A tenement on Sixth Street between Porter and Labrosse was built during a great and expansive time in the early history of Detroit. No luminary lived here; rather, the People who built Detroit lived here. This was a home for the ordinary. This little three-unit row house witnessed the daily trials and triumphs of the regular folk; the people who built a nation. By the 1840’s Detroit had become accessible from the East via the Erie Canal and was soon to become the largest settlement in the new state called Michigan.

Corktown is Detroit's oldest neighborhood, located just west of downtown Detroit and blocks north of the Detroit River. Founded in the 1830s by Irish immigrants, the neighborhood is comprised of a variety of housing styles, including workers’ cottages and Queen Anne homes, and is anchored by a Catholic church moved into the neighborhood in 1849. Today, Corktown is one of Detroit's most culturally and ethnically diverse neighborhoods.

The Workers' Row House was donated to the Greater Corktown Development Corporation (GCDC) for use as a community museum. It is a three-unit, two-story row house built in Corktown circa 1850 as workers’ rental housing. The House stands as a testament to an earlier time in which immigrant and migrant workers were moving to Detroit, renting a modest apartment for a year or two and saving money for a home of their own. The House is an important piece of nineteenth-century workers' history that is rapidly disappearing. It sheltered families for 150 years and remains quite intact. The original layout of the building as three separate units has only been slightly modified when one unit absorbed another, and two indoor bathrooms were added. Original wood framing members, two staircases, doors, some plaster, two original windows with sash pins, wallpaper remnants, original floorboards, and other original materials remain. Many of the oldest homes in Corktown were destroyed in the mid-twentieth century when an expressway was built, and this row house and a few of its neighbors are the last of the oldest remaining structures.

The Greater Corktown Development Corporation (GCDC), with full support of its board, has restored one of the three units to its original 1850s appearance, part of one unit to a 1910s appearance, and the remainder will be left unfurnished for use as program, exhibit, and office space. The Workers’ Row House Experience will engage its visitors through interactive interpretation that will help them understand how working-class residents’ domestic lives were affected by Detroit’s transition from a commercial town to a major industrial city. A graduate student researched the House as her thesis for a master’s degree in historic preservation. As a result, GCDC has a compilation of research materials about the House, including old images, lists of former tenants who lived in the House as early as 1854, and suggested methods to interpret the House’s fascinating story and the story of working-class Detroiters between 1850 and 1920.

As Stephen E. Weil writes in Making Museums Matter (2002), museums can provide their communities with entertainment, education, experience, and a place for socialization. Museums can enrich existing relationships and contribute to the creation of important new relationships. Further, museums can help build community in that they provide a distinctive public space in which diverse members of the community might intermingle in a unique way, they provide a safe place for children and minority groups, and museums can serve as an "antidote to urban loneliness, a place where individuals can safely satisfy a basic need to be in the company of other people.”

As a nonprofit community development organization, the Greater Corktown Development Corporation is committed to facilitating the redevelopment of the Greater Corktown community. GCDC’s development efforts focus on historic preservation, adaptive use, and compatible infill development. The Workers’ Row House is key to GCDC’s mission and is integral to the organization’s larger development plan for Greater Corktown by

1. Serving as a destination for cultural tourism and as a booster for local economic development

2. Fueling higher residential density and private investment in the immediate neighborhood

3. Serving as an integral connection for the first phase of the Corktown/Mexicantown Greenlink development.

The Workers’ Row House Experience will open its doors to the public to interpret everyday life in this house in a memorable and interactive way. A visit to the Row House will enable its visitors not only to learn about Detroit’s rich working-class history, but it will also allow them to see the product of this labor, while introducing them to the historical significance and charm of the Greater Corktown neighborhood—a community where thousands of working-class Detroiters opt to live and work today.