Newberry, Helen, Nurses Home

The Helen Newberry Nurses Home was built in 1898 to provide housing for student nurses attending the Grace Hospital Training School for Nurses at a time when the concept of trained nurses was just emerging internationally. The building meets national register criterion A for its association with an early nursing school in Detroit and as the last building left to represent the early generation of hospital and related buildings in the Medical Center area that began to develop in the later nineteenth century. The Helen Newberry Nurses Home also meets national register criterion C. Built appropriately in a domestic style to house a domestic use, the home is a fine example of the Jacobean Revival. The prominent architect Elijah E. Myers, especially known for his work on government buildings, designed the building. Myers (1830-1909) is the only architect to have designed five state capitol buildings, for Michigan, Texas, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. Moving to Detroit in the early 1870s, at the time his Michigan State Capitol was under construction, he practiced there almost until his death. During this time he designed many notable buildings throughout southern Michigan including several churches and the Grand Rapids City Hall. For Detroit, one of his most significant designs was the Harper Hospital; built in 1884, it was demolished in the early 1970s.

The 1898 Helen Newberry Nurses Home is a large Jacobean Revival residential building located on the southwest corner of John R and Willis streets in Detroit, Michigan, just west of what is now the Detroit Medical Center complex. The block it sits on has a mixture of commercial and residential structures of varying ages as well as two large parking lots. The building is roughly L-shaped in form with its long main facade parallel to John R on the east and the shorter side parallel to an alley to the south. Within the ell is a dirt parking area surrounded by barbed-wire topped cyclone fencing. The north and east sides of the building are surrounded by lawn bounded by sidewalks and dotted with trees. The building is three stories tall with a partially raised basement level and an attic story and is constructed of large bricks in varying warm tones of brown and red. The slate-covered roof is gabled, with a flat central area on the south wing, and displays cross gables and dormers. The flat planes of the elevations are broken by projecting sections at the cross gables. The water table at the basement level is delineated by a projecting soldier course of bricks and the upper stories are divided by corbelled belt courses.