Detroit Trust Company Building

201 West Fort – Detroit Trust Co. Building – Steel-frame two-and-a-half-story bank building faced in limestone (1915, 1925-26, 1964). Albert Kahn, Inc., architect. The original bank building, constructed in 1915, occupied a site at the corner of Shelby and West Fort Street. Ten years later, the same architect, Albert Kahn, was hired to greatly expand the building, adding one hundred feet (two-thirds of the present Fort Street frontage) to the west. The Neoclassical building features slightly projecting end units flanking a broader recessed central section, each part below a one-story attic fronted by a shallow portico displaying massive fluted Corinthian columns between matching piers – two columns in the end sections and four in the central. A full attic story with plaques of foliated details set between paired windows and an upper cornice and setback parapet wall tops the facade. The building was thoroughly modernized in 1964 when the Detroit Bank and Trust expanded into the new 211 West Fort tower next door (the two buildings are connected by an enclosed hallway near Fort Street). The front between the columns was rebuilt with the original bronze windows and spandrel panels replaced with dark brown plate glass held in place by steel frames and the original doors replaced with new steel frame revolving doors. The building occupies part of the site of Fort Shelby, and on its Shelby Street façade is displayed a State of Michigan historic marker describing Fort Shelby’s history. The Detroit Trust Company was established in 1900. Its first board of directors contained prominent businessmen from around the state including Theodore De Long Buhl, Ammi W. Wright, James E. Davidson, and lumbermen Henry Stephens, Rasmus Hanson, Frank W. Eddy, and John H. Avery. The firm moved into the corner unit of this building from the nearby first Penobscot Building in 1915 and expanded it in 1925-26. The bank merged with the Detroit Bank (former Detroit Savings Bank) in the 1950s to form the Detroit Bank & Trust Co. When the bank occupied the lower floors in the new building at 211 W. Fort, they kept this building as banking quarters but modernized it. It remains an office of Comerica (the bank’s name changed from Detroit Bank & Trust in 1982).