former Detroit Free Press Building (Detroit, Michigan)

 office building, 1924_construction

The Detroit Free Press was founded in 1831, this building was ccommissioned by Free Press owner E.D. Stair for $6 million, was designed by architect Albert Kahn. The construction firm of Spencer, White & Prentice built it in 1924.

Located at 321 W. Lafayette Blvd. between Washington and Cass, the Free Press building is six stories high with a central tower which extends an additional eight stories. A basement and a sub-basement give the building 288,517 square feet of floor space.

Sculptor Ulysses Ricci also used the Indiana limestone to create some beautiful and symbolic carvings for the outside of the building including the patron of printers, Benjamin Franklin, renowned journalists Horace Greeley and Charles Dana; Free Press drama critic George Goodale and Michigan's first territorial governor and who helped establish Detroit's first newspaper, Lewis Cass.

But Civil War Gov. Austin Blair, Monroe native Gen. George Custer, and former University of Michigan President James Angell are incongruous selections. Their place in Michigan history is not in question, but no known thematic unity binds them to the other men on the Free Press facade. Other symbols ornament the Free Press. On the sides of the building are a variety of vehicles of transportation: a plane, a ship, a locomotive and a truck -- but no automobiles. The front doors of the building are framed by an arch, and Ricci meticulously carved owls, snails, pelicans, sea horses, lizards, and snakes for the columns that frame the arch. Human figures also are present, as are two statues of the goddesses who traditionally represent commerce and communication.

Roy Gamble,a local painter who belonged to no great artistic movement but who was a muralist in his own right, was comissioned to creat five murals. Stair had called on him in 1914 to paint five murals depicting the historical development of Detroit, from the "Landing of Cadillac" to "Modern Industry." Gamble also painted a smaller portrait of Benjamin Franklin.

Stair loved the paintings so much that he told Kahn to design a special room for them. Initially housed in the previous Free Press building east on Lafayette near Griswold, the murals were moved to the first-floor room of Kahn's creation in 1925. Gamble's murals, along with one showing monks copying manuscripts and another depicting the development of the printing press, remain there today.

Even though the building was built specifically for the Free Press, Stair had Kahn design the newspaper's headquarters with additional floors not only to give it a more impressive size but also to make additional profit. The newspaper has traditionally leased unused space to other companies.

The building's longest-running relationship with another group has been with the Detroit Club, an elite social organization whose older building stands immediately behind the newspaper. So exclusive was this organization, that it not only refused to admit women and minorities but at one time denied admission to white men who had acquired their money from the automobile business "because (the Detroit Club) felt that they got their hands too dirty" by working with automobiles. Stair was a member and leased parts of the fourth and fifth floor to the club.

A bridge now connects the two buildings and an alarmed door allows people to enter the Detroit Club from the third floor of the Free Press.