Completed in 1848, this Greek Revival residence was home to generations of Sibley family members.

Judge Solomon Sibley, Detroit’s first mayor (before the city charter was adopted), visualized the plans for his third Detroit residence, but, he died before the house was completed. His widow, Sarah Whipple Sproat Sibley, and two unmarried daughters moved in. Sarah Alexandrine Sibley was the last member of the family that resided in the house. She died in 1918.

Detroit’s (technically) first mayor

To the legions of Detroiters who passed through the turnstiles of the iconic Olympia Stadium, its name alone conjures memories of legendary entertainment that spanned more than six decades.

From hockey to basketball, boxing to circuses, The King to presidents, wrestling to rodeos and The Beatles to political conventions, the “Old Red Barn” hosted an incredible variety of events. While the venue is forever linked to professional hockey in Detroit, the Olympia also played a key role in turning the city into an entertainment destination that rivaled any in the world.

Roaring ’20s, roaring crowds

From a temple to a theater.

The Bonstelle Theatre was originally the Temple Beth El synagogue, designed by architect Albert Kahn – who belonged to the congregation. The domed building stands at 3424 Woodward Ave., between Eliot and Erskine. During the widening of Woodward in the mid-1930s, the front was drastically changed. In 1925, it housed a theater company and was named the Bonstelle Playhouse, the name that would prove to be the longest lasting over the years. After the Depression, the theater was used as a movie house. In 1951, the theater was acquired by Wayne State University, which restored its name and function as a theatre.

The temple years

For nearly 100 years, some of Detroit’s greatest journalism has been produced within the walls of this building.

Today, the Detroit News Building is home to not only its namesake morning friendly, but also the paper’s arch-rival, the Detroit Free Press. This has made the structure the undisputed home of Michigan news media.

The paper was born Aug. 23, 1873, when newspaper tycoon James E. Scripps began publishing The Evening News. While most paper’s today hit doorsteps in the morning, the News came in the afternoon. The paper proved to be an almost instant success, with Detroiters eating up Scripps’ brand of local interest stories over dinner or after work.

The story of the Detroit Opera House is punctuated by a series of grand openings, closings and re-openings.

It began its existence in the early 1920s as Detroit’s first true movie palace, the Capitol Theatre. It was one of many grand monuments built in a time when the city of Detroit was reaching the zenith of its importance and wealth, and like many of those monuments, its grandeur began to fade as the city’s wealth and prestige diminished. It is the site of many Detroit firsts, including the city’s first rock ‘n’ roll show, and its first international film festival. But dark times would see the theater close and become ravaged by time, vandals and the elements. And it was nearly left for dead until an intrepid general director of the Michigan Opera Theatre saw that a movie palace designed to look and feel like a grand opera house of Europe might be the perfect home for his company. The Capitol Theatre would live on again as the Detroit Opera House.

Motion pictures come to Detroit

Along Detroit’s beautifully restored international riverfront is Cobo Center, a world-class meeting and convention facility and home to the North American International Auto Show.

The complex is located on the site where Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a French colonist, landed on the banks of the Detroit River on July 24, 1701, and claimed the area for France in the name of King Louis XIV.

Cobo Center is one of the largest convention centers in the country. Built by the City of Detroit, it opened in 1960 as Cobo Hall and was named in honor of former Detroit Mayor Albert E. Cobo. It was Cobo’s vision to build a convention center, and it was realized only after he died in office in 1957. The center and its attached arena cost $56 million to build (about $441 million today, when adjusted for inflation) and took four years to complete.

They tower over a blighted urban wasteland just on the edge of downtown. Four empty, windowless skyscrapers hovering along I-375. More than a dozen row houses, a recreation center and a pair of small apartments sprawl out over 14 acres.

The Brewster-Douglass Projects rank up there with many of the other well-known U.S. public housing disasters, such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago.

The entire complex is massive. In addition to the four towers, there are two six-story apartment buildings and 16 row houses.

One of Detroit’s more unusual architectural mysteries involves a giant granite drinking fountain on Belle Isle.

The fountain was erected in honor of William Kerr Muir, a former city park commissioner. The city’s parks commission gave permission to construct the fountain on July 22, 1896, and was accepted on July 21, 1897.

The 24-foot drinking fountain was designed and cut by the Harrison Granite Co. It had a foundation of granite from Barrie, Vt., with a pyramidal-style roof. Carved near the top on one side was “W.K. Muir Fountain for the people” and “MDCCCXGVI.”

On May 4, 1993, a four-alarm fire tore through yet another abandoned church in Detroit, destroying it.

To Joseph Foster, a businessman who owned buildings near the church in the city’s Brush Park neighborhood, it was “a blessing,” he told the Detroit Free Press as a city wrecking crew tore down the structure.

But this wasn’t just any church. To generations of Catholics in metro Detroit, this was the cathedral for the Archdiocese - the mothership for the region’s Catholics.

There wasn’t much to Detroit when S.K. Harring opened the National Hotel on Dec. 1, 1836, on the southeast corner of Campus Martius. The city was a sleepy hamlet of only about 9,000 people, and nothing that stood downtown then stands today. The hotel would go through a string of owners, each growing and remodeling parts of it.

Then, in 1857, William Hale bought the property. He, too, would spiff the place up, but it was his tenant who would change Detroit’s history. The hotel was leased to W.H. Russell, who reopened it as the Russell House on Sept. 28, 1857.

The Russell would be the city’s leading hotel for nearly half a century, and it was the center of Detroit’s social scene. “It is first class …(with) comfortable elegance everywhere abounding,” the Detroit Free Press wrote at the time of the hotel’s opening. “In all respects, the house is (a credit) to its projector, to the city and the West.” The Russell continued to morph over the years, with sections being torn down and rebuilt and additions being tacked on in attempt to keep up with Detroit’s growing population. Over it’s 48-year existence, the Russell would completely be transformed, looking nothing at the end like it did in the beginning.

The Alhambra Theatre was built as a movie house, but it is most remembered for being the place that got dancers grooving as a notable recording studio in the 1970s.

The Alhambra opened on Nov. 1, 1914, as part of the John Kunsky’s chain of theaters. It was designed by architect C. Howard Crane, who would later become renowned for his work on theaters.

The theater served Detroit’s rather hoity-toity neighborhood of Boston-Edison as was located more than 4 miles north of downtown. This means that some of the area’s residents, including Henry Ford, Walter Briggs, Horace Rackham and Sebastian S. Kresge may have wandered in to take in a flick at the Alhambra.

The Dime Building is one of Detroit’s oldest skyscrapers, having towered over Griswold Street for more than a century.

But why did they call it the Dime? Because it was built by a bank.

The Dime Savings Bank of Detroit was founded in 1884. The institution was backed by only $60,000. With so little money in its vaults, it set out to lure as many customers as it could. And it came up with a novel idea. Anyone could open up a savings account at this bank, and you could open one with as little as 10 cents. And that, the story goes, is where the bank got its name. This story led one newspaper to quip that the bank was “begun with capital a few cents short of a shoestring - and a belief in the power of a dime.”

It’s a well-known eyesore with a little-known history.

The Hotel Eddystone, located at 100-118 Sproat St. at Park Avenue and near the Fox Theatre and Comerica Park, was once part of Detroit’s most successful hotel empire.

The Eddystone was the first of three Italian Renaissance hotels built on Park Avenue in the 1920s for Lew Tuller, the owner of the renowned Hotel Tuller. This period in Detroit’s history saw a number of the Motor City’s most treasured landmarks rise on the skyline. Between 1910 and 1920, the city’s population jumped from 465,766 to 993,739. That’s an increase of 113 percent. Many came to work in Detroit’s factories.

This incredible residence at the corner of Ledyard and 2nd Avenue was the home of Ernst Nuppenau. The house overlooked Cass Park and was on the northern outskirts of the city at the time it was built in the late 1870s. While average in size for its time, the house is a lost and exemplary monument to what is known as the Stick Style that fueled a large part of Victorian home design.

Nuppenau was a carpenter known for sashes, doors and blinds whose firm – Byram, Nuppenau & Clark, and later Nuppenau & Clark – was responsible for many early Detroit homes and modifications. Nuppenau’s home exemplifies his incredible skill in carpentry and taste for architectural flair.

Nuppenau was born in Prussia around 1828. He was married to Wilhelmina Nuppenau, also born in Prussia. They had three children, Mathilda, Wilhelmina (or Minnie) and August. Apart from his business endeavors, Nuppenau was also supervisor of school buildings for a time and active in Detroit circles as men of his stature often were. It was once said that “he is not an easy person to work for. He won’t allow any loafing or bumming, but believes in men earning their money. He is a practical man of good sound sense,” the Detroit Free Press wrote in 1891.

Old Main was built as a high school, graduated to a college and later became the heart of a university.

After Capitol High School in Capitol Park burned down in January 1893, Detroit needed a new high school. Between 1893 and ‘94, the Detroit Board of Education began building Central High on Brush and Alexandrine. However, that site was close to two hospitals. In a letter to the Detroit Board of Education in May 1894, Mayor Hazen S. Pingree objected that the students would be too close to “contagious diseases.” Pingree vetoed the board’s request for funds for the project that May.

This caused a delay. The board then moved the building materials to a new site, at Cass and Warren. This is why Old Main’s cornerstone is dated 1894, although it wasn’t laid until May 13, 1895. Pingree and Dr. John E. Clark, president of the Board of Education, attended the ceremony and gave addresses.

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries.” -Rene Descartes

The old Detroit Public Library downtown - much like a great book - proved it’s often what’s inside that counts. In this case, the building held one of the more stunning rooms ever built in the city.

Today, when Detroit is mired with high illiteracy rates and library branches are being closed left and right, it can be hard to believe how much importance the city once put into education and its libraries. But there was a time when a city in America could be judged by its library - and Detroit wasn’t going to play second fiddle.

At the heart of Detroit’s Civic Center, towering over Hart Plaza, Woodward Avenue and the Detroit River stands One Woodward, one of Detroit’s most celebrated mid-century modern structures.

The building was commissioned in 1958 by the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building. Detroit architect Minoru Yamasaki designed the skyscraper in association with the firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls. The building would open in 1963 and marked a first for Yamasaki, who had never designed a skyscraper before. The building incorporates a pre-cast concrete exterior, narrow windows, Gothic arches, decorative tracery and sculptural gardens that later became the architect’s signature motifs. It has been called the fore-runner to Yamasaki’s renowned World Trade Center in New York.

Located on the northwest corner of Woodward and Jefferson avenues, the 430-foot, 32-story skyscraper sits on a square platform with concrete entrance staircases on all but the west side. On the west elevation, along Larned Street, a parking ramp leads to an underground garage. On the east elevation, along Jefferson Avenue, a small lawn with raised gardens, a fountain and a sculpture create a welcoming extension from Hart Plaza and draw attention to the building’s main entrance.

It is one of Detroit’s oldest and most beautiful houses.

The house was built between 1876 and 1878 for Ransom Gillis, a wholesale dry goods merchant. It was designed by Henry T. Brush and his assistant, a young George D. Mason. Mason would go on to become one of Detroit’s most prolific architects.

The Ransom Gillis House brought the Venetian Gothic style made popular by John Ruskin’s book “The Stones of Venice” to Detroit. The centerpiece of the structure was the turret in the front left corner. It was accented by five rows of tiles of simple geometric designs in hues of bright blue, red, yellow and brown. Similar tile work was spread throughout the rest of the structure. The base of the turret was decorated with stone carvings of quadruplets of flower blossoms, similar but all slightly different. The turret was supported from below by an ornate stone post. Dark ornately carved wooden columns enclosed the porch at the entrance to the house. A steep, dark slate mansard roof with ornate iron cresting completed the peaks in a traditional detail of the day.

