Western Knitting Mills / Water Street

About Western Knitting Mills / Water Street

The Western Knitting Mills district sits along Water Street on the east side of downtown, where Paint Creek bends through the city. The 60,000-square-foot mill at 400 Water Street was built in 1891, expanded through the 1910s, and by World War I had grown into the second-largest knitting mill in the United States — supplying khaki gloves and wool socks to U.S. soldiers under federal contract. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 and adaptively reused as Rochester Mills Beer Co. and a mix of office and loft tenants.

The blocks immediately around the mill form one of the few genuinely mixed-use pockets in the city. Water Street and the connecting alleys hold a mix of converted-industrial lofts, small infill condos, and modest single-family homes — many of them former mill workers’ cottages built between roughly 1895 and 1915, with hipped or front-gabled roofs, narrow lots, and front porches sized for the era. Several of the original mill boarding houses still stand and are flagged by a Michigan Historical Marker on the site.

What sets this pocket apart is the Paint Creek Trail trailhead. Michigan’s first rail-to-trail conversion runs 8.9 miles from downtown Rochester north to Lake Orion, and its southern terminus is essentially in the mill’s back yard. Residents walk or bike straight from their door onto the trail, onto Main Street, or to the Yates Cider Mill area further up the corridor. Tienken Road and the Clinton River pathway extend the network further.

Housing stock is unusually varied for so small an area — a one-bedroom loft inside the mill, a 1905 worker cottage on a fifty-foot lot, and a 2010s townhouse can sit within a block of each other, with prices reflecting that range. Schools are Rochester Community Schools; HOA coverage is limited to the loft condominium associations inside the mill complex itself, with the surrounding single-family blocks remaining non-HOA city lots.