The Fort Shelby Hotel: Detroit's 1917 Schmidt-Garden Skyscraper, 30 Years Vacant, Now the DoubleTree

The Fort Shelby Hotel stands at 525 West Lafayette Boulevard in the Fort/Financial district, two blocks from the river and one block south of the Penobscot. Schmidt, Garden and Martin of Chicago drew the original ten-story block in 1916, and the hotel opened to guests in 1917. Albert Kahn added a twenty-one-story tower in 1927. The building closed in 1974, sat empty for thirty-four years, and reopened in 2008 as a DoubleTree by Hilton with apartments above.

The name traces to Fort Lernoult, the British post Detroit's American garrison renamed Fort Shelby in 1813 after Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby. The fort sat roughly where the hotel now stands. The Cass family owned the land for a century afterward. By 1916 the parcel was downtown real estate, and the developers wanted a first-class commercial hotel near the financial blocks on Griswold and the federal courthouse on Lafayette.

Schmidt, Garden and Martin's 1917 building

Richard E. Schmidt, Hugh M. G. Garden and Edgar Martin ran one of Chicago's better-known commercial firms in the 1910s. They built the Montgomery Ward warehouse on the Chicago River and a dozen hospital and industrial commissions across the Midwest. The Fort Shelby is their only documented building in Detroit. The original ten-story block is Neo-Georgian in character, brick above a stone base, with restrained classical detail and a flat cornice. The plan placed the lobby and main dining room on the first two floors and 450 guest rooms above.

Neo-Georgian in 1916 meant a deliberate move away from the heavier Beaux-Arts massing that had dominated American hotel work since the 1890s. The Statler Hotel two miles north, built in 1914 by George B. Post, used the same vocabulary: brick, stone base, paired windows, no figural ornament. The Statler model was efficient, repeatable and aimed at the traveling salesman. The Fort Shelby followed it.

The AIA Guide to Detroit Architecture, the reference work compiled by the local chapter in the 1970s and updated in the 1980s, gives the original building one sentence of praise and one of warning. "The original ten-story building of Neo-Georgian character is the only Detroit work by the Chicago firm of Schmidt, Garden, and Martin," it reads. The next sentence, written when the building was empty: "This now vacant hotel is endangered."

Albert Kahn's 1927 tower

Demand outran the original 450 rooms within a decade. The owners brought in Albert Kahn — by then Detroit's industrial architect of record, two years past finishing the Fisher Building — to add a tower. Kahn drew twenty-one stories on the same Lafayette frontage, stepping the upper floors back and matching the brick and stone palette of the original. The tower opened in 1927 and brought the total room count to nine hundred.

The hotel ran through the Depression, the war, and the postwar decades. The Convention business kept it full into the 1960s. The 1967 unrest and the long decline of downtown Detroit thinned the bookings, and the hotel closed in 1974.

Thirty-four years vacant, then DoubleTree

The Fort Shelby sat empty from 1974 until 2008. Emerald Hospitality reopened it as a DoubleTree by Hilton with 203 hotel rooms below and 56 apartments above, after a $90 million restoration. The lobby, the original 1917 ballroom, and the Kahn tower exterior were all preserved.

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