Some of Detroit's eyesores are getting redeveloped, others not

They are the big old buildings that put Detroit on the map — and not in a good way.

These structures sat empty and deteriorating for years, oftentimes decades, and were widely interpreted as symbols of the city's dramatic decline. Their abandonment brought the wrong sort of attention to Detroit for city leaders desperate to reverse the outward flow of population and businesses.

Now, a growing number of these old eyesores and "dinosaur" buildings are finally being acquired by private developers with realistic plans for renovating or repurposing them, and in some instances, to bulldoze them to build warehouses or distribution centers that could employ hundreds of people.

The recent interest is generally the result of two trends: demand for new housing in Detroit, and demand for new industrial warehouses and distribution centers in metro Detroit. One exception is Ford Motor Co.'s ongoing rehab of Michigan Central Station into office space (plus a hotel) for the automaker's new Detroit mobility and innovation hub.

"The high occupancy (rate) in the industrial sector is leading people to get creative to get the needed space," said Andy Gutman, president of Southfield-based real estate firm Farbman Group. "On the residential side, there is a high demand, especially in Detroit, and there’s cachet to the city and people want to be there.”

Many of these projects are only financially feasible with assistance from government tax breaks and other development incentives. That is because of the expensive construction work involved in rehabbing long-neglected and sometimes contaminated buildings, plus the lower leasing rates and investment returns for Detroit real estate compared with larger markets such as Chicago.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has made cleaning up and repurposing these forlorn properties a priority of his third term in office, and the topic was a focus Wednesday night in his annual State of the City address.

"There are about a dozen sites in this city that have just devastated Detroit's reputation internationally for blight," the mayor said earlier in the week when announcing the planned $134 million redevelopment of the old Fisher Body Plant No. 21 into hundreds of apartments. "The Fisher Body Plant ... is one that shows up in every national gallery of the ruins of Detroit."

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Below are some of the eyesores and "dinosaur" buildings that sat vacant and decaying for years, and are now undergoing or set to undergo a dramatic transformation with redevelopment.

The list includes some empty Detroit buildings that were not major urban ruins on the level of Michigan Central Station or the Packard Plant, yet were identified in past Free Press stories as dilapidated high-rises in need of saviors.

A second list identifies prominent buildings and sites in the city that are still vacant and awaiting occupants or development. Several of them are not yet in disrepair and appear in decent condition, such as the former Detroit Police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien.

Former 'dinosaurs' and eyesores

Lee Plaza

This 16-story building, 2240 W. Grand Blvd., dates to 1927 and was originally a luxury residential hotel. It last operated as public housing for seniors before city housing officials closed it in 1997 for financial reasons.

In January, the Duggan administration announced it will be restored as roughly 177 units of mixed-income housing, including affordable apartments for seniors, through a joint development by Detroit-based Roxbury Group and Ethos Development Partners.

Old State Fairgrounds

In 2009, the Michigan State Fair left the old State Fairgrounds on 8 Mile in Detroit. There were a number of early visions, yet few workable plans, for redeveloping the 158-acre site and its collection of old buildings.

Today, the site is home to a nearly completed 4-million-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center. The center is expected to create 1,200 new, full-time jobs once it opens later this year — Amazon won't say precisely when.

In addition, early construction work is underway for a new transit center within the to-be-rehabbed Dairy Cattle Building that will replace a nearby bus hub on Woodward Avenue.

"Now instead of waiting outside in the rain and the cold, they're going to be indoors in a beautiful center," Duggan said.

As part of the project, the fairgrounds coliseum is being razed, although a part of its façade will be preserved. And the bandshell will be moved to Palmer Park.

Book Tower and Building

Prominent in the downtown skyline, the 38-story Book Tower and its adjacent and shorter Book Building, 1916 Washington Blvd., were besmirched in grime and had sat mostly empty for years until their purchase in 2015 by Dan Gilbert's Bedrock real estate firm.

