City of Detroit III (steamer)
Printer-friendly version
Send to friend
In the era before plane travel, Detroiters sailed in floating hotels, and for nearly 40 years, the City of Detroit III whisked families away in the most opulent palace sailing the Great Lakes. At the beginning of the 18th Century, taking trips on smoke-belching steamships was popular, Detroiters even took steamers to Belle Isle and ferries across the Detroit River to Canada. But they were not only a popular excursion, they also were the main way people got around the Midwest.
One of the most popular fleets was the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Co., the greatest of the so-called night lines. The fleet had “the largest boats, the heaviest traffic, and save for the Old Bay Line, the longest survival of any of the major lines,” George W. Hilton wrote in “The Night Boat,” a chronicle of overnight steamers of the United States. Most D&C passengers took overnight trips from spring to fall, enjoying dinner and drinks while making their way to Mackinac, Cleveland or Buffalo, N.Y. Passengers headed from Detroit to Buffalo usually left in the evening and arrived early the next morning.
The fleet was established in 1850 by Capt. Arthur Edwards as the Detroit & Cleveland Steamboat Line, operating two small paddle vessels, the Southerner and the Baltimore. Two years later, the company changed hands, taken over by capitalist John Owen of Detroit and his associates and was run by individual owners. As things picked up, the company got into the overnight travel business between Detroit and Cleveland. In 1868, the company was incorporated as the Detroit & Cleveland Steam Navigation Co. Around 1878, the company was taken over by James McMillan, one of the more influential figures during Detroit’s rise to wealth and prominence. He would later become a Republican senator and cofounded the Union Trust Co., which built the Guardian Building, and was president of the Detroit Dry Dock Co., which built steamships. McMillan’s family would control D&C until 1947.
Building the queen of the Great Lakes
With business soaring and having weathered the Panic of 1873 and the Depression of 1893, the D&C decided to add to its arsenal of steamers. In 1911, the D&C commissioned Frank E. Kirby of Detroit Dry Dock, perhaps the greatest Great Lakes architect, to build the largest steel-hulled passenger side-wheeler on the Great Lakes. Kirby is perhaps best remembered by metro Detroiters for designing the Boblo boats, the Columbia and the Ste. Claire, but he also is the father of modern ice-breaking technology.Kirby had been D&C’s architect of choice, starting with the first City of Detroit for D&C in 1878, and he would go on to design the six giant steamers he did for the company in the 20th Century. The Saturday Evening Post declared the D&C fleet the “Wonderful Arks of the Great Lakes.” Of these masterful vessels, the City of Detroit III is considered by many to be Kirby’s crowning achievement. “In construction of the City of Detroit III, nothing that money could buy has been omitted in an effort to make the ship the most modern model of shipbuilding skill” with “every essential to the comfort and care of passengers, with palatial furnishings, fittings and decorations,” the journal Ohio Architect, Engineer and Builder wrote in May 1912.
On Oct. 7, 1911, the City of Detroit III was christened by Doris McMillan, the daughter of the senator, who had died in 1902. While leaving the fit-out dock of the Detroit Ship Building Co. in Wyandotte, Mich., on May 30, 1912, the City of Detroit III struck and sank the Joseph C. Suite.
The D-III, as she was known, was said to have cost $1.5 million, the equivalent of $31.8 million today when adjusted for inflation. Structurally, there was perhaps no sturdier vessel on the lakes. Her 455-foot hull was built of steel with watertight bulkheads. But it was her interiors that made her famous. She was said to be the ultimate in elegance, style and comfort, offering Detroiters the type of luxury usually reserved for ocean liners. The Marine Review of 1912, which chronicled the events on the Great Lakes at the time, lauded the D-III, describing her 8,000-horsepower engines in detail, the complete fire alarm system that guarded her passengers, her speed of 22 miles per hour and, above all, the stunning beauty that made her a floating palace.
Inside the floating palace
While Kirby designed the ship and its exteriors, its luxurious interiors were the work of Louis O. Keil, an interior decorator also responsible for Indian Village’s Christ Lutheran Church. Keil and Kirby were something of a team, working together on many of the sidewheelers that plied the Great Lakes. But many maritime historians consider the D-III to be Keil’s masterpiece – and the center of his masterpiece was the ornate, carved-oak Gothic Room.The Gothic was a smoking room on the upper deck and wrapped around two of the D-III’s three smokestacks. As the name implies, the room was in the Gothic style and featured English oak throughout in gorgeous arches and featured a large, five-panel Tiffany stained glass window depicting Rene-Robert Cavelier de LaSalle’s landing in Detroit. A pipe organ filled the room with music. Between the Gothic architecture, organ and stained glass, visitors might have gotten the feeling of smoking in a church. There was a lovely carved mantel over the fireplace, spacious settees and upholstered chairs.
