Inside the Guardian Building: Detroit's Cathedral of Finance, 1929

The Guardian Building stands at 500 Griswold Street in Detroit's Financial District, forty stories of tan-orange brick crowned by a polygonal spire that once threw colored light across the river at night. Wirt C. Rowland drew it in 1927 for the Union Trust Company. Smith, Hinchman & Grylls put up the steel in 1928 and finished the interior in 1929. The building reaches 496 feet at the roof and 632 feet at the tip of the spire, and it has been a National Historic Landmark since 1989.

People call it the Cathedral of Finance. The nickname answers the Woolworth Building in New York, which the press in the 1910s called the Cathedral of Commerce. The label fits. Walk in off Griswold and the barrel vault of the lobby rises three stories overhead in red, green, buff, and blue Rookwood tile. A Monel-metal screen with a Tiffany clock in the center divides the lobby from the banking hall on the second floor. Above the banking hall floats a hand-painted canvas ceiling stretched on a mat of horsehair to swallow the noise of money changing hands.

A short architectural biography

Rowland was thirty-nine when he designed the Guardian. He had already drawn the Buhl Building two blocks north on Griswold and the Penobscot Building a year earlier. The Guardian completed a trio of Rowland skyscrapers that defined the Detroit skyline between Fort and Larned. William Edward Kapp handled the interior architecture and held the design conversation with the artisans who supplied the tile, the metalwork, and the murals.

The Union Trust commissioned the building as both a working bank and a piece of civic theater. The bank wanted prospective depositors to feel that money placed inside this volume could not be lost. Rowland and Kapp delivered.

Pewabic, Rookwood, and the color of the lobby

The exterior brick was fired in a custom tan-orange formula called Guardian Brick and laid against a Mankato stone base. Corrado Parducci carved the figures of Safety and Security flanking the Griswold entrance. Mary Chase Perry Stratton, the founder of Pewabic Pottery, glazed the semi-circular tile domes above the doors in her signature iridescent blue-green.

Inside, the lobby barrel vault is sheathed in Rookwood tile from Cincinnati, glazed in four colors keyed to the four floors above. Red Nubian marble forms the stair rises. Ezra Winter painted the mural on the banking-hall wall, a stylized map of Michigan industries with a central pine tree and the Union Trust statement of purpose inlaid in tile around it. The mural reads as a manifesto: this bank exists to channel Michigan's lumber, copper, iron, and automobile capital into the broader economy.

The 2002 restoration and the Wayne County purchase

The Sterling Group, a Detroit real-estate firm, bought the building in 1997 and completed a $14 million restoration in 2002. Wayne County bought the building in 2007 and uses it for county offices. Public access remains free during business hours, and the lobby and banking hall are among the most photographed interiors in the city.

We shoot executive headshots and editorial portraits inside the Guardian on a permit basis. See our headshot photography page for on-location pricing or book a session directly.