Lee Plaza Hotel
The Lee Plaza Hotel's ballroom echoes with the grandeur of the building's heyday.
Updated June 16, 2022 | By Matthew Christopher
There really wasn’t much left of the Lee Plaza Hotel in Detroit by the time I got there to photograph it in 2009. Floor after floor revealed an unprecendented level of vandalism and theft that had reduced the interior of what was once an architectural masterpiece to near anonymity; not only were all the windows gone, but the frames were as well. Walls had been bashed open to gut the copper wiring and pipes. Floors were invisible beneath rubble that once was the ceiling and the walls, and weeds sprouted from the debris. The green copper roof had been peeled off, presumably in broad daylight, and sold for scrap. Plaster had been torn from the walls, doors pried from their hinges, and even the support columns had been stripped to little more than concrete and rebar. Graffiti covered nearly every surface, the roof had caved in, and everything that could be broken was. While the façade still retained some of the beautiful terra cotta tile work covering the first two floors, and one of the urns capping the entryway had yet to be smashed, there was a sense that Lee Plaza would soon become unrecognizable, its telltale markings overtaken by disorder and decay.
It was hard to believe that the building, and by extension the city around it, had ever been anything else. Of the major American cities, Detroit was hit the hardest by deindustrialization. Once the fourth largest city in the United States and the symbol of America’s dominance in the automotive industry, it is now emblematic of the challenges faced by cities when residents flee by the tens of thousands to suburbs, and when the tent pole industries that support them are overtaken by overseas competition. In 2009, the year I visited the Lee Plaza Hotel, the city’s unemployment rate was at 28% (though the mayor suggested the actual jobless rate was closer to 50%). Despite efforts to ‘restructure’ in a series of moves that only closed more auto plants and dealerships, the bleak outlook seemed to get worse by the month. I had never seen so many abandoned houses in one area, and even in the middle of a weekday the downtown seemed more like a ghost town. At night from my hotel room window I could see enormous dead skyscrapers jutting up from the skyline with empty, lightless windows like multistory mausoleums. The city’s boosters stated, perhaps correctly, that not enough attention was being given to positive efforts to restore the area’s economy, and they angrily rebuked photographers coming to the city only to photograph derelict buildings.
Still, how could you not? At what point in the history of the United States has there ever been such a spectacle of waste and neglect? From the point of its founding in 1701 to the glory days when it was known as the Paris of the West, Detroit and the surrounding area had never seen such a dire situation. The city’s budget was unable to support the needs even for basic infrastructure. Children in the floundering school system were being asked to bring their own toilet paper because the schools couldn’t afford to provide it themselves. As someone who hopes to document something symbolic of the times we live in, what city could be more relevant? And a photographer born into a sort of slow motion horror story in which the phenomenon of urban decline and deterioration have been allowed to devour entire metropolises, how could I not see it firsthand, if not just to be sure of its reality?
The entrance to the Lee Plaza Hotel in Detroit still shows a bit of the building's original ornamentation.
In the 1900 census, Detroit didn’t even make the list of top ten largest cities, but between 1910 and 1920 the explosion of growth in its automobile industry caused the city’s population to double. By 1930 Detroit looked about ready to steal the #3 spot from Philadelphia. It was in the midst of this boom that the Lee Plaza Hotel was born. It was to be the crowning achievement – as well as the eventual downfall – of Detroit builder Ralph T. Lee, who less than a decade earlier was making $50 a week as an engraver. Sensing opportunity in the influx of residents, Lee quit his job and entered real estate, focusing his construction efforts on apartments. His rise to prominence and wealth came quickly; in ten years he had made over $1 million and had a lavish fifth floor office at the General Motors Building. In less than twenty years he owned more than 30 buildings. Lee built and built, and the apartments quickly filled.
Noted Detroit architect Charles Noble was selected to design a building Lee hoped would rival the beautiful apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue in New York City. For $2.5 million, the Lee Plaza Hotel would become a 17-story art deco work of art for a wealthy, sophisticated young demographic who would appreciate all of the amenities of hotel living in their luxurious apartments. The building contained a beauty parlor, library, child care area, game room, flower shop, and grocery store, and the doors had a unique compartment called a Servidor that allowed staff to collect clothing for dry cleaning without bothering a room’s occupants. According to Dan Austin’s excellent Lost Detroit: Stories Behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins, “The first floor was filled with marble, expensive woods and elaborate plasterwork; its ornamental ceilings craned necks. Upon entering the magnificent Italian-style lobby, guests were immediately surrounded by jaw-dropping frescos and Italian marble… Continuing on, you would enter the Peacock Alley, an 88-foot corridor leading from the lobby to the back of the building that had a hand-painted barrel ceiling and mirrored walls. Large comfy chairs and elegant tables and lamps lined the walls, making the alley a comfortable place to kick back and relax with a book.” It also boasted an opulent ballroom with four chandeliers, a balcony for an orchestra, and a dining room that was one of the finest in Detroit.
