History
In 1917 a group of investors sought to build an affordable hotel near Fort Street Union Station. They hired Schmidt, Garden & Martin of Chicago to design the building and the 10-story 450 room hotel opened in 1917. The hotel was so successful that in 1926 they broke ground for what was to be the first of two 450 room expansions, the 27 story Albert Kahn designed addition opened in 1927. However, the Great Depression halted plans for building of the second addition.
In 1951 it was sold to the Albert Pick Hotels chain and renamed the Pick-Fort Shelby. An original mural by Louis Grell of Chicago was commissioned for the hotel lobby during the Albert Pick operation. With more business opting for newer suburban hotels and motels the Pick-Fort Shelby struggled with low occupancy throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pick closed the hotel in 1973 and sold the building to three twenty something investors who reopened it as The Shelby Hotel, a hotel/apartment complex geared toward youth in 1974, however, this was short-lived and it soon closed again. For many years, the Anchor Bar, a popular watering hole for workers at the nearby Detroit News and Detroit Free Press remained the only tenant until moving in 1994. RSC & Associates, a real estate investment and development firm, started work on this hotel in the spring of 2007, and finished construction in December 2008. The new renovations are led by Detroit based L.S. Brinker, with the first floor Bar & Grill being completed by Farmington Hills based Mccarthy & Smith INC.
Read more about this topic: Fort Shelby Hotel
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”
—Erma Brombeck (20th century)