This handsome building was once a dormitory and school for nurses.

On Jan. 15, 1924, the Detroit Free Press reported that Henry Ford Hospital would erect a nurses home and training school designed by architect Albert Kahn. The project was announced by Edsel B. Ford, son of Henry and Clara Ford. At the time, it was also announced that it would be named in honor of Clara Bryant Ford.

“Those connected with the Ford Hospital have felt for some time that there was an obligation owing to the nursing profession and that a school where students could learn their trade in ideal surroundings should be provided,” the Free Press reported Jan. 15, 1924.

Its cost was estimated at $1.5 million, the equivalent of about $28 million in 2025, when adjusted for inflation. Excavation had actually begun in September 2023, and the building was hoped to open in the fall of 2024.

The Georgian Revival-style building extends 260 feet along Byron Street and stands six stories in the center with five-story wings on each side stretching back 153 feet. It was to be sheathed in brick with limestone trim.

“The nurses’ home will be one of the largest of its kind in the world,” Edsel Ford said at the time of the announcement. “We owe something to the nursing profession and we wish to offer this unusual opportunity to young women desiring to take up this work.”

The Clara Ford Nurses Home had 309 single-room living quarters. Students enrolled in a tuition-free, three-year program. Each got a 10-foot-by-16-foot room with its own tiled bathroom, all of them were uniformly finished and had “every possible home comfort and convenience,” the Free Press said. Each room got a bed, a dresser, a writing desk, a table, chairs and a bedside table. The rooms were grouped about central entrances and each group had its own kitchenette.

The first floor had a large reception hall and eight parlors where the nursing students could entertain friends or family. Other amenities included a 20-by-50-foot lounge; a library; dining, music, mail, laundry and sewing rooms; a dietetic laboratory; information desk; two tennis courts; and a sunken garden in back between the two wings.

It was said that Clara Ford worked with Kahn on the design of the home and took a personal interest in its development.

“The Clara Ford Nurses’ Home has been particularly designed to give students the advantages of home life,” a 1924 brochure for the school read. “The home is so constructed that each floor is provided with sufficient separation from large groups. Each floor contains three sections. Each section has an elevator, a porch, common sitting room, sewing room, and a kitchenette. With this arrangement the traditional dormitory corridor is removed.”

While the students lived in the large nurses home, they added classes in a separate education building that was built as part of the complex. Officially called the Henry Ford Hospital School of Nursing & Hygiene, this two-story building measures about 50 by 120 feet and is connected to the nurses home via an underground tunnel. It stands at the Bethune Avenue entrance to the hospital grounds. The ground floor had two handball courts and a swimming pool. The main floor held classrooms, lecture halls, a reference library, administrative offices, demonstration rooms and chemistry bacteriology and biology labs. The second floor was a 700-seat auditorium that also could be used as a gym.

In addition to the medical curriculum, elective opportunities were offered in art, athletics, literature, music and “domestic economy.”

“Such broadening of the curriculum, it is believed, will further raise the high standards of the profession by developing more understanding companions for the sick,” the Detroit Free Press wrote Aug. 10, 1924, ahead of the building’s opening.

When it opened in January 1925, the first class had about 100 women enrolled, and 60 more applications were already accepted for the second. Classes were enrolled each September and January.

The nurses home and education building were not dedicated until June 17, 1925. The event was held inside the education building’s second-floor auditorium. Henry and Clara Ford, Edsel and Eleanor Ford, public health professor C.E.A. Winslow of Yale University; the Rev. W.D. Maxon of Christ Episcopal Church; Henry Ford Hospital Superintendent W.L. Graham and various members of the hospital staff attended.

Surprisingly, Winslow was the only person to speak during the program. "The half century from 1873 to 1922 has been a period of rapid growth in the volume of nursing education," he said, "but progress in quality was far less satisfactory than increase in quantity. Leaders in the nursing profession fought for higher standards, but it is well known that standards still are too low."

Winslow told the crowd that there were 12,000 nurses in the country, but that the United States needed at least 50,000 - one for every 2,000 people.

"It is for such schools that the institutions you dedicate today may well prove a model and an inspiration, but the place which the Henry Ford school will hold in the history of nursing will depend on the use which is made of these magnificent facilities, the caliber of instructors and pupils, breath and soundness of progress and honesty of educational purpose. ... If this building is to be justified, its energies must be focused upon one end - the maximum possible educational development of the eager young minds entrusted to its care. ... No hospital can render adequate service without good graduate nurses such as only a first-class school can train."

The completion of the nurses' home brought Henry Ford Hospital to nine buildings with a capacity of 600 patients. From the date of its opening on Oct. 1, 1915, to May 1925, the hospital was said to have operated at a loss of $2.4 million, the equivalent of about $44.8 million in 2025, which was personally covered by Henry and Clara Ford.

Students came from all over the United States and Canada. The curriculum included rotations in medicine, hygiene and sanitation, chemistry, and dietetics. along with physical education classes and cultural activities like theater and glee club. Most of the instructors in the early years were doctors from the hospital next door.

In 1977, the film "The Betsy" - starring Laurence Olivier, Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones - was filmed at the school.

In 1977, two of Detroit's oldest nursing schools announced that they were closing their doors, at Harper and Grace hospital. Despite the two hospitals having merged in 1973, the schools remained separate because one was a two-year program and the other was three. Both were financially struggling. The Harper Hospital School of Nursing graduated its last class in June 1979; Grace Hospital School of Nursing saw its final class graduate in April 1980.

The national trend at the time was toward phasing out diploma-granting nursing schools in favor of college degree programs. Indeed, the American Nursing Association recommended at the time that nursing education take place in institutions of higher learning. This left Henry Ford Hospital’s school and the Mercy College of Nursing as the only two such institutions left in the city.

The 1970s also saw major changes at Henry Ford Hospital’s nursing school. Most of the school’s students were choosing to commute rather than live in the dorm, and the program changed from three years to two around this time. The last cohort to live in the Clara Ford Nurses Home was the class of 1978. That September, the nursing school moved into the New Center Pavilion, formerly a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, on West Grand Boulevard and Third Avenue. The school continued training students until 1996, when it graduated its final class. In its 71 years of operation, the school graduated more than 5,000 students. By the 1980s, the old nurses home was being called the Clara Ford Pavilion.

Today, the Clara Ford Pavilion is home to Henry Ford Health's sleep center and other offices and departments.