Pasadena Apartments

The Pasadena Apartment Building is significant as a design of Mortimer L. Smith, as an early example of upper-class, multi-unit housing, and as an early structure among those with reinforced concrete as structural material. Architect Mortimer L. Smith, in addition to being among Detroit's most important turn-of-the-century architects, was a painter of some accomplishment.

His career began in the office of his father, Sheldon Smith, in 1861. Together they designed the Detroit Opera House, a lavish Second Empire-style structure completed in 1869. Like other leading architects of his generation, Mortimer Smith was adept in the numerous historical architectural styles which prevailed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Pasadena Apartment Building, though stripped of some of its former splendor, remains an imposing example, notable in scale, design and for innovative use of materials (namely, reinforced concrete) in residential architecture.

The Pasadena Apartment Building is an eleven-story, Renaissance-style structure with yellow brick facades which faces northwest toward Jefferson Avenue. The lowest two stories of the Jefferson Avenue facade are limestone-faced and house a central, classical entrance. Three-sided window bays rise from the basement level to the tenth story. A restaurant was formerly located on the eleventh story. The removal of some classical ornamentation from the facades of the upper stories--cornices and false balconies especially--has detracted somewhat from the structure's appearance.