In the heart of Detroit’s Financial District, the two-story, ornate, terra-cotta-clad, Bankers Trust Company Building stands like a little secret treasure amongst its towering neighbors.

Architect Wirt C. Rowland, of the firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, designed the Italian Romanesque-style bank in 1925 at a particularly dramatic time in the neighborhood’s development. Long the center of Detroit’s banking activity, the surrounding area underwent a dramatic transformation in the early 20th century from one composed primarily of wood-framed office buildings to one of much taller steel-framed office towers. While Detroit’s largest banks were constructing the massive skyscrapers that now define the Financial District, Bankers Trust opted for a more modest two-story structure on the southwest corner of West Congress and Shelby streets.

Dressed to the nines

In the middle of the city sits one of Detroit’s most gorgeous church, awaiting a resurrection.

As Detroit continued to grow, it was decided that a church was needed to serve what was then the city’s northern reaches. The Christian Church, at Woodward and Josephine avenues, offered the Presbyterians use of its building until it could build its own. The congregation gathered for its first meeting of worship at the church on Nov. 3, 1907. The Rev. J.M. Barkley preached from I. Chron. 28:10: “Take heed now for the Lord has chosen you to build a house for the sanctuary; be strong and do it.” And get started on doing it, the congregation did.

Meetings were held within the week, discussing everything from articles of association to raising money to what to name their future home: Northminster, Duffield, Church of the Redeemer, Monteith, John Knox or Woodward Avenue. On Dec. 10 of that year, the civil organization of the church was completed and the congregation voted to be named the Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church. The congregation petitioned the Presbytery of Detroit on Feb. 14, 1908, to organize the church and was given the go-ahead, officially being admitted March 17, 1908.

The Wells W. Leggett House stood at the northwest corner of Woodward Avenue and Davenport Street, at 645 Woodward. This grand stone house, said to be one of the finest residences on Woodward, was built in 1883 at the cost of $48,000 (1.1 million today, when adjusted for inflation) by prominent Detroit businessman Wells W. Leggett.

The house was designed and constructed by William Scott & Co. at a time when, according to an April 1883 article in the Detroit Free Press, firms were “thronged with commissions;” attesting to the immense residential build-up of the city that took place in the early 1880s.

The house at 645 Woodward was a three-story structure built in the Romanesque Revival style with an appropriately sized matching two-story carriage house. The home was filled with stained glass and, while no known photographic evidence exists of its interior, the Detroit Free Press described it as “of beautiful interior design.”

On the east side of Detroit, among burned-out and abandoned structures, stands a terra cotta beauty, the Goeschel Building.

The Goeschel Building is located at Mack and Gratiot on Detroit’s east side. Designed in 1914 by the architectural firm Mildner & Eisen, the Goeschel is an example of simple, sophisticated Art Deco/Moderne.

What’s in a beauty’s name?

Loved by few, reviled by many, ignored by most.

Nevertheless, the Henry & Edsel Ford Memorial Auditorium was an important component of the midcentury modernist cityscape that is the Detroit Civic Center. From its dedication in 1956 until it was razed in 2011, the auditorium anchored the east end of this expansive riverfront complex of park land, plazas, civic buildings, fountains and public art.

Ford Auditorium, as it was commonly known, was an austerely simple building of the International Style popular during the mid-20th century. It was designed by the firms of Odell, Hewlett & Luckenbach and Crane, Kiehler & Kellogg (the successor firm to the architectural practice of renowned architect and theater designer C. Howard Crane). The former designed the exterior; the latter designed the actual auditorium, or theater, portion.

In the decades before it sat silently decaying, the Wurlitzer Building was filled with music, home to one of the largest music stores in the world – and helped thrill thousands of theater-going Detroiters.

Founding the mighty Wurlitzer

Rudolph Wurlitzer emigrated to the United States in 1853 and settled in Cincinnati. He founded the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. in 1856, though his family had started dealing in musical instruments in 1659 in Europe. His company would quickly become the biggest supplier of instruments in the country and soon started manufacturing pianos sold through a chain of retail stores. Its musical instruments were widely regarded as being high quality and were popular stateside as well as in Europe.

One of the city’s most spectacular churches was left behind in the exodus for the suburbs for the vagrants to destroy.

Woodward Avenue Baptist Church was dedicated Jan. 19, 1887. Built on Woodward Avenue at Winder Street, the church was along a stretch once known as Piety Hill because of the number of churches - each an architectural marvel - dotting the avenue. On Sunday mornings, Detroiters would put on their Sunday best and fill the sidewalks along Woodward Avenue, many of them filing through the heavy oak doors of Woodward Baptist. Among those filling the pews of the gray limestone Late Victorian Gothic church were families whose names were to become part of the city’s history: Olds, Palmer, Parsons, Standish and Trowbridge.

Humble origins

There’s a mustachioed mayor kicking back in Grand Circus Park.

William Cotter Maybury was Detroit’s city attorney, a congressman and mayor of Detroit. He was born in Detroit on Nov. 20, 1848. He was a product of Detroit public schools, graduating from the old Capitol High School in 1866. He received a bachelor’s degree from the literary department of the University of Michigan in 1870, and the following year he had a bachelor of laws degree from U-M. Maybury returned to Detroit and began a law career that would leave him well-cushioned financially - and physically. He was a trial lawyer and worked for corporations and other movers and shakers.

Maybury would serve as Detroit’s city attorney from 1875 to 1880, and was then elected to Congress in 1882 and again in 1884. The Democrat served Michigan’s 1st Congressional District, which was then in Detroit. It was the same seat that Alpheus Starkey Williams held a few years earlier. Maybury served on the House Judiciary and Ways and Means committees and introduced the bill in Congress allowing the construction of the first Belle Isle bridge.

For nearly 70 years, Wayne County’s dead were housed in an Egyptian mausoleum on the edge of Greektown.

In the 1920s, Americans were fascinated by all things Egyptian, thanks in large part to Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen in November 1922. King Tut enraptured the imagination of Americans, which naturally led to an influence on architecture. Detroit was no exception.

While movie palaces were the most popular examples (the Fox Theatre has some Egyptian elements), the use of Egyptian themes was especially pronounced in all things dealing with death. The Dodge Brothers mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery has two sphinxes guarding the entrance. The old mortuary chapel that is now part of the Art Center Music School has unmistakable Egyptian flavor. And then there was the old Wayne County Morgue at Brush and East Lafayette, styled after an Egyptian mausoleum.

Mayor John C. Lodge once proclaimed it “the Empire State Building of its day,” and it was the city’s unquestioned tourist attraction for half a century.

And it was just a water tower.

Water, water everywhere …

HistoricDetroit.org is in the process of writing its own history on the Water Board Building. While we wrap it up, here is the history from the Water Department’s Web site:

The Art Moderne-styled Water Board Building has been a familiar part of Detroit’s skyline since October 1928. The Common council provided $1 million in the 1927-28 city budget for a triangular-shaped building on a site bounded by Randolph, Farmer, and Bates Streets. Louis Kamper - a Detroit-based architect known for his work on the houses of prominent Detroiters, as well as Detroit landmarks like the Book Building (1917), the Washington Boulevard Building (1923), and the Book-Cadillac Hotel (1924) - originally planned for a 14-story building. But, “because of the high value of the site, the Board decided that … it would build a twenty story building.”

The completed building reflects the trend toward simplification of forms typical of the Jazz Age. Standing 23 stories, it is comprised of a five-story base, a 15-story shaft, and a three-story penthouse. The total cost - including the $250,000 paid for the site, and the architect’s five-percent commission - was $1,768,760.20. It was one of the last buildings designed by Kamper, who was in his late sixties during its design and construction.

Couples used to swing to big band sounds and rockers like the MC5 and the Stooges used to rock in a Mayan temple on the city’s east side.

The Vanity Ballroom opened on the eve of the stock market crash in 1929 on Detroit’s far east side at Newport and Jefferson. It followed several other venues that opened in the 1920s, but because of the Depression, it was the last ballroom to open in the city. Despite the Depression, the Vanity was one of the most popular dance venues in town and a place generations of Detroiters went to hear live performances by Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Louis Prima, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey and Cab Calloway.

Such spectacular venues were popular places for Detroiters to go dance the night away and socialize. In its heyday, the Vanity hosted huge crowds – up to a 1,000 couples. Five nights a week, they danced to the big bands on the 5,600-square-foot maple dance floor, where couples “floated” on springs that gave the floor bounce. Patrons - who paid 35 cents to get in - would enter from the first floor and ascend a grand main staircase before entering a ballroom that took them to a different time and place – an ancient Aztec temple.

The United Artists Theatre was one of several in Detroit that helped define the term “movie palace.” It thrilled hundreds of thousands of Detroiters with its movies and interiors, wowed listeners as a recording studio for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra — and developed a peculiar habit of crushing Oldsmobiles.

By the time legendary theater architect C. Howard Crane sat down to sketch out the UA on his drawing board, the United States was already enamored with motion pictures. In the 1920s, the area around Grand Circus Park was becoming lined with dazzling places to see shows, each theater trying to outdo its rivals in opulence and flair. The UA mainly competed with its nearby neighbors, the Michigan and the Crane-designed Fox, State and Capitol theaters. But there were many others nearby, such as the Oriental and Adams. The intricate designs and lavish interiors of these so-called movie palaces allowed common, working Detroiters to enjoy the splendors of the rich. The theaters became as much of a draw as the films themselves and were part of the show. And Detroit’s United Artists was no exception.

Working at the theater

The first train steamed into the venerable Union Depot, downtown at Third Avenue and Fort Street, on Jan. 21, 1893.

Planning began in 1889, with James Stewart & Co. of St. Louis — one of America’s most accomplished railroad contractors - handling its design. Construction began in 1891 and took a couple of years to complete. Stewart carved the behemoth out of a dark red sandstone, choosing the Romanesque Revival style popular at the time. The style was based on the concepts of H.H. Richardson, a Boston architect who also designed the Bagley Memorial Fountain in Detroit. The depot’s appearance was similar to the still-standing Detroit Club on Cass and First Presbyterian Church on Woodward.

The depot was described by architectural critics as monumental and gutsy, and of being in a solid, aggressive style. W. Hawkins Ferry, in his “The Buildings of Detroit,” described the station as being of “robust plastic composition.” Ross and Carlin mention it proudly as “an ornament to the city” in their “Landmarks of Detroit,” published before the turn of the century. Its massive four-clock tower served as a proud landmark in and of itself — a beacon in the years before skyscrapers appeared. (As an odd side note, the clock faces read “IIII” instead of “IV.”)

She was once the Grand Dame of Grand Circus Park - but she wound up a bag lady.

The Hotel Tuller was ridiculed at the time it was built but would become one of Detroit’s most successful hotels in the early 20th century and would give rise to one of the city’s most successful hoteliers.

Lew Tuller was born in Jonesville, Mich., on Jan. 4, 1869, and was the son of architect and builder Hiram Whiting Tuller. In 1832, when he was 17 years old, his parents moved to Michigan from New York. Lew Tuller moved to Detroit after school and followed in his father’s footsteps in the building trade. U.S. Sen. Thomas W. Palmer — one of the most significant figures in Detroit history and the man who gave the city the land for Palmer Park – loaned Tuller money to get his contracting business started in 1894. Tuller would build three apartment buildings: the Saragossa (on Woodward), the Valencia (Woodward and Lothrop) and the Witherell (Jefferson and McDougall). And then, opportunity came knocking once again.

