With love from Detroit
and a magical weekend in the lost-and-found Book Tower
My first time in Detroit I stayed in pretty much the only downtown hotel, the Book Cadillac, a Westin property. From that spot I could see nearby a deliriously beautiful skyscraper, the Book Tower; its tippy top looking for all the world like it had been plucked from the rooftops of Paris. I was wildly intrigued. What was this building? Or rather, what had it been? By 2013 it had stood empty for several years, one more forlorn structure amidst the almost literal tumbleweeds of a carcass of a once thriving downtown.
On every trip I'd eye that ornate tower, wondering.
Then one day I read an article about its restoration led by Bedrock Real Estate, owned by Dan Gilbert. And later saw a NYT article about a French restaurant that had opened in it. This Le Suprême could have been lifted directly from Paris -- it even had the same magical light. My two favorite cities in the world, colliding under one beautiful roof? I HAD to go. Conveniently, there's also a hotel in the tower. So when we decided to head to Detroit to mark the decade since the day we bought a house there, which also in a stroke of luck, aligned with the time the restored train station was open for tours, there could only be one place to stay.
We booked into Roost Detroit, a clever concept in the Book Tower that offers full-on, beautifully designed apartments for stays ranging from nights to months or years, and it’s still surreal that we stepped inside this building that I'd been so infatuated with for so long, and just ... stayed there! (We were hosted by Roost for part of our long weekend there.)
I was fortunate to have a tour of the property with some of the Bedrock and Roost team, and learn about the Book Tower’s background and restoration. Like, in its early days airlines had ticket offices here. You'd just walk up and book your ticket to Paris! The tower was dreamed up by the three brothers Book who commissioned local architect Louis Kamper to bring their vision to life, and when they finished it in 1926, the tower portion of the building was the tallest in Detroit. The 38 stories wasn't enough for them, apparently, because they actually planned to build a second tower that was 81(!) stories. If it hadn't been for the Depression, they'd have been launching dirigibles from the rooftop (not so different from Ford’s plans now to use the top of Michigan Central Station for last mile delivery with drones).
Like in much of the rest of downtown Detroit, the Book Tower slid into decline in the 1960s and gradually lost its tenants, mostly offices, ultimately going vacant. It languished, its limestone exterior darkening from pollution in Motor City.
Bedrock started work in 2016, just as Detroit’s comeback was gaining momentum a couple years after the city exited bankruptcy. Seven years and 300 million dollars later, New York architectural firm ODA finished up the restoration.
Gone was the heartbreaking ruin porn; here was a three story lobby crowned with a long-forgotten and hidden atrium skylight that they painstakingly restored. Through collaborations with Method Co and Stokes Architecture + Design and Here came that French restaurant, an underground Japanese restaurant and hidden cocktail lounge, and on the 13th floor roof of the main building, a bar with bird’s eye views of Detroit rising from the ashes. (Melodramatic much? Maybe, but it’s real. Dead center of the view is the rising Hudson Tower, a glinting skyscraper at the site of the former Hudson’s department store that reflects back the Book Tower itself).
I’ve been the person behind a total transformation of a property a few times, created spaces that people live and work and sleep in. I’ve done that on a family scale and know how that feels. To immerse myself in something at this scale, with this history, with this level of restoration (with this budget!)? I could spin the dial on a thesaurus and grab a word: magical, incredible, surreal, dreamlike — any will do but none truly capture the sensation of living for a few days in a before and after at this epic level.
It’s funny, I live in a city with roughly the same population as Detroit. And no shade to my own Louisville, but Detroit is a proper City with stunning architecture and a downtown alive with music and arts and sports and food and drink and shops and people (and unfortunately now those pedaling booze party things) and I soak it up like a sponge.
Detroit is still, mostly, its very own. A French journalist I met while touring the building (yes, LeMonde sent someone to cover Detroit’s stunning rebirth and I’m stalking her author page to see when the story hits) commented when I asked her what surprised her about Detroit that you don’t see McDonald’s or Starbucks or High Street shops. Yes, there are some inroads from the likes of H&M, Gucci (HONESTLY who would have thought), WeWork, and Warby Parker, but most of what you see in Detroit is from Detroit.
I’m not a napper but sometimes I pretend I’m going to be able to nap and make myself, like a child, lay down when I’m overly stimulated or going too hard. I did that one afternoon in Detroit, put my phone in another room so I couldn’t just scroll for an hour, and laid on the bed. For the hour that I rested I just … looked out the window. Thought about the people that took the time in this building and those in view to make them beautiful, their first time and when they brought them back. Thought about how and why we as humans respond to beauty, need it. Thought about the empty buildings that sat dark and decaying for so long, and the passion and creativity that’s fueling their restoration, about the new life taking shape within their bones.
The lobby of the tower was full all weekend, shimmering with people dressed for parties and weddings, for nights out, their excited conversations filling the atrium with life. I remembered the building wasn’t just empty for years during Detroit’s dark days, but that not so very long ago we couldn’t gather like this. People everywhere were hugging, laughing, drinking, eating, living, layering the history within the building with their own stories. It was loud and it was crowded and it was beautiful.
We added our own stories over the weekend. My friend Karter happened to be in town, and we schemed for him to meet us, surprising Brian. All through cocktails in the impossibly sexy cocktail bar hidden below-ground, Aladdin Sane (inspired by a Bowie album of the same name), where I learned I like sake, the pink, bubbly kind anyway(!), all through dinner perched at the sushi counter in Hiroki-San, where I tasted Wagyu beef for the first time — snow beef and I must know more — I kept bottled the secret that threatened to burst out like so many bubbles in a glass of Champagne.
After dinner Karter and his friends arrived and I hurried him to Sakazuki where Brian was waiting to order (more of that sake!) at the bar. Karter tapped him on the shoulder. “How was dinner?” he asked. Brian whirled around, the incredulous look on his face priceless. “How? What!” he stuttered before hugging Karter like the long lost friend he’s been since moving to San Francisco.
We joined Karter’s group at Le Suprême for their own dinner, sipping cocktails and nibbling on dessert ourselves. Around the table in this Paris-in-Detroit dream we told stories as hard and fast as we could talk, hearing how his friends met on the QE1 crossing the Atlantic in the early 60s, reunited 40 years later, and live here now (even getting to hear the poem that the American tea expert wrote the young British woman he’d met on the ship), and I remembered how Detroit is a magnet for the most fascinating, intriguing sorts of people.
How its magic works to bring people together. How those of us who love it have had a collective dream. And we’re witnessing that dream come to life, we’re living that dream. And the most wonderful part is that it’s no dream. It’s Detroit and it’s now.