The Detroit-Columbia Central Office Building is a building located at 52 Selden in Detroit, Michigan

Michigan

Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....

. It is also known as the Michigan Bell Telephone Exchange. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

 in 1997.

History

The Detroit-Columbia Central Office Building was commissioned by the Michigan Bell Telephone Company

Michigan Bell

Michigan Bell is the subsidiary of AT&T serving the state of Michigan. Following the Bell System divestiture on January 8, 1982, the company became a subsidiary of Ameritech, the Regional Bell operating company that served the midwestern United States...

 in 1927 at a cost of $1.2 million. The "dial system" office building, buiilt to relieve the function of earlier "manual" exchanges, originally served around 7000 telephone customers in the central Woodward Avenue district of the city. The building is still owned by AT&T

AT&T

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

, a successor company of Michigan Bell.