Whether as a 103-year-old site for pro baseball or as an 87-year-old stadium, the corner of Michigan and Trumbull is the home of memories for millions of fans. The park sat vacant since hosting its final game on Sept. 27, 1999, until June 30, 2008, when demolition began.

Professional baseball was first played on the site, at a 5,000-seat ballpark known as Bennett Park, on April 28, 1896 — three years before Detroit even had an auto plant. The field, named after fan favorite Charlie Bennett, was built on the former site of a municipal hay market. The park was razed after the 1911 season and replaced with 23,000-seat Navin Field. The ballpark as we know it today opened April 20, 1912, the same day as Fenway Park in Boston — and six days after the RMS Titanic sank.

The queen of diamonds

If you’re going to get thrown in the slammer, you might as well have the book thrown at you in a place of style.

The Theodore Levin U.S. Courthouse is an Art Deco-Art Moderne rectangular building that stands between Fort Street and Lafayette Boulevard and Shelby Street and Washington Boulevard. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places with the rest of the city’s Financial District in December 2009.

Out with the old

“All the splendid houses which have been erected before and which adorn the broad avenue of town (Woodward) are fairly eclipsed, and the new home enjoys the distinction of being the most pretentious modern home in the state and one of the most elaborate houses in the West.” -– the Detroit Free Press, Feb. 4, 1894, on the David Whitney Jr. House

The David Whitney Jr. House was built by successful lumber baron David Whitney Jr., one of Michigan’s wealthiest citizens and the wealthiest man in Detroit. He was worth more than $15 million at the time of his death in 1900 — about $388 million today, when adjusted for inflation.

David Whitney Jr. was born Aug. 23, 1830, in Watertown, Mass. He quickly established himself in the lumber trade and moved to Detroit by age 27. The company he and his brother Charles headed expanded from the eastern seaboard and Canada to Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. It was for some time the largest lumber dealer in the United States. Lumber was not Whitney’s only business venture; he also was involved in real estate speculation, steamships and banking. He wisely bought up property around Grand Circus Park when it was the far reaches of downtown business, and in 1885, he built the five-story Grand Circus Park Building. It would be replaced with the much larger David Whitney Building, designed by the world-renowned architect Daniel Burnham, in 1914. Whitney married Flora McLaughlin in 1860 and had one – David C. Whitney - and three daughters, Flora Ann Whitney Demme, Katherine Whitney McGregor, and Grace Whitney Hoff (who was given, as a wedding present in 1882, a home at 79 Alfred St. that still stands today; this home was rented by retail giant Joseph L. Hudson from 1894-1904).

HistoricDetroit.org is working on its own history of this landmark. Until then, this history is from the church’s official Web site, www.ste-anne.org.

On July 24, 1701, Cadillac and his people landed at Detroit. Two days later, July 26, 1701, Ste. Anne’s Feast Day, construction of the first structure began, Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church. The site was just west of what is now Jefferson and Griswold streets.

Fire swept through the settlement on October 5, 1703 destroying the church, rectory, and several other buildings. The parish’s earliest records were consumed in that fire. Even so, Ste. Anne’s today, possesses one of the longest continuous church records in the United States.

Work on the grand, 15-story Statler Hotel began in 1913 on land once owned by Gen. Alexander Macomb. Former Gov. John Judson Bagley acquired the site in 1863 and built his home, which remained in the family until it was sold to Arthur H. Fleming in 1907. It was Fleming who sold the property to Ellsworth M. Statler’s chain of hotels.

Mayor Oscar B. Marx was said to be beaming as he seized a shovel during the groundbreaking on July 2, 1913. After all, it was a monumental moment for Detroit: Grand Circus Park was about to embark on a revolutionary facelift, going from a park in a residential area to a park ringed by hotels and skyscrapers: “Only a short time before, low, rambling buildings, some of them of ancient frame construction, had been fringing the green carpet of the old park, now brick, steel and stone were beginning to pierce the higher levels, lending new features to a skyline which had persisted in earlier years in hugging our river shore,” George W. Stark wrote in the Free Press in 1913. Construction of the Statler would take only 18 months.

A grand hotel on Grand Circus

Perhaps no other area of Detroit has changed more often and more drastically over the years than Campus Martius, the city center. Over the years, Old City Hall, the Majestic Building, the Pontchartrain Hotel, the Family Theatre, the Hammond Building and the old Detroit Opera House have all come and gone.

Only one landmark has outlived them all.

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument is among Detroit’s oldest pieces of public art and was one of the first monuments to honor Civil War veterans in the United States. It was announced by Gov. Austin Blair in 1865 that money would be collected to erect a tribute to Michigan’s soldiers killed in battle. Detroit, being the largest city, won the right to the monument.

The Shubert helped usher in a new age of entertainment palaces in Detroit. It was located on the southeast corner of Shelby and Lafayette streets, across from the Lafayette Building. The theater first opened as the Orpheum in 1914, but changed its name several times over the years, including to reflect the street on which it was located.

The theater contained elaborate architecture throughout and had murals by Maxwell Parrish. Designed by Smith, Hinchman and Grylls, it was almost as beautiful on the outside, faced with tapestry brick and trimmed with Renaissance details in cream terra cotta. In 1925, owner Edward D. Stair — who also was publisher of the Detroit Free Press — had the interior completely remodeled in a grand manner.

The Shubert-Lafayette was a legitimate theater, meaning it did professional drama and some forms of musical comedy.

The Russell A. Alger Memorial Fountain stands on the east side of Grand Circus Park. The monument features a bronze statue of a woman about 7 feet tall wearing a headdress and a flowing gown and carrying a sword and a shield that bears the state seal. Her right hand is raised in greeting. She is the bronze personification of the state of Michigan.

Alger is depicted on the memorial on a bas relief on the granite pedestal, surrounded by laurel. Lion heads on the pedestal spit out water. The base of the memorial is inscribed “Russell A. Alger — Soldier — Statesman Citizen — 1836-1907.”

Alger was a lumber baron and railroad man who rose to become a U.S. senator and later was governor from 1885 to 1887. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for president in 1888. Alger later served as President William McKinley’s secretary of war, and when the president was assassinated by Leon Czolgosz — a Michigan native and former Detroiter — on Sept. 6, 1901, Alger said: “The root of anarchy which has been started in our country and which has resulted in the loss of a president should be stamped out. It is out imperative duty to stamp out the evil.”

It was the ultimate bachelor’s pad, a place to go to shoot pool, to bowl — and later, to go to court.

Detroit’s first bowling alley was said to have opened at 241 E. Jefferson Avenue in 1861. By 1900, the city directory listed six alleys. It was around this time that the sport exploded in popularity in Detroit. The Detroit Bowling Association (now the Greater Detroit Bowling Association) was founded in 1912. As the city grew and greater incomes allowed for greater leisure, some entrepreneurs decided to build a giant recreational center for the city. The Huston brothers were young entrepreneurs who had a successful billiard parlor in Ann Arbor, Mich. Looking to expand their entertainment business into the city, they teamed up with a Mr. Sweeney to form the Sweeney-Huston Co. In 1917, the Hammond family leased a plot of land on the northwest corner of Lafayette Boulevard and Shelby Street to Sweeney-Huston, so that it could build a monument to amusement.

Let the good times roll

The Hotel Pontchartrain is a legendary Detroit hotel, the cradle of Detroit’s auto industry and ushered in luxury hotels in the city.

The Pontch, as it was known, was built on the site of another landmark hotel, the Russell House. The Russell had opened Sept. 28, 1857, and was the center of Detroit’s social scene for decades. “It is first class … (with) comfortable elegance everywhere abounding,” the Free Press wrote at the time of the Russell’s opening. “In all respects the house is creditable to its projector, to the city and the West.” But as the 20th century rolled around, the Russell was woefully antiquated. It closed Nov. 19, 1905.

Work on the Pontchartrain began Jan. 15, 1906. It was designed by architect George D. Mason, who is best known for the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island and Detroit’s current Masonic Temple. The hotel opened Oct. 27, 1907. The contractor was Westinghouse, Church & Kerr.

The 12-story Detroit Commerce Building is perhaps best remembered as the building knocked down for the Book-Cadillac’s parking garage.

But before Detroiters parked their cars on its grave, the site was home to the People’s Outfitting Co. department store - a place where generations of Detroiters went to shop.

People’s was founded by Leopold Wineman in September 1893 in a five-story building at Michigan Avenue and Shelby Street in Detroit. The store’s motto: “It’s easy to pay - the People’s way!” - allowing shoppers to buy everything from cameras to jewelry to furniture on no-interest credit. Signs and advertisements proclaimed People’s as “Detroit’s largest home furnishers.” In addition to the usual tables and chairs, the store also sold carpets, draperies, stoves and other items with which Detroit’s increasingly wealthy families could decorate its homes.

The 47-story Greater Penobscot Building towers over Campus Martius, an Art Deco masterpiece that has dominated the city’s skyline for more than 80 years.

The building is named after a tribe of American Indians in New England. The name Penobscot means “the place where the rocks open out.” Simon J. Murphy, who made a fortune as a lumber baron before coming to Detroit, spent his youth working on the Penobscot River in Maine. As the nation moved west, Murphy’s lumber empire moved with it, and he settled in Detroit. When it came time to name his new building, his thoughts returned to his roots.

There are actually three Penobscot buildings. The first is the 13-story building Murphy erected in 1903. It was joined by a 24-story tower in 1916. The third, the 47-story tower known as the Greater Penobscot, was built at a cost of $5 million.

Gabriel Chiera came to Detroit from Chicago following the Fire of 1873 and set up a candy shop across from a park just north of Campus Martius.

Within a few years, Chiera opened up the Parisian Laundry, which was in business for several decades and was the largest in the city. It made him a fortune, and he opened several laundries in other cities. The businesses made him one of the city’s most successful Italian-American businessmen.

Around the turn of the century, Chiera decided to try his hand at the resort-hotel business. He built and managed the 100-room Oriental Hotel, across the street from the old main branch of the Detroit Public Library. Its original address was 60 Farrar, but the street was later renamed Library Street because, well, that’s where the library was.

It is a masterpiece of marble, mahogany and mosaics, bas reliefs, sculptures and columns. It is a stately building that looks as old as the city itself, one of the few survivors of the years before Detroit became the auto capital of the world.

This beauty of Beaux Arts Classicism was built as the Wayne County Courthouse at a cost of $1.6 million (about $39 million today, when adjusted for inflation). With its pink granite base, ornamental 247-foot tower and classic bronze sculptures, the Old Wayne County Building is one of the last survivors of pre-Depression Detroit. Work started in October 1897 and was completed in 1902, but the battle to build it began long before.

The old Old Wayne County Building

This five-story building, with an exterior modeled after the pavilions that surround the Louvre in Paris, opened March 29, 1869. Upon its opening, the Detroit Free Press proclaimed it a “luxurious temple of art.” It was made of brick though covered with mastic to resemble cut stone. Much like City Hall - which stood across Campus Martius from it - the Opera House had statues in niches. These represented Tragedy, Comedy, Music and so on.

The interior the Opera House - including the elaborate drop curtain - was decorated by Robert Hopkin. Garry Hough was the opening manager.

Over the years some changes occurred to the theater. The exterior underwent changes, such as extending window bays and removing statues. In 1885, the ground floor retail space was converted into a smaller theater.

The National Theatre is the only survivor from Detroit’s first theater district and the only surviving theater known to have been designed by renowned architect Albert Kahn.