Bedrock is now in the final stages of a long and extensive $313 million renovation, and plans to reopen the buildings later this year as a mix of hotel, residential, retail and office space.

Two Ilitch-owned buildings

The Ilitch family organization has been rehabbing two long-vacant downtown buildings that it owns: the Women's City Club and the United Artists Theater Building.

The six-story Women's City Club, 2110 Park Ave., dates to 1924, has a Pewabic tile indoor swimming pool and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Olympia Development recently received a temporary certificate of occupancy, and a flexible office and co-working space brand called Spaces is now fitting out the building in prepation for opening.

The 18-story United Artists Theater Building, 150 Bagley St., dates to 1928 and is an office building attached to the old United Artists movie theater. The office building has been largely vacant since the mid-1970s and owned since 1997 by the Ilitch organization.

The Ilitch organization has partnered with a minority-owned enterprise, Bagley Development Group, to redevelop the building as 148 market-rate and affordable apartments to be called Residences@150 Bagley, expected to be done in late 2023 or early 2024. The defunct theater is to be razed to create parking for the future residents.

AMC Headquarters

The old and massive American Motors Corp. headquarters, 14250 Plymouth Road, was last used by Chrysler and has been vacant since 2010. The structure dates to 1927 and once sprawled 1.4 million square feet before a back section was torn down.

Last month, Detroit City Council approved a redevelopment deal in which Missouri-based NorthPoint Development will demolish the entire structure, including a unique Art Deco tower, and construct a 728,000-square-foot building for a to-be-determined auto parts supplier that could potentially bring hundreds of jobs to the neighborhood.

Demolition could begin late this year, and the new structure could be ready in late 2023 or early 2024.

Cadillac Stamping plant

NorthPoint also is redeveloping the site of the former Cadillac Stamping plant, 9501 Conner St.., which had been mostly vacant since the 1980s. The stamping plant was demolished last year and construction is underway on a new 684,000-square-foot manufacturing center to house auto supplier Lear Corp. and employ 450 people.

Fisher Body Plant No. 21

The old Fisher Body Plant, 6051 Hastings St., opened in 1919 and was later used by General Motors until 1984. It then housed a succession of industrial paint companies until 1993, when the six-story building was abandoned.

This week, city officials joined with developers Gregory Jackson and Richard Hosey and announced plans to remediate and redevelop the old factory into 433 residential apartments, plus retail and co-working spaces. Pending the necessary approvals, construction could begin next year and finish in 2025.

Michigan Central Station

The most well-known Detroit building under renovation, Michigan Central Station, opened in 1913, closed in 1988 when the last train pulled out, and then devolved into what many outside observers considered a graffiti-covered symbol of Detroit's decline.

Ownership passed to a Downriver real estate investor, who dreamed of putting a casino and upscale restaurants in there, and later in 1995 to the Moroun family, which owns the Ambassador Bridge.

The abandoned depot was attracting urban explorers from around the world by the late 2000s when Detroit City Council passed a resolution requesting its demolition. But that effort was stymied, including by restrictions on using federal stimulus money to raze a structure on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ford made international headlines in 2018 when it bought the train station and some nearby properties, including a disused school book depository. The automaker is now busy renovating the depot to be the centerpiece of its future Detroit mobility and innovation district.

The renovations are to finish in 2023, and Ford plans to bring 5,000 workers to the district, of which 2,500 will be Ford employees.

Current eyesores and 'dinosaurs'

Packard Plant

What remains of the old Packard Plant on the city's east side was by now supposed to be newly opened offices and cultural space. However, Peru-based developer Fernando Palazuelo was unable to build the ambitious project that he started in 2017, and since the COVID-19 pandemic, he has instead tried to entice industrial buyers such as NorthPoint to the site.

The city of Detroit is in court trying to take possession of the property.

Southwest Detroit Hospital

The old Southwest Detroit Hospital, 2401 20th St., near the edge of Corktown, is a 1970s structure that was once clad in stainless steel and has been empty since 2007.