In the five years after its grand opening in 1927, the Lee Plaza Hotel had been sold to a company that fell behind on payments and passed through the hands of several other companies acting as receivers. Ralph T. Lee wound up as the building’s manager, but his handsome salary and suspiciously abundant perks led to a court battle in which Lee was evicted from the five apartments at the Lee Plaza Hotel that he had been occupying and was ordered to pay restitution. Many more of Lee’s unethical practices came to light, and by 1935 the hotel was bankrupt and mired in legal battles that would drag out for years while the value of the hotel itself dwindled. These courtroom clashes, compounded with a changing clientele and the fact that residential hotels had lost popularity, drained the Lee Plaza. It limped along until it was sold to the city in 1969 and converted into low income senior housing, a solution Detroit was turning to with many of its insolvent apartments and hotels. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, but couldn’t remain viable even in its role as senior housing. As the city’s budget emptied a decision was made to close the Lee Plaza in 1997, and the free fall began.
Very little remains in the apartments to give a sense of who was once there.
It didn’t take long for vandals to begin the process of destroying the Lee Plaza Hotel. Though it was in good condition when it closed, it was poorly protected. One of the earliest and most visible casualties were the 56 terra cotta lion heads that were ripped from the exterior. Shortly after, they were found in the fashionable neighborhood of Edgewater in Chicago, built into high-end condos. Indignation over the theft crescendoed when the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois (LPCI) praised the row house development for “carefully balancing historic and contemporary architectural features” and gave it a preservation award. When the police and FBI were involved, between 20 and 30 of the lions’ heads were returned, but rather than restore them to the Lee Plaza Hotel, they were placed in storage. Though Greene & Proppe Design of Chicago, the architecture firm who built the condos, headlined the project “Detroit Lions Invade Chicago” in their newsletter, they claimed they weren’t aware that the lions were stolen. The warehouse they were purchased from, Architectural Artifacts, who bought them from an unidentified dealer at an antique fair, also claimed ignorance of their origins. The LCPI rescinded the award, but over $2 million in damage had been done to the Lee Plaza. “Decorating with stolen objects… wins awards,” Casey Costen observed in The Detroit Times.
After the roof was stripped in 2005, it appeared as though the only possible outcome for the hotel would be an eventual demolition, which is, in a case like this, a painfully explicit acknowledgment of Detroit’s inability to care for the architectural treasures built during its heyday. Tragic as that would be, it also was one of the least of the city’s problems: struggling under the weight of an $18.5 billion debt, Detroit entered Chapter 9 bankruptcy proceedings in 2013. It was the largest American city ever to do so.
After 16 months, a deal was reached and the city emerged. With a new mayor, rising auto sales, new investors, and a declining crime rate, there is hope in Detroit. After several stillborn efforts to rehabilitate the Lee Plaza Hotel, developer Craig Sasser announced plans to purchase the Lee Plaza from the city of Detroit in November 2015. Sasser plans for it to become a 200 unit luxury apartment building that will open in 2017. Though doubts had been expressed about the building’s structural integrity, Sasser states the foundation is still sound. It remains to be seen whether the project will be successful, but there is more optimism about it than there has been surrounding any previous plan for the building. “When you’re a developer, you have to have faith,” Sasser was quoted as saying in an interview with Kirk Pinho of Crain’s Detroit Business. “We are not going in building an oasis in the middle of the desert. We are going to build stuff all around it and improve the area.”
Nobody can see the future, and the project could be yet another failure or a surprising victory for the Lee. At one point long ago, the Lee Plaza was the tallest building on the boulevard, and a beacon was installed on its roof to light the sky and guide pilots. My hope is that it can be a beacon again, and show that despite decades of hardships, better days are ahead for Motor City.
The Lee Plaza Hotel is a chapter in my book, Abandoned America: Dismantling the Dream.
Buy a signed copy via this link or get it on Amazon using the link below to read more!
Listen to the new Abandoned America podcast here!
Join us on Patreon for high quality photos, ad-free exclusive content, and book previews
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|