Located on Monroe Street at Farmer, near Greektown, the National opened Sept. 16, 1911, as a vaudeville house. It was located in Detroit’s old theater district — before the movie palaces near Grand Circus Park were built. The old Detroit Opera House and the Gayety, Temple, Columbia, Liberty and Family theaters were among the venues that once stood nearby, making it Detroit’s main avenue of entertainment.

Designed by Kahn and his associate Ernest Wilby, the National’s exterior is a Baroque-Moorish-Beaux-Arts hybrid with a Moroccan or Egyptian flavor. Like Kahn’s earlier Grinnell Brothers Music House (built in 1908), the National is covered in white terra cotta fired at Detroit’s Pewabic Pottery. It features two proud eagles, carved stone rosettes, cupids and other small Art Noveau details dotting the facade. It has twin, 64-foot gold-domed towers with airy grill work and a grand, recessed Romanesque arch over the entrance. Originally, the archway features a massive stained glass window. Both the Moorish towers and the arch were dramatically lighted up by hundreds of bulbs at night, giving the theater an amusement park-like vibe. There was an iron framework, illuminated marquee with glass panels, but this was later replaced with more sterile, modern-looking signage.

The sound of the bells of Belle Isle rises up amid throngs of Canada geese. For more than 60 years, the Nancy Brown Peace Carillon has provided a lovely soundtrack to picnickers and island revelers.

The idea for a peace carillon originated with readers of Detroit News columnist Nancy Brown’s Experience column, which was immensely popular at the time. She wrote with a homey, frank style that was gentle, yet firm and endeared her to her readers. She talked about everything from art to life decisions to love to religion.

Who was Nancy Brown?

Generations of Detroiters used to park their seats under the jaw-dropping ornate plasterwork and opulence of a downtown movie palace. Today, they park their cars there.

The 4,038-seat Michigan Theatre was designed in the French Renaissance style in 1925 and was simply unrivaled in Detroit in elegance at the time. The Michigan was built at Bagley and Cass avenues at a cost of more than $3.5 million ($42.4 million today, when adjusted for inflation) and was the only Detroit theater designed by renowned architects Cornelius W. and George L. Rapp. The theater was the Rapp brothers’ third largest, and it, and the 13-story Michigan Building office tower that it is connected to, would open in 1926.

The majestic Michigan

Nothing symbolizes Detroit’s grandiose rise and spectacular fall like Michigan Central Station. No other building exemplifies just how much the automobile gave to the city of Detroit — and how much it took away.

For seventy-five years, the depot shipped Detroiters off to war, brought them home, took them on vacation and sent them off to visit Grandma. It was Detroit’s Ellis Island, where many generations of Detroiters first stepped foot into the city for factory jobs. It was filled with the sounds of hellos and goodbyes, panting locomotives and screeching wheeled steel. But for nearly twenty-five years now, it has been a place for vandals, thrill-seekers, junkies and the homeless. The only sounds to be heard are the hissing of cans of spray paint, the clicks and whirs of camera shutters and the slow drips of water through holes in the roof. Wind whistling through broken windows has replaced the deep-throated whistles of trains.

Designing the depot

The Michigan Central Railroad Depot was the company’s second station in Detroit, opening on the southwest corner of Third and West Jefferson avenues in 1884. The Romanesque Revival structure cost about $1 million to build (about $21 million in today’s dollars).

Newspaper articles at the time deemed the depot the pride of Detroit. Numerous turrets made it look like a medieval castle and the waiting rooms — there was a separate waiting room for ladies — had marble floors. Its massive clock towered above everything around it.

The depot was designed by Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz, the architect responsible for One Times Square in New York City and the Dearborn Station (aka Polk Street Station) in Chicago, which opened two years after the MCRR station.

The Metropolitan Building arises like a medieval castle nestled near Grand Circus Park. Once home to the city’s jewelers and watchmakers, today it sits empty and decaying, an unpolished gem where time has stood still for nearly 30 years.

Between 1910 and 1920, Detroit’s population more than doubled, from 465,766 to 993,678, thanks largely in part to the rise of the automobile. And with the rise of the automobile came a rise in the city’s fortunes — and with those fortunes came more places to spend them. By the end of the 1910s, the city was starting to sprawl north up Woodward. Storefronts began to fill the area between Campus Martius and Grand Circus Park.

In 1919, George P. Yost, vice president of the Central Detroit Realty Co., came up with the idea to centralize multiple facets of a single trade into one building. He wanted to erect a building “at once beautiful, accessible and practical,” the Detroit Free Press wrote in May 1925.

The Merrill Fountain opened in 1901 in front of the old Detroit Opera House that stood on Campus Martius.

The elaborately detailed, white marble structure was designed in the Italian Renaissance style by John Carrere and Thomas Hastings, a pair of New York’s top architects who also designed the New York Public Library. It was commissioned by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Merrill Palmer in honor of her father, lumber baron Charles Merrill.

At the dedication ceremony, Merrill Palmer’s husband, Sen. Thomas W. Palmer, was provided “an opportunity to launch into a dissertation on the historic fountains of Europe,” William Hawkins Ferry wrote in his “The Buildings of Detroit: A History.” Ferry quotes the senator as saying: “As men were crowded into great cities and denied the frequent sight of the contact with water in agitation or repose, a craving for it, as a feature of the landscape, has led to construction of artificial lakes, cascades and fountains to cool the air, please the eye and soothe the ear, as well as supply the physical wants of the people.”

As the 19th century was winding to a close, the Masonic fraternity in Detroit was starting to build a growing membership. There were many Masonic branches spread out throughout Detroit at the time, and in 1891, they agreed to consolidate their groups into one home, united in solidarity and in base of operations.

On Aug. 11, 1892, Masonic groups bought land on Lafayette Boulevard and First Street, just outside of the heart of downtown, for a little more than $50,000 (about $1.2 million today, when adjusted for inflation). To pay for the $344,198 building (about $8.75 million today), the individual members were asked to chip in about $80 each, the equivalent of $1,800 today. The Ashlar, Oriental and Palestine lodges, the Monroe chapter and the Damascus Commandery gave $1,000 each ($23,500 today); Corinthian gave $1,400 ($33,000 today); the Peninsular Chapter and Detroit and Union responded with $1,500 each ($35,000 today); Zion forked over $3,000 ($70,000 today); and the Monroe Council gave $500 ($11,800 today). The groups then united to form what would become the Masonic Temple Association of Detroit, which still exists today. The association was formally formed March 19, 1894.

To build their new home, the Masons turned to another Mason, George D. Mason and his firm, Mason & Rice. The plans and specifications for the building were formally adopted on Dec. 3, 1892. Excavation began Oct. 1, 1894, and the cornerstone was laid Jan. 23, 1895. The dedication ceremonies were held with much fanfare and celebrated by thousands of Masons and their families on St. John the Baptist Day, June 24, 1895. The Masonic groups moved in over the next several months. Among the city leaders active in getting the temple built were future Mayor William C. Maybury, a past master who served as chairman of the Masonic Relations Committee. Just under two years after the new temple opened, Maybury would be elected mayor of Detroit.

HistoricDetroit.org is working to get its own history of the Masonic Temple up. This history is from the Masonic Temple’s Web site, www.themasonic.com:

The development of the Detroit Masonic Temple is indicative of the growth and the strength of the Masonic Fraternity in this community.

The first move towards a suitable home for the Order in Detroit was made in 1891. In January of that year, the bodies occupying space over the old Wayne County and Home Savings Bank on West Congress Street appointed a committee to confer regarding the purchase of property and the erection of a temple which would accommodate the Lodges, Chapters, Council, Commanderies and the Michigan Sovereign Consistory. Several meetings were held by this joint committee in1891 and the early part of 1892. On March 16, 1892 representatives of Zion, Detroit, Union, Ashlar, Oriental, Schiller and Kilwinning Lodges, Monroe and Peninsular Chapters, Monroe Council, Detroit and Damascus Commanderies, and the Michigan Sovereign Consistory, held the first meeting of record at which time Michigan Sovereign Consistory was requested to place a valuation on the property which it owned on Lafayette Boulevard. At a meeting held March 23 of the same year, the Michigan Sovereign Consistory placed a valuation of $37,500 on the 75 feet between Cass Avenue and First Street on Lafayette Boulevard, and generously offered to transfer this property to a new corporation to hold title to this property, where a suitable structure should be erected to house all Masonic Bodies, and agreed to accept therefor certificates of contribution. Thus we have the beginning of the Masonic Temple Association of Detroit. The above land was added to by the purchase of adjoining property, giving a total frontage of 150 feet on Lafayette Boulevard and a depth of 130 feet on First Street.

Designed in the Beaux Arts style by Daniel H. Burnham & Co., the Majestic Building opened in 1896 on the corner of Woodward and Michigan avenues. The office building stood across from old City Hall on Campus Martius and had storefronts on the ground floor.

The structure helped usher in the skyscraper age in Detroit. It was Detroit’s fourth, following six years after the Hammond Building and one year after the Chamber of Commerce Building on Capitol Park and the Union Trust Company Building downtown. The Majestic was the city’s most imposing commercial monument for more than a decade until Burnham’s 18-story Ford Building was completed on the northwest corner of Griswold and Congress.

Burnham was the acknowledged authority in skyscrapers at the time. He was the head of a firm that was likely the biggest in the country. He also was the chief consulting architect of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the man behind such notable structures as New York City’s Flatiron Building.

It was Detroit preservationists’ Alamo.

The Madison-Lenox Hotel was one of downtown Detroit’s last remaining turn-of-the-century residential buildings — but it may be best remembered for being one of the city’s most controversial demolitions in decades.

In 1898, William W. Hannan set out to build an apartment hotel and bought land at Grand River Avenue and Madison Street, then a two-way thoroughfare with wide setbacks near Harmonie Park. The site was originally part of 220 acres that had been given nearly 200 years earlier to the founder of Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.

The Madison Theatre was a key link between the small Detroit theaters of the turn of the century and the extravagant movie palaces that would rise in the 1920s.

Like many of the city’s theaters, it was designed by renowned architect C. Howard Crane. It cost $500,000 to build (about $8.5 million today, when adjusted for inflation). The 1,806-seat theater opened on eastern Grand Circus Park on March 7, 1917, with Mary Pickford in “Poor Little Rich Girl.” Also part of the bill on opening night: a Pathe-Hearst newsreel and the Madison Famous Orchestra and Organ, and performances by a tenor and a soprano.

“The fanfare surrounding the opening of this theater was unprecedented in the city, but was to be matched often through the succeeding decade as one Kunsky palace after another opened,” Andrew Craig Morrison wrote in his book on Detroit theaters, “Opera House, Nickel Show and Palace.”

Mackenzie Hall began its life as the city’s top “stag hotel” and ended it as a hangout for co-eds.

At the turn of the century, most young single men in cities lived in boarding or rooming houses or rented a room in another family’s home. “A wag remarked that a few years of such living would either drive a man to suicide or matrimony,” its architect, H. Augustus O’Dell, cracked in an advertising special section in the Detroit Times. Transient hotels were another option, but were pricey for permanent or long-term renting, as were bachelor hotels, or “stag hotels,” as they were also known at the time. Detroit’s manufacturing boom had led it to become a city of 1.3 million people, the fourth-largest city in the country. And many of those factories were bringing single men to work in the city. The time was write, O’Dell surmised, for what was essentially an apartment building for young, single men in Detroit. Peter A. Miller, president and principal stockholder of the Cass Putnam Hotel Co., rose to fill that need. The building at Cass Avenue and Putnam opened as the 800-room Webster Hall hotel. It was designed by O’Dell of the firm Halpin & Jewell.