In what was a surprise to many, four years ago a "coming soon 2020" sign for a "mixed-use development" appeared on the property.

Today, the hospital building is still abandoned and the "coming soon" sign is getting raggedy. (The "2020" has since been whited out.) There also was a giant break in the property's security fence visible this week.

Detroit businessman Harley Brown, a member of the property's ownership group, told the Free Press this week that there are no plans to publicly discuss. The ownership group is said to include prominent landlord Dennis Kefallinos.

Brewster Wheeler Recreation Center

The old Brewster Wheeler Recreation Center dates to 1929 and is where boxer Joe Louis once trained and generations of Black Detroiters learned to swim. It is adjacent to the demolished Brewster-Douglass public housing projects and has been vacant since the early 2000s.

The rec center was slated for demolition in 2014, but the Duggan administration said it could be saved if the right developers came forward.

A group that included KC Crain, president and CEO of Detroit-based media company Crain Communications, ultimately stepped up. Their plan, announced in spring 2015, was to redevelop the two-story building as events space and a restaurant with a rooftop beer garden. Nearly seven years later, construction has yet to begin and the building remains empty.

“With COVID-19, it obviously didn’t make sense to move forward with the restaurant idea we’d set out,” Crain said Thursday in a statement. “The pandemic affected our plans, as it did for many others. We will have news to share soon.”

Executive Plaza Building

The former Executive Plaza Building, 1200 Sixth St., is a complex of two towers at the periphery of downtown that has been vacant since the early 2000s, when its state office tenants moved to Cadillac Place in New Center.

It is now owned by Danou Enterprises and available for lease or purchase.

“It is one of the biggest vacancies that we have," said Levi Smith, a real estate broker with P.A. Commercial. "It's a great building in the fact it has 1,200 parking spaces and it's halfway between the (central business district) and the new Ford mobility and the train station."

Old Wayne County Building

The ornate Wayne County Building, 600 Randolph St. in downtown, dates to 1902 and has been empty since 2009, when county government moved to the Guardian Building. The county sold the building in 2014 to a group of private and unnamed New York investors, who four years later announced they had spent nearly $7 million renovating the structure and were seeking a tenant to move in.

It still sits empty.

A representative for the CBRE office in Southfield said this week that the firm is no longer marketing the building. A past spokesman for the New York group didn't return a message seeking comment.

Aborted Wayne County jail site

Twice in the 2010s, a slice of land along Gratiot entering downtown at 1400 Saint Antoine St. was heralded as the future site of big projects. But each time those projects were later relocated, and today the land remains undeveloped.

The first, a new Wayne County jail, was halted during construction in 2013 amid cost overruns; its ruins stood unfinished at the site for years. Gilbert's Bedrock firm later took possession of the land in exchange for building the county a new jail and justice complex at Interstate 75 and Warren.

The second project, announced in fall 2019, was a collaboration between Bedrock and real estate mogul Stephen Ross for the University of Michigan, called the Detroit Center for Innovation.

However, Gilbert and Ross last year canceled their collab, and Ross went on to partner with the Ilitch organization to build the Detroit Center for Innovation on land west of Fox Theatre that is currently a parking lot.

Bedrock has said it still intends to build something on the Gratiot site, although no formal plans have been announced.

Bedrock did not respond to a message for comment.

1300 Beaubien

Designed by architect Albert Kahn and known simply by its address — 1300 Beaubien — the former Detroit Police Department headquarters has been empty since 2013, when the department moved into new headquarters on 3rd Avenue near MGM Grand Detroit casino.

Bedrock purchased the old DPD building in 2018, and the following year announced plans to make it a boutique hotel and conference center. However, because those plans appeared tied to the Detroit Center for Innovation being built nearby on the failed jail site, their current status is a question mark.

Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jcreindl. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Many Detroit eyesores getting redeveloped; some still aren't