymond Dietrich’s designs were credited with perpetuating the elegance of brands such as Cadillac, Lincoln, Pierce-Arrow and Packard.”
The factory was then acquired by Dallas E. Winslow, who owned car dealerships, washing machine and refrigeration firms and an auto parts supplier. After he acquired the stock of Durant auto parts after that carmaker went out of business in 1931, he is believed to have moved those parts to the Holden Street factory, where he also serviced Durant and Star vehicles. According to the National Register nomination form, it is also possible that Winslow relocated his Copeland Refrigeration Corp and Trupar Manufacturing Co. — which made Mayflower brand fridges — into the factory on Holden in 1934.
The rest of the story coming soon ...