What is now known as the city’s Cultural Center was a booming part of town in the mid-1920s. The city opened its main branch of the Detroit Public Library on the northeast corner of Cass and Putnam in 1925, and the Detroit Institute of Arts was under construction. It was close to General Motors’ headquarters, as well as plants for the Burroughs, Packard, Dodge, Standard Plumbing, Studebaker, Fisher Body and McCord Manufacturing. It also was on the Cass Avenue bus line and the Woodward Avenue streetcar line. The John R and Forest and Warren avenue streetcar lines were within walking distance. The investor’s brochure for the Webster said the “location selected for Webster Hall could not be improved upon for the purpose. … A careful survey by the mortgagor has shown that these plants alone employ more single men than could be accommodated in Webster Hall.” Noted the Detroit Times: The combination of “a large population of prosperous single men and a pressing hotel shortage” was a “splendid opportunity for a bachelor hotel such as the Webster Hall. … Men, young and old, who make Webster Hall their home will have on one side of them a great avenue (Woodward), where they may take busses (sic) to any part of the city, and on the other the smooth green lawns and marble buildings of the art center.”

Lizzie Merrill Palmer was growing weary of the traffic, noise and crowds of the city. She longed for a retreat, a place where she could live as people had in the early days: simply, peacefully and on plenty of land.

It just so happened that her husband, Sen. Thomas W. Palmer, had plenty of land – a few hundred acres of it along Woodward Avenue in what was then considered the country. He had inherited it from his grandfather James Witherell, a Supreme Court judge of the Michigan Territory, and had ”played with it” since the 1860s, growing his holdings and farming the land. He kept an orchard and raised herds of cattle and Percheron horses.

In 1885, Thomas Palmer gave his wife a present: plans for a rustic log cabin, just like they used to see in the old days, built to her specifications, suitable for summering and entertaining. The Cabin, designed by upstart architecture partners George D. Mason and Zachariah Rice, was completed in 1887. (Rice later married the Palmer’s adopted daughter Grace.)

The Leland Hotel is a survivor, one of the city’s few hotels that has weathered the good times and the bad since opening April 20, 1927.

Designed by famed architects Rapp & Rapp (a rare non-theater commission for the brothers), the 20-story hotel was done in the Italian Renaissance style and faced with brick and terra cotta.

The hotel was erected on Cass and Bagley avenues, near the city’s two grandest movie palaces, the Michigan and United Artists. It also was close to Detroit’s thriving shopping district on Washington Boulevard and to Grand Circus Park. Its location helped to put the Leland in the heart of it all.

It went from a towering symbol of wealth to a towering symbol of Detroit’s decay.

Built for the city’s rich and powerful, the Lee Plaza still stands today, ravaged by the city’s poor and destitute. Like the Michigan Central Station, it is a gut-wrenching reminder of how far the city has fallen from its preposterously prosperous past. The Art Deco landmark also is the site of one of the city’s most notorious architectural heists.

Fifth Avenue comes to the Boulevard

Beautiful. Ugly. Artist canvas. Magnet for graffiti.

The Lafayette Building began its life as just another skyscraper in a skyline littered with them. It ended that life at the center of a heated preservation battle that made headlines. Many praised its architectural details; many called it a rundown old eyesore. Its windows were covered in street art, making it a target of both spray-paint-toting trespassers and critics alike.

Construction of the Lafayette Building began in 1923 on a triangular hunk of land bounded by Lafayette Boulevard, Michigan Avenue and Shelby Street. The distinguished high-rise office building would open in 1924.

The Kales Building is home to people these days, but it once was home to a retail giant: the forerunner of Kmart.

Sebastian S. Kresge achieved wealth and success almost immediately after opening his first 5- and 10-cent store on Woodward in 1899. His S.S. Kresge Co., today known as Kmart, would blossom to nearly 100 stores in a little more than a decade. Such success meant the company would soon outgrow its cramped headquarters above one of its stores. Such success called for a towering skyscraper designed by one of the best in the business.

Kresge turned to Albert Kahn to design him an 18-story, 115,000-square-foot tower at Park and Adams streets overlooking Grand Circus Park. The white-bricked building, originally dubbed the Kresge Building, opened in 1914. It was done in the Chicago School of Architecture style and had a steel-frame infrastructure and large windows to allow for as much light as possible. Kahn gave the building’s façade clean lines with Renaissance Revival and Neo-Classical touches. At the top of the tower, in the middle, KRESGE was spelled out in capital letters (this was later changed to KALES).

The Scott Memorial Fountain is the jewel of Belle Isle - and a monument to a womanizing scoundrel.

Socialite James Scott was said to have been lazy, eccentric, a prankster and a real rapscallion. He had inherited his money from his father — a successful real estate tycoon — and spent his days not working like the rest of his fellow Detroiters, but often gambling it away and being an all around man about town. He also made shrewd real estate investments that only added to his fortune. But he was a perpetual bachelor and frequently entertained women of “less moral fiber.” In his “The Buildings of Detroit: A History,” William Hawkins Ferry writes that Scott “had the reputation for being a vindictive, scurrilous misanthrope. … His enemies were legion, for he seemed to delight in feuds, lawsuits and practical jokes.”

When he died in 1910, his vast estate was left to the city to build a monument for the people. Of course, his gift came with a catch: The city also had to erect a life-size statue of himself. The issue would be locked in bitter debate for years.

Where prosperous bankers once kicked back their heels in gilded splendor, the Industrial Stevens Apartments today is home to low-income senior citizens.

In the 1920s, Detroit’s Book brothers were turning Washington Boulevard into the Fifth Avenue of the west, erecting skyscraper after skyscraper designed by architect Louis Kamper. This Art Moderne-Art Deco skyscraper was yet another part of their plan, rising 22 stories on the northeastern corner of the boulevard and Grand River Avenue.

Work on what was to be called the Industrial Morris Plan Bank Building began in March 1926, the same time work was wrapping up on another of the Book brothers’ Kamper-designed projects, the Book Tower. “The Industrial Bank building will follow completion of the Book Tower, and other projects designed to improve the boulevard are under way and will follow in order,” J.B. Book Jr., whose corporation owned the building, told the Detroit Free Press in February 1926. “As soon as the bank building is completed another structure will be started, and so on until the thoroughfare assumes a similarity to the Grand Central development in New York.”

The hotel was named after a vicious animal yet boasted a courteous staff and was regarded as the friendly home of both a tropical paradise and Tigers alike.

Jerome S. and Marcus L. Freud were running the Hotel Addison at Charlotte and Woodward, one of the largest apartment hotels in the city when it was built in 1905. Detroit was on its way to becoming an industrial powerhouse, but there would soon be a major shortage of hotel rooms. That’s because it was announced that the city’s most celebrated hotel, the Hotel Pontchartrain, would be closed on Jan. 31, 1920, and razed. Its closure meant a loss of 400 rooms in the city.

The Freuds stepped in to fill the void. When the Wolverine was announced in December 1919, it was front-page news in the Detroit Free Press. The George A. Fuller Co. began excavation and foundation work that month. The Sterling Construction Co. began erecting the structural steelwork -– fabricated by the Russel Wheel & Foundry Co. –- on Feb. 2, 1920.

Looking like something out of Europe, the Hotel Ste. Claire’s “register bore the names of most of the distinguished visitors to Detroit,” the Detroit Times once wrote.

The Ste. Claire was built at Randolph and Monroe streets in Detroit by Mayor William G. Thompson, a member of the prominent Brush family, in 1893, and it quickly became the city’s finest and most popular hotel and the center of the growing city’s social life. It also was the first fireproof hotel erected in Detroit, according to “The City of Detroit” by Clarence Monroe Burton.

It was built on the site of the Hotel Henry, built by John Henry in 1866. The Ste. Claire was one of Detroit’s swankier hotels at the time and boasted 140 rooms. It was a smaller - and cheaper - alternative to the more lavish Russell House and original Pontchartrain, which were down the road on Campus Martius. Built in the Dutch/Flemish Renaissance Revival style, the Ste. Claire looked like something out of old Europe. It was a tall and narrow building, standing eight stories. The Detroit News wrote in 1934 that the Ste. Claire was the architectural rage of its day. The architect was Henry George, and he used several thousand feet of the finest birds eye maple in its doors and frames of the parlors and the bridal suite. Its halls were lined with marble wainscoting. Out-of-town travelers would stand on its iron-railed balconies, taking in the bustling city below or across Campus Martius at Old City Hall. The hotel did not have a ballroom.

The Hotel Norton was part of a family tradition in hotel ownership that stretched back to the post-Civil War days.

The name Norton was well-regarded in the Detroit hotel industry. Milton Norton opened the Triangle Hotel in Brighton, Mich., in 1880 along a plank road on which farmers transported their milk to Detroit, a trip that often involved a detour to the Triangle. Two of Norton’s sons would follow in his footsteps. One of them, Henry Norton, operated a hotel in Holly, Mich. The other, Charles W. Norton, initially took up farming and butchering, acquiring “large muscles to power a lusty handshake,” the Detroit Free Press wrote in February 1959. Charles Norton would later get bitten by the hotel bug himself and set up shop downtown, opening the first Detroit Hotel Norton in 1900 on the northwest corner of Jefferson Avenue and Griswold. It was a four-story, simple building offering affordable rooms, a cheaper option than fancier hotels like the Pontchartrain and Cadillac hotels. At first, the Norton was a stag hotel, serving only men, and had 30 rooms. It was later enlarged to about 100 rooms. Among its amenities: hot and cold water and telephones in each room. Rates in the European plan hotel ranged from 75 cents to $1.50.

The new Norton

“I envy the chap who is lucky enough to call it home.” - an unidentified woman quoted in a 1920s advertising brochure

Not much information exists about the Hotel Fairbairn, though it is notable as one of the first hotels downtown that catered to African-American guests. The Fairbairn was announced in July 1923, and work to clear the site started at the end of that month. The eight-story building cost $1.25 million (about $16.5 million today, when adjusted for inflation) to build, and opened in 1924 on Columbia Street, just east of John R Street. Like the building, the architect of the Italian Renaissance-style structure, which featured an Indiana limestone and red-brick exterior, has been lost to time.

The story of the Hotel Detroiter is one filled with name changes, a gory gangland murder, cigarette girls falling to their doom, money troubles, hundreds of grandparents and one massive implosion.

The 12-story hotel opened Sept. 15, 1926, as the Savoy Hotel on the corner of Woodward Avenue and Adelaide Street. On the day of its opening, only five floors and 300 rooms were ready to go. The hotel, and the rest of its 800 rooms, was formally opened Oct. 16, 1926. The man in charge was A.B. Riley, managing director and secretary of the Savoy Hotel Co.

The Italian Renaissance-style building was constructed of Bedford stone and pressed brick and terra cotta trim. The price tag: $4 million, the equivalent of $46.5 million today. It was designed by Paul Kamper, the son of architect Louis Kamper. The elder Kamper is responsible for some of Detroit’s landmark buildings, such as the Book-Cadillac Hotel, the Book Tower and the David Broderick Tower.

Patrons knocking back cold ones at the Park Bar can often be overheard gossiping about one of the city’s abandoned eyesores across the street.

But this empty eyesore just so happens to be one of the city’s oldest surviving hotels.

Built in 1905 and designed by William S. Joy, the Charlevoix was intended to be an office building. Instead, it was a hotel at first but only for about 10 years. It spent a short time as an apartment building before being turned into a commercial building for various companies and unions in 1922. It was owned by the Grinnell Realty Co.

Seated in Grand Circus Park, silently watching crowds scurrying across Woodward, is a soldier who fought for his country, a mayor who saved his city, and a governor who served his state. For a generation, however, he was simply known as the “Idol of the People.”

