Lee Plaza Hotel - Detroit, Michigan - U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Waymarking.com

For a great peek into the inside click here (visit link) .

and here (visit link)

The state of Michigan website at (visit link) tells us:
"The Lee Plaza is a fifteen-story, orange-glazed-brick, steel-and-reinforced concrete, Art Deco apartment building with a steeply sloped green copper roof. The building is "I" shaped and rises from a one-story rectangular, terra cotta clad base. The structure has a strongly vertical character as a result of the prominent brick piers that divide the elevations into bays and rise in continuous bands to the steep chateauesque roof crowned with ornamental lightning rods.

The Lee Plaza Hotel is architecturally significant as one of the finest and most elaborate apartment hotels surviving from Detroit's 1920s heyday. The structure is notable for its excellent state of preservation and it has never been redecorated or remodelled, unlike the majority of the city's other luxury hotels. "



The Detroit 1701 website at (visit link) tell us this interesting story:
"Art deco architecture is very distinctive. It was briefly popular in the United States in the 1920s. The best-preserved and most extensive collection of art deco buildings—primarily hotels—is found in Miami Beach south of Lincoln Road. When construction activity resumed after World War II, the art deco style was discarded.

There are a few art deco buildings in Detroit including Cass Motors. Lee Plaza was built as an art deco apartment house for the prosperous on then-prestigious West Grand Boulevard. The architect—Charles Noble—emphasized the vertical. There is a substantial and defining rectangular terra cotta base. And then there is the soaring fifteen-story building done in attractive orange glazed brick. This is capped with an impressive chatequsque roof in copper.

This building has not undergone any major renovation, so it clearly illustrates the type of apartment buildings architects designed for upscale clients just before the catastrophic Depression contorted Detroit. This building became controversial in the first decade of the 21st century. At one time there was an impressive array of decorative lions ornamenting the distinction between the base and the apartments. Apparently, these were stolen from Lee Plaza with no regard to the structural integrity of the historic building. In 2001, some of them were found on the facades of newly renovated buildings in Chicago. Detroit preservations sought to have them returned and raised questions about litigation concerning the destruction of buildings on the National Historic Register but, so far as I know, the lions have not yet been returned to Lee Plaza and no one has been convicted of a felony for their removal. "






Additional web site for information (visit link) .

Street address: 2240 W. Grand Blvd Detroit, MI USA 48202 County / Borough / Parish: Wayne Year listed: 1981 Historic (Areas of) Significance: Architecture/Engineering Periods of significance: 1925-1949 Historic function: Domestic Current function: Domestic/Multi Dwelling/Vacant Privately owned?: yes Primary Web Site: [Web Link] Secondary Website 1: [Web Link] Season start / Season finish: Not listed Hours of operation: Not listed Secondary Website 2: Not listed National Historic Landmark Link: Not listed

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Date Logged Log User Rating   09/25/2023 bobfrapples8 visited it 05/02/2015 RakeInTheCache visited it

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