The old Lincoln motor factory is a techno venue now

The brick auto plant at 1331 Holden Street spent most of a century as one of Detroit's many empty industrial shells. In September 2024 it reopened as Dreamtroit, and the loudest room inside it is now a techno venue.

The building dates to 1908, when it was put up for the Warren Motor Car Company, and later produced engines, auto parts and refrigerators before becoming a grocery wholesaler. The redevelopment, by Matthew Naimi and Oren Goldenberg, runs about $30 million and pairs 76 income-restricted apartments with roughly 38,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space, according to the City of Detroit. The housing is layered by income, with units set aside at or below 50, 80 and 120 percent of area median income so the artists who fill the place are not the ones priced out of it later.

The music side is run by the team behind Marble Bar, Detroit's well-known techno room, operating here under the name the Lincoln Factory. It is a high-ceilinged, warehouse-scale space, the kind of room a city's dance scene grows into rather than out of.

Mayor Mike Duggan turned up for the grand opening. "This is the type of creative redevelopment that is happening all around the city," he said, per the City of Detroit. Goldenberg framed the ambition in plainer terms, saying the real accomplishment was redeveloping both an economic model and a physical structure while keeping the surrounding culture and affordability intact.

The venue made its intentions clear fast. It rang in 2025 with a New Year's Eve Surrealist Ball headlined by Carl Craig and Moodymann, two names that function as a Detroit-techno seal of approval, billed alongside LADYMONIX and Haute to Death.

Affordable artist housing welded to a working music venue is an unusual model anywhere, and a pointed one in a city that watched creative spaces get priced out for a decade. Whether Dreamtroit holds its rents over the long run is the open question. For now the building is full, the floor works, and the Lincoln Factory is booking the kind of nights the room was built for.