The Hotel Hofman stood on the southwest corner of Woodward Avenue and Sibley Street.

Originally built in 1883 as the Burnstine Apartments for Marcus Burnstine and designed by architect R.T. Brookes, it was considered Detroit's first "flat-style" apartments.

In 1900, it was enlarged and turned into the 18-unit Sibley Apartments. In 1909, it was sold and reopened the following year as the Hotel Hofman. The building was owned by Hugo Scherer, but the hotel was operated by Frank Wadham and M.A. Shaw.

The Hofmann Hotel would lead a rather dignified but unspectacular history until the early morning hours of Jan. 26, 1920. When Detroit firefighters arrived on the scene, a number of guests were trapped inside, but because of their heroism, only one man - A.C. Weigel - lost his life in the blaze.

The fire started in the hotel's basement, and "the rapidity with which the flames spread through the building was due, according to the fire authorities, to the fact that the blaze originated almost at the foot of a large stairway leading into the basement," the Detroit Free Press reported the morning after the blaze. "The flames, sucked up this shaft by air currents, gained such headway that Battalion Chief Charles Becht ... realized immediately the futility of attempting to fight it before the last of the imperiled men and women were in safety."

Temps were in the 20s as fire crews doused the blaze.

"So difficult was the work of digging in the ice-encrusted ruins that it was almost 12 hours before they reached bottom," the Free Press said.

Recalling the biggest stories of the year, the Detroit Free Press wrote Dec. 26, 1920, that "great work by the fire department saved a score of persons from death at the Hotel Hofman fire."

Deemed a total loss, work to clear the fire-ravaged ruins to make way for a new 10-story high-rise would begin in April 1922.

That building, designed by Louis Kamper, would open in May 1923. Scherer, who developed the new structure, would keep the Hofman name. However, around 1929, an extra N was tacked onto the name, and it became known as the Hofmann Building. It is not clear why. Over the years, it would be home to the United Auto Workers (UAW) and American Federation of Labor, among other tenants. The Hoffmann Building was torn down in 1984.

The site would be a surface-level parking lot for decades until 2015, when construction began on Little Caesars Arena.