Detailed plaster and exquisite woodwork – carved in a loft over the Detroit Ship Building Co. at the foot of Riopelle – lined the ship from bow to stern. Balustrade staircases, gorgeous paintings and frescoed ceilings and candelabras dotted her interior.
“Everything that ingenuity can suggest for the safety and convenience of passengers is incorporated,” the Ohio Architect wrote in 1912. The D-III had 25 parlors lavishly outfitted in poplar and hardwood with verandas and private baths. They also came equipped with electric fans, a chest of drawers, a sofa or settee, a large mirror, and the decorative panels had light floral paintings. There also were 50 semi-parlors with private baths. Her 600 staterooms were less lavish but suitable for the overnight voyages between Detroit, Buffalo, N.Y., and Cleveland. All of her staterooms had telephones, hot and cold running water, clean-air ventilation and Marshall Ventilated mattresses. The D-III had a capacity of 5,000 passengers, though usually carried fewer.
After boarding, passengers would step into her grand salon, which was as gorgeous as any hotel lobby in the city. There were seven large mural paintings in the ceiling and a large painting on each of the two staircase landings. The salon, too, was finished in mahogany with decorative work with elaborate patterns. The promenade deck had mahogany, and the upper and gallery decks had poplar paneling. There also were three moon-shaped panels, or lunette panels, in the dome.
“It was big,” Frederick E. Weber, 85, of Detroit, who worked on the D-III as a baggage handler, told BuildingsofDetroit.com. “It was nice with a wooden décor, nice tile floors. It was a nice airy space. … To me it was real nice. It was old style. Today it would be antique. Going on for the first time, it would be like going on one of the old ocean liners.
“If it was your first trip, it’d awestruck a young person who hadn’t seen it before,” said Weber, who grew up with steamers. His father worked as chief steward on the steamer Tashmoo from 1920 to 1923.
The colonial-styled dining room held 350 people and was located at the back of the boat on the main deck. Its canvas ceiling panels were painted, and there was mahogany wainscoting throughout the room. There also were private dining rooms decorated in colors and gold for the higher-brow travelers.
The Palm Court was a popular spot for guests to kick back in a wicker chair and relax. It was located on the upper deck at the back of the ship and had a fountain with running water, as well as flower boxes and a trellis. The room was ornate, and had lovely columns and gorgeous arched mahogany beams up and down the ceiling.
The ship also had a 17th-Century-style Rhine wine cellar. “The atmospheric beauty and charm of this room have won praise of decorators and designers from many states and countries,” the Free Press reported in 1938. “Costing $300,000, and built only after exhaustive study of ancient European drinking places, the Detroit III’s cool and comfortable cocktail lounge, which has been named the Cocktail Hold, excellently reproduces the picturesque drinking room of 300 years ago.” The Cocktail Hold was fashioned with massive, hand-hewn oak beams with a large oak bar at one end. Behind the bar were heavy oaken doors leading to the liquor and wine storage chamber. The lighting fixtures were patterned after old European candleholders of wrought iron. The benches that lined the walls were covered in leather. There were even ceiling decorations simulating spider webs and bats.
All aboard
The D&C travelers would board the D-III and her sisters at a building at the foot of Third Street. D&C steamers would arrive at the passenger docks at the foot of Third, unload their guests and then steam back to the freight sheds west of Third, where it would unload its freight and load up the next day’s goods. The D-III would then pull back up to the foot of Third, where the next passengers would get on. She usually catered to more upper class patrons, Weber said. “Office people, doctors, lawyers,” he told BuildingsofDetroit.com. Sometimes baseball teams would take the boats, other times it would be big bands making their way from Detroit to Cleveland and sometimes on to Cedar Point from there, he said.“The trains were faster,” Weber said. “But the boats were restful.”