The Hazen S. Pingree Monument honors a man who served as Detroit mayor from 1890 to 1897, leaving office only after being elected governor of Michigan. Old Ping, as he was known, was named one of the 10 best mayors in U.S. history in a poll of scholars for Melvin Holli’s 1999 book, “The American Mayor.” In it, Holli writes that Pingree’s “role as an advanced social reformer was unmatched by any big-city mayor in the last half of the 19th century.” His tough-love form of social reform, historians note, was the forerunner for the reforms of the Progressive Era. Besides his social reforms, the Republican mayor is best known for turning vacant land into vegetable patches to feed the city’s needy during the economic downturn of the 1890s.

A legend rises

It was Detroit’s first skyscraper, a building the likes — and heights — of which Michiganders had never seen. It was the cradle of Detroit law — and a monument to a guy who slaughtered cattle.

The Hammond Building’s role in ushering Detroit into the age of the skyscraper cannot be understated. The state had never seen anything like it. At 10 stories, it towered over everything else around it for years. Gawkers literally came from all over Michigan to see this architectural wonder. It was proof that Detroit was a city destined for bigger things — and bigger buildings.

The Hammond would be built on land that had belonged to former Postmaster and Judge James Abbott II, on which he had a brick Greek Revival mansion. Abbott said he hoped this land “was forever outside of and beyond the reach of business wants or business property” and “in future years there he and his children and his children’s children could have a quiet country home,” Clarence M. Burton wrote in his definitive history “City of Detroit and Michigan.”

She is known as Detroit’s Cathedral of Finance.

Originally named the Union Guardian Building, this building was created for the Union Trust Co. when it required more space after a merger with the equally huge National Bank of Commerce. It would vacate its 1895 building — designed by Donaldson & Meier — for a new structure located across the street on a block bounded by Griswold, Larned and Congress.

The commission for the building went out to Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, which chose one of its noted designers, Wirt C. Rowland, for the job. The result was a 496-foot, 40-story steel-framed building sheathed in 1.8 million orange bricks — a specially formulated shade dubbed Guardian brick by the architect. The use of brick is unusual in a building of this size from this era. Usually, granite and limestone were used, and the Guardian was the world’s tallest masonry structure when it was completed.

Among the empty commercial buildings lining Woodward is what was once a grand department store of music housed in a structure designed by Detroit’s maestro of architecture.

The Grinnell Building was built in 1908 on Woodward Avenue and designed by Albert Kahn. It was covered in a white-glazed terra cotta. He used the same effect on the Woodward Building, built in 1915 on the southwest corner of Woodward and Clifford, and the Kales Building, built as the S.S. Kresge Co. Building on Grand Circus Park in 1914. Grinnell Brothers was a giant music store that carried everything from guitar picks to organs topping $15,000. The business was founded in Ann Arbor in 1879 by Ira L. Grinnell, who started off by selling sewing machines in 1872 before adding musical instruments. Along with brothers Clayton and Herbert, Ira Grinnell opened a store in Ypsilanti before setting up shop in 1881 in an old wooden house on the east side of Woodward below Cadillac Square, 219 Woodward. The brothers added the line of Ann Arbor and Etsey organs to their stock of sewing machines. Over the years, Grinnell’s went from selling parlor organs to grand pianos to spinets. The piano business was a hit and before long, the company had outgrown their shop and moved into the Kahn-designed building up the road in 1908.

Grinnell opened a large piano manufacturing plant in Holly in Oakland County. It was billed as the world’s largest piano factory and became the world’s largest piano distributor by the mid-1950s. The company had the pianos that were made in Holly shipped to its warehouse near Tiger Stadium, at 2003 Brooklyn. Today the warehouse is known as the Grinnell Lofts. The pianos were sold only its own stores and were considered a top brand for decades.

It is a rock ‘n’ roll mecca.

Designed in 1928 by Charles N. Agree for dance hall entrepreneurs Edward J. Strata and his partner Edward J. Davis, the Grande started off as a place Detroiters would go to dance and listen to jazz and big band sounds, but it would later achieve immortal status in the annals of music history as a rock venue. It is arguably the birthplace of punk and hard-driving rock, where bands like The MC5 and The Stooges cut their chops and became legends.

The building was designed in the Moorish Deco style and contained storefront space on the first floor and on the second a ballroom with Moorish arches featuring a floor on springs that gave dancers the feeling of floating. The dance floor held 1,500 dancers and was one of the largest in the city. Its ground floor had several retail tenants, such as W.T. Grant Department Stores, Beverly’s and a drugstore. The neighborhood was a predominately Jewish enclave in the 1930s and ’40s.

Towering over the corner of Grand River and Cass is Detroit’s castle, the Grand Army of the Republic Building. While its turrets and battlements make it look like some sort of ancient fort built to defend the city from invaders, it’s origins are far more humble: It opened in 1900 to serve as a hangout for the city’s Civil War veterans.

The Grand Army of the Republic was a nationwide organization organized in 1866 by union surgeon Dr. Benjamin F. Stephenson. In 1881, the GAR had only 87,718 members; by 1890, it claimed more than 490,000. This made the organization one of the most potent political forces in American politics. To a degree, it also was one of the first highly organized group lobbying on a nationwide level. “There was a time when a GAR badge was necessary for election to any office in the North, from President to village constable,” Frank B. Woodford reminiscenced in a 1949 Detroit Free Press column. Such pulling power meant that the group had no problem pressuring the City of Detroit to build them a base of operations, the largest GAR hall ever built in Michigan.

Building Detroit a castle

The Detroit Free Press has had 14 homes since being founded in 1831, and moved into No. 13, this Albert Kahn gem on Lafayette between Washington and Cass, in 1925.

The six-story building — with a 14-story tower — was commissioned by Free Press owner E.D. Stair and cost $6 million (about $72 million in today’s dollars) to build. The construction firm of Spencer, White & Prentice was entrusted to erect Kahn’s limestone masterpiece. The Lafayette Hotel was among the building’s razed to make way for the paper’s new home.

The 288,517 square-foot building has limestone carvings by New York sculptor Ulysses Ricci, including two imposing statues of the goddesses of Commerce and Communication who guard the front doors. An arch with owls, snakes and, oddly, pelicans and seahorses is above them.

It is the long-forgotten fore-runner of Detroit’s most beloved movie palace.

The Washington Theatre opened on July 21, 1913, on the northwest corner of Washington Boulevard and Clifford. It was designed by Arland W. Johnson, who also had done the Broadway Theatre (later the Broadway Strand) around the same time.

The red-bricked Renaissance Revival theater blended in almost perfectly with the Statler Hotel, which opened next door in 1915. Many of the theater’s 1,862 seats were often filled by the Statler’s guests.

Designed and built for the Fox Films chain by C. Howard Crane in the Oriental style in 1928, this movie palace contained 5,041 seats and a unique mix of Egyptian, Far Eastern and Indian styles to create a movie palace like no other. It was built to replace the Fox Washington Theatre near Grand Circus Park, which was deemed too outdated and small at 1,862 seats.

The lobby is a half-block long and is six stories high. The Fox has two organs, a 4-manual 36-rank Wurlitzer in the auditorium and a 3-manual 13-rank Moller organ in the lobby.

The Fox opened Sept. 21, 1928, with the silent film “Street Angel.”

The Fort Shelby Hotel rose and fell with the city of Detroit — and it has risen again.

With Detroit a booming town for both industry and tourism, the Shelby was erected to meet the demand. When the city’s fortunes fell, it closed. Decades later, the hotel reopened, instilling hope that another Detroit turnaround is around the corner.

The Shelby went up in two phases. The first was in 1916, when a 10-story building went up at Lafayette Boulevard and First Street, near the city’s old Masonic Temple. The building was the only structure in Detroit done by Chicago architects Schmidt, Garden and Martin. As the city kept growing, the hotel grew with it, adding a 21-story, 450-room tower in 1927 that was designed by renowned architect Albert Kahn.

In a city with an embarrassment of architectural riches, sometimes a jewel can get overlooked or taken for granted.

The Ford Building is one such jewel.

Detroit’s second-oldest skyscraper was designed by a renowned American master, once held the title of tallest building in the city, helped save downtown’s central business district and is a lovingly restored link to an era before the Motor City was the Motor City.

The building known as “Detroit’s largest art object” has been dropping jaws in New Center for more than 80 years.

The Fisher — built by the Fisher brothers of “Body by Fisher” fame — opened Sept. 1, 1928, at Second Avenue and Grand Boulevard. Once known as the Cathedral to Commerce, the 441-foot tower is decked to the nines in fancy marbles, mosaics, soaring, painted ceilings and a whole lot of brass and bronze. This world of shops, theater, art and architectural beauty is renowned architect Albert Kahn’s masterpiece, “a superbly designed complex which displays some of the finest craftsmanship in any Art Deco style building constructed in the U.S. in the 1920s,” the National Park Service says.

Unquestionably, the golden tower of the Fisher Building is one of the most recognizable sights in Detroit’s skyline.

This seven-story building was built at the corner of Cass and Montcalm in 1926 for the distribution and booking of movies for the Detroit area. It was erected near Grand Circus Park, then the city’s theater district, having been home to the Fox, State, Capitol, Adams and Madison theaters, among others.

The building featured fireproof vaults for the nitrate films for all its tenants, and detailing such as a sculpture above the main Cass Avenue entrance, a lobby in Travertine marble and brass elevator doors.

The building was mainly occupied by unions by 1964, around the time the occupancy rates began to fall. The building closed in the mid-1970s.

The Fillmore Detroit spent much of its life as the State Theatre, opening under that name on Oct. 29, 1925. It was designed by legendary Detroit theater architect C. Howard Crane and built atop the site of the first Grand Circus Theatre, also designed by Crane.

Crane designed the 12-story, terra cotta-sheathed building in the Renaissance Revival style for theater mogul John H. Kunsky’s chain of movie houses. The theater itself is six stories tall and is in the back of the building. The theater was one of the city’s larger movie houses, seating just shy of 3,000 people. But it was a more subdued affair compared with its next door neighbor, the Crane-designed Fox Theatre.

On May 22, 1937, its name was changed to the Palms-State Theatre until 1949, when it became simply the Palms. The name comes from the building in which it is housed, the Palms Building, which was built by the Palms Realty Co. and named after prominent 19th century Detroit banker and real estate mogul Francis S. Palms.

Magnificent, majestic and massive, Detroit’s old Federal Building and Post Office was a towering palace of government that was more than three decades in the making, took seven years to build — and only 34 years to outgrow.

Today, photos of the building often drop the jaws of those who have never seen it. Detroit historian William Hawkins Ferry called it “one of the most outstanding monuments of the Romanesque Revival in Detroit.” The landmark literally dominated the northwestern corner of Shelby and West Fort streets. Everything about it was huge. Its 243-foot clock tower soared over everything else in the city for several decades and could be seen from outside of downtown. Detroiters would enter under enormous arched entrances and peer out from its giant windows. It was an impressive monument to the federal government and, in the words of Peter Gavrilovich of the Detroit Free Press in 2009, “a heck of a place to buy a 2-cent stamp.”

Cramped quarters call for a behemoth

The Farwell Building is proof that, when it comes to Detroit architecture, sometimes it’s what’s inside that counts.

The Farwell Building opened on Capitol Park on March 8, 1915. Named for Jesse Farwell, a man who made his fortune in real estate and shipping among other fields, the building was built for mixed office space use and was home to attorneys, dentists and other professionals.

