Hotel Eddystone

“A grand hotel, fit for Detroit’s booming 1920s.” That’s how the Hotel Eddystone must have felt upon opening its doors in December 1924. Here at the corner of Park Avenue and Sproat Street, the Hotel Eddystone stands as a testament to a bygone era of Detroit’s history. The Eddystone wasn’t just any hotel. It was the first of three Italian Renaissance-style hotels built on Park Avenue for Lew Tuller, the owner of the famous Hotel Tuller. Tuller envisioned a hotel empire. He saw Detroit’s rapid growth, the influx of people coming to work in the factories, and the tourists eager to see the “city that put the world on wheels.” The Hotel Eddystone, designed by famed architect Louis Kamper, was a gamble, a bet on Detroit’s continued success. It offered 156 rooms, a mere fraction of the over 1,375 rooms Tuller controlled across the city. Detroit, in the 1920s, was experiencing an unprecedented boom. The city’s population more than doubled between 1910 and 1920. The demand for hotels was sky-high, and between 1924 and 1925, nearly two dozen hotels were built downtown. Many served as long-term residences for Detroiters, not just temporary lodging for visitors. The Hotel Eddystone, located near major streetcar lines and the financial district, aimed to capture a slice of this bustling market. Park Avenue itself was undergoing a transformation. The Park Avenue Association, formed in 1923, aimed to make the district a rival to New York’s Fifth Avenue. The Hotel Eddystone was right in the thick of it. However, Detroit’s boom became its bust. The rapid increase in hotel construction created fierce competition. Combined with risky real estate ventures in Florida and the looming Great Depression, Tuller lost his fortune, including the Hotel Eddystone. In 1928, the Eddystone was sold to David P. Katz, a prominent Detroit real estate magnate. Katz owned the hotel for nearly four decades until his own financial troubles in the 1960s. The Eddystone survived longer than many of its contemporaries. It continued to operate as a transient hotel until the late 1990s before finally succumbing to the forces that had reshaped Detroit. Despite various redevelopment attempts in the early 2000s, the Hotel Eddystone sat vacant, a ghostly reminder of a more prosperous time. Its sister hotel, the Park Avenue, met its end in 2015, demolished to make way for a loading dock for the new Little Caesars Arena. But the Hotel Eddystone’s story wasn’t over. In 2017, a new chapter began. The Ilitch family, instrumental in the arena’s construction, committed to rehabilitating the Eddystone. Finally, in 2022, the Hotel Eddystone was reborn, not as a hotel, but as 96 residential units, a symbol, perhaps, of Detroit’s own ongoing revitalization.