The D&C ships would line the Detroit riverfront between Third Street and Wayne, which is today known as Washington Boulevard. For decades in Detroit, this was one of the more bustling parts of the city and was more or less Detroit’s transportation hub. During the D&C offices’ existence, from about 1908 until 1953, it was estimated 10 million people walked the floors of the old buildings on their way to cruises on the D&C ships, the Detroit News wrote in 1953. Trains would steam into town at the Michigan Central Railroad Depot nearby at the foot of Jefferson and Third. Rail passengers could then transfer to a steamer after a short walk. The Wayne Hotel along this piece of the river was a beacon itself, drawing visitors to the area with its baths and steamer docks offering cruises to Belle Isle. This hub also featured the lavish Wayne Gardens and Pavilion, an auditorium, a concert hall and a cabaret. In a normal good season, the D&C line carried 400,000 passengers, and “hundreds of thousands of others danced, dined or skated in the Gardens and the adjoining pavilion before World War I – or watched Detroit’s early auto shows there, the Detroit News wrote in 1953. Newlyweds would often stay at the Wayne Hotel, enjoy the sights, and then sail away on their honeymoons from this spot, making their way to Niagara Falls via Buffalo, with the line throwing carnival-like departures for the brides and grooms. Other D&C travelers took day trips, lake cruises up to watch the annual Port Huron to Mackinac sailboat race or group excursions on the vessels.
People would flock to the Detroit River to watch the D-III’s three billowing stacks fill the air with coal smoke and her massive paddlewheels churning as she made her way across Lake Erie. Patrons gladly forked over $3.50 (about $35 today) to sail from Detroit to Buffalo in such luxury. An extra buck got you a spot in one of the staterooms.
The Buffalo line proved to be incredibly popular, even more so than the line to Cleveland. The D-III took over the trips to Buffalo. The D&C line was so successful in the 1920s that the company built a pair of even bigger ships, each of more than 500 feet in length. The Greater Detroit and the Greater Buffalo cost $3.5 million each (about $42 million each when adjusted for inflation) when built in 1924 and were the largest paddle ships ever built – and were based upon the design of the D-III. The new kids on the block forced the D-III back to the Detroit-to-Cleveland run.
In 1931, the Detroit News exalted D&C as “one of the most important passenger and package freight lines operating upon the inland waters of the United States." But things started to slow down at the foot of Wayne Street. With the rise of the automobile, many travelers opted to take their trips into their own hands and hit the road – even before freeways. The Michigan Central Railroad had pulled up stakes and left the area for Corktown, building the massive Michigan Central Station. Business slowed to a crawl for the old Wayne Hotel and led to it closing up shop. The D&C ships were the only thing luring people down to the old hub, and even then there weren’t many. The number of runs were scaled back – others were canceled altogether. Both the luxurious steamship and its nemesis, the automobile, made Detroit famous. The Golden Age of passenger steamers on the Great Lakes was over.
The end of the line
D&C managed to stay afloat throughout the Great Depression, though it lost more than $2.8 million from 1930 to 1935 – about $42 million when adjusted for inflation. The company also routinely operated at a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year into the early 1940s – including $654,809 in 1938, the equivalent of $9.5 million in today’s dollars. Further compounding the company’s problems were a series of union disputes and strikes over pay and layoffs. D&C ended up turning the Greater Buffalo over to the U.S. Navy in 1942 to be turned into the aircraft carrier USS Sable (IX-81) during World War II. This moved the D-III back to the Buffalo route. By 1942, D&C had the largest fresh-water fleet of combination passenger and freight boats in the world – but such a boast couldn’t change the fact that business was suffering.“The railroads were in and it was after the war, and people were driving again,” Weber said. “At that point, they didn’t care whether they carried passengers or not; they were running for the freight. They didn’t have the roads that they do now” for truckers to use.
On Jan. 5, 1948, the McMillan family sold D&C to banker George J. Kolowich of Hamtramck, who had led a group of minority stockholders in seeking control of the board of directors since 1943, which had led to several disputes. Kolowich, now president and general manager of D&C, had earlier been convicted of embezzlement and served 15 months in prison in Jackson, Mich. This moment sealed the steamers’ fate, as Kolowich wanted to take D&C into the freight business. The paddlers were expensive to operate – mostly because of high labor, fuel and maintenance costs – and business continued to dive because of automobiles and interstate travel. In late November 1949, D&C announced it was planning to enter the automobile transport business and would use part of its $2.6-million payment from the federal government for the Greater Buffalo to retire the company’s stock.
