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Posted Nov 20, 2015, 5:50 PM
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Join Date: May 2012
Location: Metropolitan Detroit
Posts: 712
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Same here. I was thinking that it's too bad that such a nice highrise was kind of isolated from the rest of the momentum in Downtown/Midtown/New Center. Definitely glad to see this news.
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It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out because only 34 million is needed for Lee Plaza itself with another 50 million earmarked for the adjacent lots, that leaves over 100 million to be spent on the surrounding area. I would love to see Grand Blvd turned back into a Blvd west of the Motown Museum area to Northwestern High School with some "connective tissue" built along the way, i remember Henry Ford Hospital having long term plans for redevelopment around their campus perhaps we may hear of some kind of overarching West Grand revitalization plan.
Quote:
Detroit's Art Deco Masterpiece, Like Its City, Is Poised for Reinvention
by Rebecca Golden
November 18, 2015
Curbed Detroit
When you Google "Detroit," one of the first hits you get includes the description "post-apocalyptic." Low Winter Sun, a particularly terrible cable drama set in the Motor City, used a steady scroll of burned, broken houses to represent Detroit in its opening credits. A recent book, The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, offers images of a city dying one vacant, wounded building at a time. But this isn't the real story, or at least not the current one, or the most complete. Detroit is home to some of the world's most beautiful buildings, both residential and commercial. The city has been chosen to represent the nation at the world's top architecture show, the Venice Biennale, this spring. People sometimes forget the city's history as a center for design and architecture, given the more usual public idea of Detroit as a broken city, ruined by poverty, crime, and corruption. Detroit has three centuries of history, though, including a golden age of architecture perfectly represented by one soaring structure, the Fisher Building.
Opened in 1928, this landmark skyscraper erupts out of Detroit's New Center. Called "Detroit's largest art object," the 30-story Art Deco masterpiece occupies a whole city block at the corner of West Grand and Second Street. The statistics on the place are astonishing. Over 40 types of marble were used in the Fisher: Golden-Vein Tavernelle from Tennessee, Cardiff Green from Maryland, Carthage from Missouri, Verdi Antique from Vermont, Mar Villa from Maryland, red marble from Germany, green marble from Austria, brown and black marble from Belgium, black and gold marble from France, white and black marble from Italy, and rose marble from Spain.
This summer, the building sold at auction for $12.2 million. While the Fisher's interiors feature marble floors, marble columns, and even massive marble wall plaques, the outside is the real story: an astonishing 325,000 square feet of marble tile covers the Fisher's exterior. It remains the largest marble-clad building in the world. Minnesota pink marble and Oriental granite coat the structure from its base to the top of the third floor. Next comes Beaver Dam Maryland marble, all cut and oriented to create the effect of different textures.
Outside, the sun has set, and the Fisher's pinnacle glows green against a black sky. While the developers are quick to discuss ideas about the arcade, new apartments, and bringing in more retail, specific plans for the building, including the timeline, remain a closely guarded secret. People worried about the 90-year-old building's future can take heart knowing that HKZ has a long track record of doing exquisite restorations. Most of their projects turn grand old buildings into the real estate item Detroit is very familiar with: mixed-use residential and commercial space. So many of these broke ground or were announced this summer and fall, a person could lose count. There's new construction at Orleans Landing on the city's riverfront and at DuCharme Place in Lafayette Park. This week, Kraemer Design Group began whitewashing the Valpey Building, part of the work of adding it on to The Lofts at Merchants' Row. Developers working on the Metropolitan Building, formerly a center for Detroit's jewelry industry but vacant since 1977, say the structure will have 71 brand new apartment units, along with retail spaces on the first two floors. New Center hasn't had the revitalization experienced by downtown Detroit. Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans' founder and CEO, who many assumed would buy the Fisher when it went up for auction, has poured tons of money into downtown, renovating older structures and moving 8000 Quicken Loans employees to his collection of buildings surrounding Campus Martius Park. New Center awaits similar treatment, and pundits see it coming any day, along with the M1 Rail, a new transit loop of trolley cars currently under construction and slated to open for public use in 2017.
HFZ and Redico, the Southfield firm they partnered with to buy the building, haven't given any details at all all about plans for the building since buying it nearly six months ago. But Detroit Developer Peter Cummings, son-in-law of Detroit's other famous Fishers (of Detroit Symphony Orchestra fame) helped shepherd the sale of the Fisher, and is working on the project alongside HKZ and Redeco. Cummings, who is probably best known in Detroit for bringing a Whole Foods to midtown in 2013, said that there have been surprises since the purchase, but nothing the group can't handle. "When our group underwrote the building, we obviously understood we would find deferred maintenance and there would be a lot of work to do," Cummings said. "That's proved to be the case. There have been operational issues that we discovered that were more challenging," he said.
Initially, Cummings said that the developers focused on the mixed-use potential of the building. "When we were trying to evaluate Fisher and colonize investments, were were focused on the opportunity to balance the use, take down some of the offices and convert them to residential space," Cummings explained. "We are planning to introduce a residential component," he added, before explaining that retail has become far more of a focus for the investor group.
Cummings says the plan is to focus on adding new retail options to bring people in. Retail in New Center, he added, wasn't a consideration for the developers when they bought the Fisher, but it quickly became apparent that retail will be a huge part of the Fisher's redevelopment plans.
"The biggest surprise has been the interest in retail," Cummings explained. Cummings won't name any of the potential retail tenants his group is courting, but did describe the type of tenant he hopes to bring in.
"We do have interest from national and regional retailers and our goal is to curate those retailers and mix them with local and emerging retailers so we have something that is granular and reflects Detroit. That's what drives our leasing strategy," Cummings explained.
http://curbed.com/archives/2015/11/1...einvention.php
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