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.
Ralph T. Lee made a fortune in real estate in the city, rising from making $1.50 a day in a furniture store to having a fortune worth more than $6 million before the Depression, a whopping $75 million today, when adjusted for inflation. In October 1919, Lee left his job as an engraver with the J.B. VanAlstyne Engraving Co. and his $50-a-week salary to enter the real estate business and start building Detroit apartment houses. Lee was a natural and quickly became one of Detroit's best-known builders. He dazzled clients in his fifth-floor office in the General Motors Building (today known as Cadillac Place) that was decorated with "thick rugs, hung tapestries and furnished with tall, baronial chairs," and he sat behind a mahogany "desk whose area rivals that of a billiard table," the Detroit News wrote in February 1927.
In 1940, the Detroit Free Press called him "Detroit's most spectacular real estate operator" during the 1920s. By making more than $1 million in 10 years ($15.5 million today), the Detroit News wrote in February 1927 that "in the building and real estate journals, the rise of Ralph T. Lee is spoken of as 'meteroic.' The adjective is not misused."
By 1935, Lee had built more than 30 hotels and apartment buildings. Among his roster: the Lee Crest; the Wager Terrace; the Orpha Mae Apartments -- named after his wife -- on West Chicago Boulevard; the Bohr Apartments in Highland Park; the Lee Manor; and the Margaret Lee, Elmhurst, Glen, Doherty, Burlingame and Tanton apartments. Hundreds upon hundreds of Detroiters were living in Lee's buildings.
The I-shaped, steel-and-reinforced-concrete building is one of the more dazzling Art Deco buildings in the city. The first two floors of the exterior are faced with stone, and its orange-glazed brick the rest of the way up. The Lee features Mediterranean flourishes and originally had a French chateau-esque roof of red Spanish tile and ornamental lightning rods. The tile was later replaced with a green copper roof. Among the elaborate ornamentation on the exterior: large urns and the sides were dotted with ornately carved lion heads.
The Lee would become preservationists' Alamo when more than 50 terra cotta lion heads adorning its exterior were stolen in late 2000 or early 2001. Outrage mushroomed when six of the lions turned up in a new development of $600,000 condos in Chicago at 1218-32 W. Bryn Mawr. Because the stolen lions were smuggled across state lines, the FBI got involved. The lions were bought for less than $1,000 each from a firm called Architectural Artifacts in Chicago. The condos' builder, Greene & Proppe, said they had no idea the lion heads were stolen, and the owner of the artifacts dealer said he bought six of the lion heads from a dealer at an antiques market in Saline, Mich., in 2000.-
Historic Detroit