It was designed by Harrie W. Bonnah of Bonnah & Chaffee and also featured elaborate ironwork by Russel Wheel and Foundry of Detroit. The interior design was done entirely by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and the brass and marble elevators were unequaled in the city.

Few buildings in 1908 Detroit could match the sheer beauty of the Empire Building.

It opened on June 1, 1908, on the southeastern corner of Griswold Street and Washington Boulevard, “the width of the boulevard permitting its architectural beauty to stand forth prominently,” Public Service Magazine wrote in October 1908.

It was designed by John Scott, the architect of the Old Wayne County Building. His 1887 Queen Anne home, at 84 E. Ferry St., still stands and is now part of the Inn at Ferry Street.

Patrons of the Eastown Theatre went from downing popcorn to downing tabs of LSD. The theater is the last survivor of Detroit’s four major neighborhood movie palaces, but its legacy was made as one of the city’s most notorious drug-infused rock venues.

With the rise of movies and the city’s fortunes in the 1920s, Detroit got a number of palatial movie palaces. And as Detroit continued to sprawl and grow, enterprising theater owners decided to bring the movie palaces to the neighborhoods. The west side got the Grand Riviera. The southwest got the Hollywood. The north got the Uptown. And the east side got the Eastown.

The Eastown opened in a largely residential area on Harper Avenue near Van Dyke at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 1, 1931, with the movie “Sporting Blood,” starring Clark Gable. Advertisements in newspapers at the time declared the theater’s opening as the “dawn of a new entertainment era” and invited Detroiters to “thrill to the glory of Detroit’s newest, finest Palace of Happiness.’” The ads also proclaimed the theater’s opening as “the most glorious event in the history of east Detroit.” Business owners and merchants in the neighborhood pitched in by decorating the surrounding streets for the grand opening.

The Detroit Yacht Club has had several homes since being formed shortly after the Civil War, but it is its current home that gives it the largest yacht club in the United States.

A small clubhouse and sailing shed were built at the foot of McDougall Street just south of Jefferson Avenue in the late 1870s. That was replaced with a clubhouse on Belle Isle that was built for $10,000 in 1891. It was lost in a fire in 1904. That facility was replaced by another clubhouse that was built atop the old one.

But with Detroit’s growing wealth came a growing membership in the DYC, and an even bigger facility was needed. The present, villa-style clubhouse opened in 1923 at a cost of $1 million (about $12 million in today’s money). Its design was entrusted to George D. Mason, the same man who built the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island and the Masonic Temple, Gem Theatre and several churches in Detroit. Mason also is considered the mentor of legendary architect Albert Kahn.

As the People Mover noisily meanders through downtown, it passes a stop with a famous name and a fading memory: Times Square, the onetime home of the Detroit Times newspaper.

The Times was first published on Oct. 1, 1900, as Detroit Today under publisher James Schermerhorn. It was sold Oct. 6, 1921, at a receiver’s sale to newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who folded the paper into his growing nationwide empire. When Hearst bought the Times, it had a daily circulation of only 26,000. A year later, it had exploded to 150,000, reaching a peak of about 440,000 daily in 1950. In mid-July 1922, Hearst added a Sunday edition of the paper, which reached a peak circulation of 625,000 people in March 1949.

Such growth demanded a bigger building, so Hearst commissioned renowned architect Albert Kahn to design his newspaper a palace, much like other owners had for the Detroit News (built in 1917) and the Detroit Free Press (1912 and a successor in 1925). And Kahn would not disappoint. The stunning Art Deco home of the Detroit Times arose at Cass Avenue and Times Square, and was dedicated to much fanfare on Dec. 6, 1929. Among those giving speeches were owner William Randolph Hearst and Gov. Fred W. Green. Some of the attendees included Kahn, Henry and Edsel Ford, local poet Edgar Guest, General Motors President Alfred P. Sloan and members of other prominent Detroit families, such as Briggs, Booth, Crowley, Fisher, Joy, Himelhoch and Scripps.

The old Detroit Museum of Art was known as Detroit’s cradle of culture, albeit its time as a museum lasted less than 40 years. Still, its impact on the city’s history cannot be underestimated.

As the forefather of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Art brought culture to the city and masterpieces to the masses. Many of the pieces now housed in the DIA were acquired and originally housed within the old museum’s walls.

Before the museum opened, Detroiters would attend “art loan exhibitions,” more or less touring museums. The Detroit Art Loan Exhibition’s success in 1883 led to the creation of a board to start a permanent art museum in the city. Donating money to the cause were some of Detroit’s biggest names, including Russell A. Alger, Sen. Thomas Palmer and James E. and George H. Scripps. The Detroit Museum of Art was founded March 25, 1885, and incorporated a month later on April 16. An eight-month fund-raising campaign saw 1,919 people donate more than $100,000 (nearly $3 million today). On March 21, 1886, a jubilant headline in the Detroit Free Press proclaimed, “It is Raised!”

Designed by architects Arnold & Shreve, The Detroit Life Building, with it’s neo-classical style opened to the public in 1923.

Detroit Life Insurance occupied the top four floors. Other original tenants included the Library Bureau and Zimmer Keller Institute.

The building was also occupied by real estate, insurance and construction agencies and retail shops lined the street level space. It officially closed it’s doors in 1977 and became a part of the Park Avenue Historic District in May of 1997.

She may not look like much on the outside, but the David Whitney Building is one of the most important structures in Detroit.

First, it is one of only three surviving buildings in Detroit by the renowned architectural firm of Daniel H. Burnham & Co. Burnham is considered one of the most important American architects of all time. Second, the building’s atrium lobby is one of the most jaw-dropping in the city, a veritable terra cotta smorgasbord. And lastly, it is one of the increasingly few landmarks ringing Grand Circus Park.

Meet David Whitney

A towering Art Deco structure honoring Detroit’s flour king, the David Stott Building stretches 38 stories above Capitol Park at the corner of State and Griswold streets.

Construction began on June 1, 1928. The tower cost $3.5 million to build - the equivalent of $46.3 million today, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Stott opened on June 17, 1929, on what had been the sites of the Garrick Theatre, Hodges Building and the Whitney Office Building. It was designed by the architectural firm of Donaldson & Meier, though Henry Meier had died more than a decade earlier. The general contractor was the Martin & Krausmann Co.

Crowley’s was one of Detroit’s Big Three of downtown retailers and Hudson’s fiercest rival in the department store business. Generations of Detroiters glided down its famous wooden escalator and suited themselves in the latest fashions within the gorgeous building.

The building’s story began in 1901, when Williard E. Pardridge and Henry Blackwell teamed up to open a department store bearing their names. Pardridge & Blackwell - note that the name is often misspelled as “Partridge” – occupied a small store in the Majestic Building on Campus Martius, but quick success and a hunger for more led to grander plans. The company hired the architectural firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls to design them a new department store as beautiful as it was huge. Its new six-story Beaux Arts building opened in 1906 and covered part of the block from Gratiot to Monroe and extended from Farmer Street east for half a block. On the store’s roof were huge heart shapes with the initials “P&B” in them. Their size and the height of the building itself served as a beacon to let Detroiters now where the fashions were at. Inside, Detroiters could peruse floor after floor of luxurious clothes and other merchandise imported from Europe. Unfortunately for P&B, it built at the wrong time: A year after opening, the Panic of 1907 struck, and the firm’s enormous new store proved to be more than the partners could manage to keep afloat. The company’s struggles were chalked up by many at the time to poor management.

Rising from the ashes

The Col. Frank J. Hecker House is one of the remaining handful of elegant mansions that once lined Woodward Avenue, and has stayed mostly unchanged for nearly 120 years as the city has wildly change around it.

The mansion was built for one of Detroit’s most notable 19th century citizens, Col. Frank Joseph Hecker. Hecker was born on July 9, 1846, in Freedom, Mich., near Ann Arbor. His family moved to St. Louis, Ill., where he joined the Union army and served in the Civil War. After the war, he worked for the Union Pacific Railway and other smaller railroads in New York. It was during his work with the railroads that Hecker met Charles Lang Freer. The two would become lifelong friends, business associates and eventually neighbors, with Freer building his shingle-style home behind Hecker’s chateau on East Ferry. Freer’s extensive Asian art collection is now part of the Smithsonian.

The Hecker mansion was built between 1889 and 1892 and designed by architect Louis Kamper while he was with the firm Scott, Kamper and Scott. Kamper, who was trained by legendary architects McKim, Mead and White, is best known for his commercial work in Detroit. Among Kamper’s best known works are the Book-Cadillac Hotel, the Book Tower, Broderick Tower and the Water Board Building. Kamper designed the home to resemble a 16th Century French chateau. The inspiration was the Château de Chenonceau, near Tours, France, fitting considering Detroit’s French roots. The home cost $144,936.54 (about $3.5 million today, when adjusted for inflation) for the house, design fees, the carriage house, carpets and décor. Another $19,990.14 ($480,000 today) was spent on furnishings.

St. Anthony Cathedral is a shining beacon surrounded by darkness.

All around the proud 1902 Romanesque landmark, burned-out homes and vacant lots dot the landscape. The notorious Packard Plant — which could be the biggest, most infamous example of urban blight in the country - has killed the nearby neighborhoods like a cancer spreading from street to street.

Yet St. Anthony endures.

The Cass Theatre was a leading lady in the city’s entertainment business, one of many theaters that dotted the Detroit landscape.

The Cass Theatre was designed by Herbert J. Krapp and had been added onto the existing, Donaldson & Meier-designed Board of Commerce Building on the northwest corner of Lafayette and Washington Boulevard, across from the Free Press Building. The theater would host many of the stars of the stage, help usher in the era of Cinerama and end its run reduced to showing pornographic movies.

Building a foundation

In a city filled with factories pumping out automobiles, Cass Tech High School was a factory of learning, where students were taught to use their hands, as well as their heads.

More than 50,000 students graduated from it, and hundreds of thousands of others walked its halls. Among the distinguished students who wandered the old Cass Tech’s halls: singer Diana Ross, comedians Lily Tomlin and David Alan Greer, auto executive John DeLorean, former Miss USAs Carol Gist and Kenya Moore, violinist Regina Carter, jazz musicians Donald Byrd and Earl Kluge, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Compuware CEO Peter Karmanos. Aviator Charles Lindbergh’s mother, Evangeline Lindbergh, taught chemistry at Cass from 1922 until 1942.

A site rich with education history

Tucked into a corner on a side street off Woodward sits an old hotel, reclaimed from the scrappers and turned into new luxury homes in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

The Carlton was designed by Detroit architect Louis Kamper, whose most famous works include the Broderick and Book towers. The building is an important piece of Detroit’s architectural history because it served as a proving ground for Kamper to evolve his style in hotel design. The Carlton was Kamper’s 12th major commission, and his firm’s first documented hotel project. On his blueprints for the structure, Kamper has the name spelled Carleton, with an E. When it opened in 1923, however, it was dubbed the Carlton Plaza Hotel.

Its façade design is a combination of Beaux Arts and the Chicago School. Its appearance has unique visual characteristics and balancing elements; elements that are not found on other Kamper projects. The layout of the hotel itself was done in a “U” shape, which Kamper went on to use for his Book-Cadillac Hotel. This shape allowed every guest room to have an outside view, which was not yet a common feature in hotel design. The hotel’s guest rooms also came equipped with individual baths, again another feature that was uncommon at the time.

The Cadillac Square Building was one of Louis Kamper’s lesser known designs - but arguably his most beautiful.

The Gothic Revival-style building was designed in 1918 and opened the following year as the Real Estate Exchange Building. The building was located near the Barlum Hotel Tower, or Cadillac Tower as it is called today. As its name implied, the building housed mostly property-related businesses, such as the Detroit Mortgage Corp., which was on the tower’s third floor.

