Detroit-Leland Hotel

The Detroit-Leland Hotel was an important part of the city of Detroit's social and civic history. It hosted various hotel conventions- for example, in 1930 the eighth annual national meeting of the Association for the Study of Allergy. In 1934 the Standard Club was founded in a room at the Detroit-Leland by a group of Jewish businessmen, and in 1935 automobile entrepreneur Preston Tucker and his partner had an office in the Detroit-Leland Hotel. Major league baseball teams stayed at the hotel including the New York Yankees and its Hall of Fame legend Babe Ruth, who in 1929 reportedly 'wiped the floor' of his room there with roommate and rookie Leo Durocher, whom he accused of pilfering his and teammates' property.

The Detroit-Leland Hotel is a twenty-story steel frame hotel building located on the northwest corner of Bagley and Cass Avenues in Detroit. The terra-cotta-trimmed brick exterior is Italian Renaissance in inspiration. The building's plan is nearly rectangular in the first five stories, with the broader facade fronting on Bagley, and a small projection at the east narrow end facing Cass. The footprint for the floors five through twenty takes the form of a broad U. The hotel originally housed 720 guest rooms, and today contains 428. Vertically the building forms a three-part composition including a four-story base and two-story attic. The base on the Bagley and Cass Avenue facades above the street level, which was refaced in marble probably in the 1960's, is finished in buff terra cotta. The terra cotta is formed into large scale masonry blocks and displays Italian Renaissance details. Large two-story round-arch windows light the ballrooms, lobby and other public spaces on the second floor. At the third floor, each pair of double-hung windows is separated by a terra-cotta plaque comprised of a cartouche containing a fleur-de-lis. A projecting denticulated cornice and decorated frieze of small circles caps the third story. At the fourth floor, squares of terra cotta containing brickwork panels alternate between the windows. Between the fourth floor and the two-story attic, the building is faced in buff colored brick. A beltcourse separates the attic stories from the thirteen stories beneath. At the roofline, a classical cornice and frieze are topped by a brick coping. The building has a flat roof. There are two flagpoles on the roof, one centered over the Bagley Avenue entrance, the other centered over the Cass Avenue entrance.