Mariners Church

Mariners Church was built in 1849 to provide for the spiritual well-being of sailors on the Great Lakes. Sailors could not only worship there, but also eat, sleep and bathe there. Knowing that the church could not sustain itself on the tithes of sailors, whose incomes were generally modest, the church was designed from the outset to generate rents from stores located on its ground level. The row of windows at the front of the church used to be storefronts. Among other things, a grocery store and tailor once occupied this space (see photo).

Mariners Chuch once stood in the middle of Hart Plaza, on the corner of Woodward Avenue and what was then Woodbridge St (which no longer passes through the plaza). When work on developing the plaza began in the 1950s, the city intended to condemn and tear-down the church. However, a private fundraising campaign managed to raise enough money to relocate the church. It took 4 years to move the 3000 ton building 880 feet to its present location. They had enough money left over from the relocation to add a bell tower and stained glass to the church.

When they relocated Mariner's Church, they uncovered a tunnel from the days the church served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. An article in the Detroit Free Press explained how the tunnel was used:

"The procedure was designed to look as ordinary as possible. In the years before the Emancipation Proclamation, a wagon full of what looked to be free black laborers would on occasion pull up to Mariners' Church at its old location on Woodward Avenue close to the Detroit River. The group would dismount and start carrying goods back and forth from the wagon into the church sub-basement. Had a spectator at the corner of Woodbridge and Woodward watched carefully...he or she might have noticed that at some point all the workers disappeared into the church — and never came out. What that witness couldn't know was that a door hidden in the sub-basement opened to a tunnel that led to the Detroit River and formed one of the last links in the Underground Railroad. Once they'd pushed through the shrubbery that hid the tunnel's mouth, women, children and men bent on escape would get into boats and push off for Canada and freedom."

Mariner's Church is notable for another reason. It is immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot's ballad "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," about the sinking of a giant ore freighter on Lake Superior. The events at the center of that song took place on November 10, 1975. The next day, the Bishop of Mariner's Church rang the church bell 29 times for each life lost in the wreck. As Lightfoot describes it:

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald