12160 Cloverdale Street
LeRoy Steel Fabricating Company, Commercial Contracting Corporation
This structure is on the city’s teardown list…
…and for once, I don’t think anyone can argue about whether or not that’s the best course of action moving forward. However, it’s a reminder of the hypocrisy presented by the city. But we’ll get into that later. For now, let’s chat about history.
I believe that 12160 Cloverdale Street was constructed in the early 1940s. It exists on an industrial stretch of Cloverdale surrounded by neighborhoods. Today, 96 runs just east of it; however, when it was built, it wouldn’t be there for a few more decades.
An advert in the Detroit Free Press in 1945 lists the address as the LeRoy Steel Fabricating Company. They fabricated steel joists, trusses, and stock bins. Their ads claimed they did ‘structural steel work of all kinds.’ The ads in the paper were frequent until March 1947, when they stopped abruptly.
By 1954, the structure was being utilized by the Commercial Contracting Corporation, whose president was A. D. Beveridge. That same year, Jimmy Hoffa and Beveridge were accused of being in cahoots, allegedly setting up a trucking company that netted Hoffa’s wife and another aide more than $62,000 between 1949 and 1952.
Beveridge utilized some 90 workers from Teamsters Local 299 to remove machinery from two Buick Plants that were ditching equipment after the Korean War, which landed Hoffa in hot water with the Flint Building Trades Union as they felt their territory was being encroached upon. The Commercial Contracting Corporation was only one of the contractors caught in the crossfire, as the Building Trades Union was becoming worried Hoffa’s reign would soon encapsulate all of Michigan’s jobs. This eventually led the Building Trades Council to order some 5,000 workers to leave their jobs over the conflict with Hoffa. The Michigan Supreme Court refused to intervene, which led to the union calling off the strike. I’m unsure if anything ever changed regarding the jurisdiction dispute.
The process by which machinery was removed from automotive plants and properly stored became known as mothballing after World War II. According to a 1954 Detroit Free Press article, the Commercial Contracting Corporation was one of the “first firms to specialize in the new technology.” Their first job was at the Buick Plant in Flint, transitioning it back to peacetime operations after the war ended. In addition to its location on Cloverdale, the Commercial Contracting Corporation had facilities in Battle Creek and Kalamazoo.
After the CCC left the property, I’m unsure what happened to it. The Detroit Free Press listed that it sold for $20,000 in 1991 as a part of a multi-property transaction. In 2018, the City of Detroit Housing and Revitalization Department requested the release of funds to demolish it, alongside 31 other blighted properties. However, as you can see, that didn’t happen.
The structure has been in dire shape for the better part of two decades. The roof is completely gone—the doors are missing, and the interior has been stuffed to the gills with garbage. The City of Detroit Planning and Development Department owns the structure, and it’s looked like this for as long as I can remember.
When I started this piece, I mentioned the city’s hypocrisy. The city has been handing out blight tickets in recent years (and probably as we speak). A few weeks ago, I got a warning because my garbage cans were on the front side of my house, not the side. If I didn’t move the cans, I would have gotten a blight ticket. That was easy enough to fix—but I can’t help but laugh when this monstrosity is just over 2 miles from my house.
I want Detroit to be a nice place to live. Still, it’s hard to justify coming after residents for something as trivial as placing their garbage cans *incorrectly* when the city is actively giving away hundreds of millions in tax dollars and sitting on dangerously vacant structures like this one.
In fairness, they gave themselves a blight ticket, too.