Between 1922 and 1940, the name changed from the Real Estate Exchange Building to Cadillac Square Building.

In its time, the Cadillac Hotel was one of Detroit’s finest hotels and stood on the corner of Washington Boulevard and Michigan Avenue from 1888 until 1923. Presidents Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft all stayed there.

The corner has been home to a hotel since the completion of Blindbury’s Hotel in 1852, which later became the Antisdel House. The Cadillac Hotel’s origins date back to 1885, when Daniel Scotten bought the east half of the block on the north side of Michigan between Washington and Shelby. On that site he built a four-story business block between Washington and Shelby that was rented to a grocery company that soon failed. It was then that he converted it into the Cadillac Hotel in 1888. The structure, with its Italianate and Romanesque style, proved successful, so he bought and razed the Antisdel next to it and built an addition to the hotel on top of it.

By 1891, the Cadillac Hotel covered the entire block fronting on Michigan between Washington and Shelby. At this point the boulevard was mostly residential, but times were changing. The Book brothers — real estate moguls Herbert, Frank and James Burgess Book Jr. — were looking to turn the thoroughfare into the exclusive, fashionable shopping district of Detroit and started snatching up property along it.

It could be one of the weirdest monument ever.

To celebrate Detroit’s 200th birthday, it was decided to build … a giant stone chair.

To mark Detroit’s bicentennial, city officials planned to erect a 220-foot marble column on Belle Isle with a natural-gas light at the top. It was to be 24 feet wide and be decorated with statues of icons in Detroit history. The price tag? About $1 million. Some things never change, and public opposition to the frivolous use of tax dollars is one of them, so the city opted to go with a cheaper option: a large, red sandstone chair.

The Broderick Tower went from being “a beauty by day—a jewel by night” to the third-tallest abandoned building in the United States — and is now poised to be a towering symbol of Detroit’s rebirth.

One of the city’s most recognizable buildings, the skyscraper opened in 1927 as the Eaton Tower, named for what was then one of Detroit’s most recognizable families. Theodore H. Eaton came to Detroit in 1838 and invested his savings in a run-down drug store that had folded in the Panic of 1837. At the time, Detroit was just an out-of-the-way frontier town of about eight thousand, but the 23-year-old Eaton had pioneering in his blood: He was a direct descendant of Thomas Eaton, who helped settle the New World in 1660.

Eaton bought the Riley and Ackerly drug store in the American Hotel block, located at Jefferson and Randolph near where the city’s landmark Renaissance Center is today. A few years later, the building housing his store burned down. He moved into new quarters only to lose that one to fire, too. But Eaton would not be deterred and erected himself a warehouse at Woodward and Atwater — and this time he built it fireproof.

The Book-Cadillac glistens above Washington Boulevard, a towering symbol of Detroit’s latest attempts at a renaissance. For decades, it was the city’s most opulent hotel and - after nearly 25 years of abandonment and blight - has reclaimed its throne.

The building’s history, like much of the city’s historic architecture, begins in the 1920s. The Book brothers were seeking to make Washington Boulevard the most opulent, most successful retail destination in Detroit. By 1923, the siblings had built the Washington Boulevard Building and the Book Building and had already cornered much of the real estate on the boulevard. But the Statler Hotel, which opened Feb. 6, 1915, anchored their boulevard on the north and was drawing their tourists. The brothers decided they needed a hotel of their own.

A Cadillac dies so another may rise

She’s one of a kind. Some might even say beautiful in its ugliness.

No skyscraper in Detroit, let alone the Midwest, looks quite like the Book Tower on Washington Boulevard. It’s a rather awkward-looking building, whether you look at its unusual maze of an external fire escape or the intricate, over-the-top details on its crown that are tough to appreciate without a pair of binoculars. It’s an undeniably unique piece of the city’s skyline and a rare breed of classical Renaissance-style architecture and skyscraper. As an added bonus, joined at its hip is one of the city’s oldest surviving office buildings.

The Book Building

The Board of Commerce Building is perhaps best remembered among Detroiters for the Cass Theatre, which was housed under the same roof.

The Board of Commerce was formally organized June 30, 1903. It had occupied three rooms in the Hammond Building on Campus Martius for a few months before spending a couple of years in the State Bank Building. At the end of the three-year lease, the bank decided it didn’t have the room to spare, and the board was looking for new quarters.

In early 1907, the board shelled out $45,000 (about $1 million today, when adjusted for inflation) for the home of Dr. William Brodie on Lafayette and Washington Boulevard, a thoroughfare then known as Wayne. The board used the house until 1912, when the organization decided it needed even more room to grow. That year, Brodie’s house was flattened and construction started on what would come to be known as the Board of Commerce Building.

Detroit’s celebrated siblings, the Belle Isle Aquarium and the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory, opened together on Aug. 18, 1904. The two landmarks, designed by renowned architect Albert Kahn fascinated and delighted generations of Detroiters. At the time of its closure in 2005, the aquarium was the longest continuously running aquarium in the United States and the only aquarium in Michigan.

An Italian flavor

Clarence M. Burton, in his history on the city of Detroit, attributes the idea of an aquarium to Rep. David E. Heineman, who had visited Naples, Italy, and studied that city’s Anton Dorhn Aquarium. Heineman, who had earlier been the city’s chief assistant attorney, introduced a bill in the Legislature to provide funding for the conservatory and aquarium. The act authorized that $150,000 in bonds be issued (about $3.7 million today) was passed on May 26, 1899. It just hinged on a vote of the people, which gave its support. The bonds were issued March 1, 1900, and the money was placed in the city treasury for building the two landmarks.

The Bagley Memorial Fountain was Detroit’s first public drinking fountain, created in 1887 with money from the estate of John Judson Bagley.

Bagley was a New York tobacconist who came to Detroit in 1846. He helped organize the Michigan Mutual Life Insurance Co. and the Republican Party, and served as Michigan’s governor from 1873 to 1876. Bagley’s house on Grand Circus Park was razed in 1913 to make way for the Statler Hotel.

When he died in 1881 at age 49, his will called for the construction of a drinking fountain for the people of Detroit that would provide “water cold and pure as the coldest mountain stream.”

If Belle Isle is Detroit’s crown, then the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory is its brightest emerald, full of brilliant green ferns, palms and cacti and plant life from all over the world.

The conservatory, opened in the center of the island on Aug. 18, 1904, the same day as its next door neighbor, the Belle Isle Aquarium. Both were designed by Albert Kahn, who for the conservatory turned to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello for inspiration. It sits on 13 acres and features a lily pond on its north side and is fronted by formal perennial gardens on the west. These gardens are home to the Levi L. Barbour Memorial Fountain. For the first 51 years of its existence, the building was known as simply the Conservatory or the Horticulture Building. Today, the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory is the oldest, continually operating conservatory in the United States.

The building covers about an acre and has five areas, each housing a different climate, and features a north wing and a south wing and a 100,600 cubic feet dome 85 feet high to accommodate soaring palms and other tropical plants. The north wing houses hundreds of cacti and desert plants, and just beyond that is a room packed with ferns from floor to ceiling. The south is home to hundreds of tropical plants and the Children’s Christian Temperance Fountain. The collection also includes perennial gardens and displays of annuals. The show house, remodeled in 1980, features a continuous display of blooming plants.

Major Gen. Alpheus Starkey Williams sits atop his horse in the middle of Belle Isle, checking a map as his steed seems to saunter toward downtown.

Williams, a Detroiter, was a congressman, a judge, a lawyer, a postmaster, a newspaper publisher and a failed gubernatorial candidate, but he made a name for himself in the military, serving in the Mexican-American War and for the Union in the Civil War.

He was born Sept. 20, 1810, in Saybrook, Conn., and went on to graduate from Yale College in 1831 and moved to Detroit in 1836 to practice law and enlisted in the local militia. He became a Wayne County probate judge in 1840, serving until 1844, when he became the editor of the Detroit Daily Advertiser until 1847. It was at this point that he left the city to serve in the Mexican-American War as a lieutenant colonel of the First Michigan Infantry on Dec. 8, 1847. After being mustered out on July 29, 1848, Williams returned to Detroit and became the city’s postmaster from 1849-1853. In 1861, he was commissioned a brigadier general and, four years later, a brevetted major general. The majorly mustachioed Detroiter would go on to see action in some of the Civil War’s key battles.

Stoically standing in the middle of Washington Boulevard is the statue of Gen. Alexander Macomb, a hero in the War of 1812 and longtime 19th century military leader in Detroit.

Macomb was born in Detroit - then British-held territory - into a wealthy family on April 3, 1782. His family owned wide swaths of real estate, including much of Macomb County, Belle Isle and Grosse Ile. His father, also named Alexander Macomb, was a wealthy merchant, land owner and business partner of John Jacob Astor.

Instead of a comfortable life, Macomb joined the U.S. Army in 1799 and would make a name for himself during the War of 1812 as a brigadier general at the Battle of Plattsburgh in New York in September 1814. His forces were vastly outnumbered by the British, nearly 10 to 1, and he tricked them into dead ends and narrow areas and wiped them out. As chief Army engineer, Macomb pushed the building of military roads in the Great Lakes region. In 1814, Macomb received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor given by the federal government to an individual, for his “gallantry and good conduct” in the battle. He was promoted to major general for his efforts, and was bumped up until being named the commanding general of the U.S. Army in May 1828.

Nestled among the hotels and office buildings dominating the west side of Grand Circus Park was an unusual theater designed by a master, built by a Detroit movie tycoon and torn down by a pizza maker.

The Adams Theatre was a 1,770-seat theater designed by famed architect C. Howard Crane as a playhouse for John Kunsky’s chain of entertainment venues. It opened Sept. 1, 1917, with a stage performance called “Romance.” Within a year, however, the Adams was converted into a movie theater and would spend almost its entire life as a major movie house. The alley-jumper One of the things that made the Adams so different was how its lobby was separated from the theater’s auditorium. The Adams was a so-called alley-jumper, with its entrance in the Fine Arts Building on Grand Circus Park. The Fine Arts, built in 1905 and designed by Louis Kamper, was well-established by the time the Adams opened 12 years later. The theater itself was on Elizabeth, across from the State Theatre (now known as the Fillmore Detroit). Patrons would enter the lobby through the Fine Arts and buy their tickets and concessions. Balcony patrons would then go up some stairs and cross an enclosed sky bridge over an alley into the auditorium, while main floor guests would go down steps and through a tunnel underneath the alley.

Grand Circus Park was a desirable and high-priced piece of real estate at the time, so by having a narrow, small entrance on the park and the large theater on a side street, Kunksy got the prestigious address without the high cost. It was one of only three known alley-jumpers in the city.

For nearly 100 years, Old City Hall was the center of life in Detroit. Today, it’s merely another piece of its forgotten past. Put simply, Detroit has suffered no greater loss architecturally or of its history — and its story proves that no other building in that history has been so loved yet so reviled.

The old Old City Hall

Detroit was still a small but growing city of only 12.75 square miles in the late 1850s when plans were made to build a majestic landmark where the future of a booming, sprawling metropolis would be born. The city’s government was operating out of a small structure on the east side of Campus Martius then. What would become the city’s old Old City Hall was built in 1835 in the middle of what was then called Michigan Grand Avenue at a cost of $14,747 (about $610,000 today). It was tiny: only 50 feet by 100 feet – and originally served double duty as a market (the lower part had stalls for selling meat until 1856). The building was sold for $1,025 and torn down in November 1872, a year and a half after its successor would open.