Former Walker Wire plant
(Facebook photo from Iron Ridge Marketplace)
A long-vacant 13-acre factory site alongside railroad tracks at 660 E. 10 Mile Road in Ferndale is percolating, and is anticipated to become a hip spot for food, a brewery and more, reports Robert Allen of the Detroit Free Press:
Iron Ridge Marketplace promises to transform a Rust Belt cluster of aging buildings, including a five-story office tower, into an entertainment and retail destination on the site of what long ago was a wire factory. The $35-million brownfield redevelopment project — tucked between I-696 and train tracks at the Ferndale-Pleasant Ridge border — already houses about eight businesses, some of them recruited through Craigslist, with more to come.
On a recent tour of Iron Ridge Marketplace, developer Dennis Griffin stopped and looked around the inside of Pulse Fitness — which opened last June in a long building directly alongside the tracks.
"This building was a blown-out mess," he said. Now, it's a chic, locally owned fitness center with about 800 members, cutting-edge exercise equipment, spin classes, pumping bass and a protein-shake bar. The property was used for a dairy before it was converted into a brewery in the 1930s and, in the 1940s, a wire factory.
Iron Ridge Marketplace describes itself on Facebook:
A tribute to the industrial heritage of the surrounding community, with a modern assembly of creative makers and manufacturers, industrial innovators, as well as neighborhood goods and services.