On June 25, 1950, the City of Cleveland III was heading toward Detroit when she was rammed by a Norwegian freighter off Harbor Beach in Lake Huron. The D&C vessel suffered a 60-foot hole amidships, which would end her career. What’s worse, four people – including two local leaders of Benton Harbor, Mich. – were killed in the crash. Merwyn Stouck, 64, was a former mayor and city commission member, who died after being tossed overboard while taking a morning walk. Police Chief Alvin C. Boyd also was killed. It was the first fatal accident in D&C’s 98-year history. The C-III was never repaired and sat at a dock in Windsor for several years before finally being towed in September 1954 and was said to have been converted into a derrick barge for use in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The collision left D&C with only four of the six mighty vessels it had touted for decades, and many of their runs were made only for the freight; passenger services had dropped considerably.
Further compounding the company’s problems was the City of Detroit’s apparent attempts to rid itself of the magnificent steamers. In May 1949, the city’s chief smoke inspector, John W. Shaw, cited D&C with violations of the Smoke Abatement Ordinance. “In 55 observations … since June 1948, four of the company’s vessels were clocked with more than 66 hours of emitting a No. 2 shade of a black smoke,” the Free Press reported at the time. “We advised them to use an improved-type of fuel,” Shaw told the Free Press. “They are not doing it.” The company had already converted the Greater Detroit from coal to oil burning at great expense. Converting the rest of the fleet would have been incredibly costly.
In May 1950, the City of Detroit condemned the D&C terminal in an effort to redevelop the waterfront and make way for what is now Cobo Hall. The city gave the company $1.4 million for the land and then said it would rent the property back to D&C for $11,700 a month until it became necessary to demolish the structures. But on Feb. 7, 1951, the company was ordered evicted from the property because it owed $73,050 in unpaid rent. With the loss of the D&C terminal, service on the D&C boats was officially suspended May 9, 1951, though they had not run since the previous fall. The city first attempted to get the fleet moved from in front of the Veterans Memorial Building on April 24, 1951. “Each time (D&C) tells us that they don’t have any place to move them,” Corporation Counsel G. Edwin Slater told the Free Press the following month. “When we find them a spot, they tell us the insurance won’t approve it.” So D&C was ticketed, effectively getting parking tickets, when the boats were not relocated by 8 p.m. May 24, 1951. On May 28, 1951, Traffic and Ordinance Judge John D. Watts found D&C guilty of “illegally parking” the steamers in the Detroit River. “City officials were irked because the vessels … blocked the view of the river from the Veterans Memorial Building,” the Free Press reported at the time. There was talk since 1951 of trying to revive the line, either through leasing the vessels to other companies or converting them to freight service, but neither happened.
Death of the D&C and the D-III
In July 1953, wreckers tore down the old D&C buildings at the foot of Wayne to make way for storage space for the steel needed to build Cobo Hall. The old bustling hub of Detroit was dead, making way for a new Detroit and the new bustling convention center.Time and progress caught up with the magnificent passenger vessels that had enlivened the Detroit riverfront and thrilled hundreds of thousands on the Great Lakes. The D-III and the line’s other vessels would sit, slowly rusting and losing their grand stature, rotting away at dock. The stately boats were “chiefly the homes of the waterfront’s pigeons and sparrows” by this point, the Detroit News wrote in March 1953.
In May 1956, the Free Press reported that D&C denied rumors that its steamers were up for sale – however D&C acknowledged that it had abandoned hope of putting the boats back into operation. “The increasing years of idleness have taken their toll, boosting the cost of rehabilitation, and the economic situation hasn’t improved,” Free Press reporter Curtis Haseltine wrote. On June 21, 1956, the D-III, Greater Detroit and the Eastern States were sold for an undisclosed amount to Robert L. Rosen, president of Lake Shore Steel Inc., and Abraham Siegel, president of the Siegel Iron & Metal Co. “Neither of the new owners had any definite plans for the operation of the three vessels – only a determination that they should not be scrapped,” the Free Press wrote at the time. “After all,” Siegel’s son, Norman, told the Free Press, “they’ll be worth as much 20 years from now as far as scrap is concerned as they are worth today. Even though our company is in the scrap business, we have no intention of scrapping them.” Rosen and Siegel were sentimental about the steamers, but they had to face up to the economic facts.
“Time has dealt with her kindly as it does to a truly beautiful woman of character," the Free Press wrote in September 1956. "Her beautiful lines remain, she is structurally sound and the elegance of her interior fittings and decoration is as eye-filling and tasteful as the days she slid down the ways." But “like many another aristocrat, the City of Detroit III has fallen victim to a new economy and the whimsical vagaries of human nature. The new economy calls for higher costs of operation – notably labor – and skyrocketing prices for scrap metal.”
