The Lee Plaza Hotel next to historic East Grand Boulevard stands tall and straight but appears somewhat lonely. Perhaps its architecture is out of place – the tallest building within two miles, its thin singular tower pierces the sky like a spear. The hotel reaches over fifteen floors high and is crowned with a two-story pointed roof. Its foundation is shaped like the letter “I”. The imposing structure dominates the surrounding New Center neighborhood. The Michigan National Guard and two schools, Northern High along with Hutchins & McMichale Technological Academy sit directly in the shadow of the Lee Plaza. The hotel’s beautiful orange-glazed bricks practically glow in the summer sunlight, reminding of its past glory. Unfortunately today, only a shell of this former luxury hotel remains. Pillaged to the point of near-total destruction, the Plaza Hotel is a discarded carcass of a once great residential hotel that rivaled all others in the city in elegance and prestige.

Places like the Lee Plaza were all over Detroit in the 1920s and 30s. However, if you were an African-American around the turn of the century (and for many years after) looking for a room at one of these hotels, the answer was often “Sorry, we’re full”. Despite the advancements of blacks in the north, simple things like finding room and board were difficult at best. Most blacks were forced to room in the “Black Bottom” neighborhood, north of downtown, a place known for its squalor. This area of Detroit was very dense with African-American families. Banks offered little to no credit to blacks in those days and people took what they could get. Often the only choice was to own or rent in Black Bottom. Most of it was forcibly bulldozed in the 1950s to make way for I-75 under the guise of “urban renewal”. For those blacks that could afford to stay outside of Black Bottom, the Lee Plaza was their first choice. Though not exclusively catering to backs, the hotel did not discriminate against them. The Plaza was well patronized by blacks, whites, celebrities and those for whom race was not an issue.

Built in 1929 by the by the renowned architect Charles Noble, the Lee Plaza Hotel would eventually become his crowing achievement, an art-deco masterpiece. Famous for building other similarly styled, but smaller buildings like the Kean Building on Jefferson Avenue, Noble also designed residential homes such as the William Wells home on the river east of downtown. The Lee Plaza, as well as many of his other buildings, would become national landmarks protected under the National Registry of Historic Places.

At its creation, the Lee Plaza was a very modern and lavish hotel offering all the amenities of the day. Looking at the doors of the Lee Plaza’s rooms you can see that they offered pick up laundry service. Each room had a door with a large rectangular hole in it and another set of doors outside. This way you could simply put your laundry between the doors and a workers would come by and collect the clothes from the outside without having to ever enter a guest’s room. It would be returned later in the day the same way – highly convenient for both the staff and the hotel’s guest

However, in 2001 some of the lion heads turned up at the new Edgewater Loft development in Chicago. Apparently the sculptures were sold at an auction in Michigan some years after being stolen from the Lee Plaza. The buyer then sold them to a Chicago developer who was rehabbing a historic building. The developer unknowingly incorporated some of the fugitive artwork in his restoration, setting off a firestorm of controversy between Detroit preservationists and architects in Chicago. In an ironic twist, the reason the sculptures were even discovered was because the developer had won an award for historical preservation of this building, which included six of the stolen lion heads. In an article to promote the new development, the architecture firm in charge of renovation put out a newsletter entitled “Detroit Lions Invade Chicago”. Unfortunately, the person or persons responsible for the brash vandalism and theft were never caught. The remaining fifty lion head sculptures were never seen again, and likely they adorn some other building or buildings across the country and are yet to be found.

I watched this madness while standing next to two Detroit cops. I asked them why they couldn’t arrest the group of men, which numbered around eight or nine on the ground alone. One cop simply said, nonchalantly, “Its Sunday, and we ain’t got no backup. It’s just him and me on patrol, we’re fucking outnumbered, kid!” That’s when I realized that the scrappers were less afraid of the cops than the cops were of actually doing their jobs. Living here you have to accept this is just how Detroit is sometimes. You may not like it, or agree with it, but in the end it is what it is…imperfect. I watched the scrappers tear section after section from the roof. Large copper squares slowly wafted to the ground, ending in a cascade of loud crashing metal sounds. Smoke and flames occasionally could be seen coming from the hotel’s insides. I stood next to the cops as they directed traffic away from the streets in front and next to the hotel. I suppose it was literally the least they could do.