That month, the D-III was stripped of her finery in preparation for scrapping. Her paint had flecked off in large patches. Vandals had smashed her windows. The upholstery had faded on her luxurious lounge chairs. The art treasures that made the D-III a floating palace were sold off. Oil paintings by the score were sold to collectors, but others could not be removed without being damaged and were destroyed with the ship. Many other souvenirs were sold at the foot of Third. Settees were carried away in car trunks. Pitchers emblazoned with the D&C monogram were sold to grace basement rec rooms across metro Detroit. Some of her furnishings – the thousands of drinking glasses, water pitchers, electric fans, bed springs and thousands of other items – were taken to East Tawas, Mich., for use on the Western States, which Rosen tried to convert into a “flotel,” a floating motel. That effort would fail in 1959.
“Apparently no one was interested in buying them,” Norman Siegel told the Free Press in late November 1956, “at least, not interested enough to put up any money. We would much rather have seen them back in operation, but the economics of the situation were stacked against that. The present high value of scrap metal dictates our decision.”
In late 1956, parts of the D-III were stripped by the Union Wrecking Co. of Detroit and sold off to scrappers and as souvenirs to collectors and citizens with fond memories of the vessels. Her whistle, telegraphs and other inner workings were all available for sale. While many of these pieces wound up on mantles and in living rooms of Detroiters, it was a Clevelander who took souvenir-collecting to a whole other level. Frank Schmidt bought entire interiors of rooms and had them shipped to Cleveland by the truckload – including the entire Gothic Room from the D-III, magnificent stained glass window and all – and had them installed it in a loft of a barn in a Cleveland suburb, an odd setting for such elegance but one that preserved it.
In early November 1956, “the last vestige of wood” was stripped from the D-III, and her carcass was taken to the Steel Corp. of Canada in Hamilton and was scrapped in late March 1957. The bill for scrapping her was so high, having to demolish all the ornate woodwork and plaster to get at the steel, that the Greater Detroit and Eastern would be taken out into Lake St. Clair and set on fire in December 1956. Burning away that which made the ships luxurious facilitated the scrapping and lessened the cost when it was the Greater Detroit and Eastern’s time to follow the D-III to the boneyard. Such a move had been done before when the steamer Put-In-Bay was scrapped.
“It was an expensive operation,” Norman Siegel told the Free Press of removing the D-III’s wooden superstructure. “We felt we were not justified in following the same procedure on these two vessels.”
In 1960, D&C Navigation disappeared when it was rolled into the Denver-Chicago Trucking Co.
Parts of the D-III return home
After his death in 1965, Schmidt’s estate decided to liquidate his artistic holdings, including the treasures from the D-III. Most of his collection was sold to a restaurant decorating firm in Cleveland, which sold pieces to restaurants around the Midwest and beyond. The pediment over a painting on the landing of one of the grand salon’s staircases now serves as the back of a bar at Bistro Romano in Philadelphia.But the firm sold a good chunk of the collection to the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle. By December 1966, a fund-raising effort had raised more than $10,000 (about $64,000 when adjusted for inflation) to buy the ornate Gothic Room and bring it back to Detroit. The Great Lakes Maritime Institute spearheaded the effort to have the famed room installed in the Dossin. Kolowich, the last operator of the D&C vessels, gave the drive a big boost by donating thousands of invalidated stock certificates of the D&C Navigation Co., which were sent to those who donated $2 or more. The Daughters of the American Revolution paid $2,700 for the La Salle window, but most of the donations came from individual Detroiters.
Pieces of the Gothic were painstakingly cleaned and refinished and installed near the entrance of the Dossin Museum on Belle Isle. Dossin curator Robert E. Lee and his assistant, Charles Patrick Labadie, directed the restoration. The skillful hands of Paul Colleta of the Detroit Historical Museum did much of the work. Many of the fine carvings had been damaged over the years and were covered with layer after cracked layer of old varnish. While the entire Gothic Room wasn’t re-installed, and the layout was changed to conform to the room in the Dossin, the Gothic Room still awes visitors, more than 50 years after the ship was dismantled.
At the museum, the D-III’s “fond memory still lives, close to the waters she sailed,” the Marine Historical Society of Detroit wrote in “Great Lakes Ships We Remember.” “The room can be enjoyed by the thousands who once rode aboard her, and the countless others who can only imagine her opulence as she once was.”
