The Library Park Hotel was operated by William H. Beamer, a prominent Detroit businessman and city councilman. For more than four decades, it hosted a number of guests - including Prohibition prophet Carrie Nation - and was the site of a tragic mystery that was never solved.
Beamer was born in Detroit on July 4, 1861. His father was a grocer, with a store on the northwest corner of Randolph and what was at the time East Fort Street. After graduating from Detroit public schools, he headed out to Colorado and became a prospector. After five years, he gave up and returned to Detroit, where he followed in his father's footsteps and opened a grocery store and meat market at what was then 149 Grand River Ave. (present-day 1991 Grand River). He did well, but after two years, he sold the store and opened the Library Dining Rooms on April 25, 1885, at Gratiot and Library (then-Farrar) avenues, just across the street from the old Detroit Public Library.
Beamer would partner with Lucretia Fraer two years later, and business would boom. The partners would wind up branching into real estate, doing much wheeling and dealing across the city and in Highland Park. It was unusual for a woman in this era to be involved in real estate at the time. The names Beamer and Fraer can still be found on property boundary descriptions today.
In December 1896, the pair opened the Library Park Hotel, taking up much of the rest of the southern side of the block on the northeast corner of Library and Gratiot avenues.
"It is a most elegant family hotel,” The Detroit News reported Feb. 24, 1897, of the hotel’s opening. “There are 75 guest rooms, having all modern conveniences with electric light, elevator, steam heat, etc. and prices 50 cents to $1 per day for each room,” or the equivalent of about $20 to $40 in 2025 valuation, when adjusted for inflation. “The new hotel is admirably located. It overlooks the public Library Park and adjoins the business center of the city, making it beautiful and convenient. ... Ladies unattended may feel as safe as in their own homes. Forty new rooms have been filled inside of two months. ... Their popularity has been deservedly earned."
“The dining room is especially handsome and tastefully finished in ivory white with solid French plate mirrors around three sides," The Detroit News continued. It sat 125 people and offered meals for a quarter. “It need hardly be said that no finer meals are served in the city for the money. There is the best of everything.”
But there was no booze to be had to wash down your meal; the Library Park Hotel was a temperance establishment, refusing to sell alcohol.
Over the years, Beamer and Fraer enlarged and modernized the hotel "until it became one of Detroit's best known and most popular hosteleries," Clarence M. Burton wrote in his seminal history "The City of Detroit, Michigan."
Indeed, as The (Detroit) Evening News wrote Aug. 23, 1899: "Beamer and his cleanly, spacious Library Park Hotel do not need to be marked on the map with red ink. Everybody knows where the house is, and the genial proprietor, as well."
Beamer would serve four terms on the Detroit Common Council, from 1894 until 1902, and was council president in 1899. He would dabble in a number of other ventures, serving as vice president of Silver Springs Water Co. and the Leamington Oil Co. Ltd., and a director of the Canadian Gas Co., Detroit Terminal Storage Co. and American Loan & Trust Co.
Shock, terror and celebrity
The Library Park wasn’t a go-to for the rich and famous, though it did have at least one national celebrity as a guest.
On Aug. 24, 1908, famed teetotaler Carrie Nation arrived in Detroit at the Michigan Central Railroad Depot to crusade against booze. But the city’s saloons were spared an assault, however, as Nation told The Detroit Times for a story that ran the next day that her days of destroying mirrors and whiskey bottles were over.
"My arm is lame now," she told the Detroit Times. "I am not going to do any more smashing. ... I am going after the cause now - the vicious laws that allow the saloon to exist."
That didn’t stop her from popping into bars to berate imbibers. Afterward, "Carrie made tracks for the Library Park Hotel, with a curious crowd at her heels," The Detroit Times wrote. "By the time she reached the hostelry, her followers had increased to the proportions of a small army, all anxious for a peep at the famous hatchet wielder. At the entrance she paused and, by way of saying good night, delivered a little temperance speech, in which she urged her hearers to vote the Prohibition ticket from president down."
It was a surprise that Nation chose the Library Park Hotel, as she refused to lay her head anywhere that served alcohol, so Beamer and Fraer’s decision to operate it as a temperance establishment likely factored into Nation’s decision.
On Sept. 10, 1909, the dead body of a 1-month-old baby girl was found alone in Room 201 at the Library Park Hotel. The child had arrived at the hotel about 1 p.m. the previous day with a “stylishly dressed” woman who had registered as Mrs. J.C. Capon of Chicago. The Associated Press reported that "on registering, she said she wanted a room for only a short time as she intended to leave town on an evening train." She did not have any luggage with her.
The woman had paid in advance and ended up leaving about an hour later, without checking out and leaving the key - and her baby - inside the room. Hotel employees said they heard the child crying during the evening, and discovered her lifeless body the following morning when going to clean the room.
The coroner ordered a toxicology screen on the baby's bottle to determine whether she had been poisoned. Though no trace of poison was found, her death was ruled due to “brutal neglect” but natural causes, possibly having died "of cramps," the (Grand Rapids) Evening Press reported Sept. 11, 1909. Police investigators said they believed that the woman who brought the infant to the hotel was not the baby's mother, but was "merely disposing of it for the mother," the paper reported. Unsurprisingly, a check of Chicago city directories found no J.C. Capon.
The story proved sensational fodder for the paper’s daily newspapers. Front page headlines wrote about the search for a Muriel Fraser that crossed into Canada, but nothing came of it.
On Sept. 28, 1909, The Detroit News reported that investigators had given up on solving the case. The infant was to be interred in an unmarked grave in a potter's field the next day, and with it, the case was closed.
After more than two weeks, the detectives working on the case said they still didn't have a clue to the whereabouts of the mother. Some had given her the benefit of the doubt, saying it was possible that "she never thought the baby would be found dead. She probably figured that the child's cries of hunger would be heard and that it would be cared for. There is no doubt, however, that she had fully determined to abandon the infant."
They had hoped "that someone, preferably its mother, would come forward, claim the body and explain all,” the paper reported. “But nobody uttered a word, and, despairing of ever solving the mystery, the authorities ordered the burial.”
On the morning of July 10, 1908, cook Amelia Montroy, 45, was frying potatoes when the grease flared up, setting her clothing on fire. "In an instant, she was a mass of flames," The Detroit News reported that afternoon. Two of her co-workers tackled her. Jessie Ross, "with her bare hands, began tearing the burning clothing from the woman's body," The News reported. Montroy was "frightfully burned about the face, arms and legs" but expected to survive. Ross and chef J.A. Miller also suffered burns during their rescue.
The Detroit Times reported July 16, 1908, that "the woman's scalp is literally cooked to a crisp, the fire having smouldered in her hair. Her right arms is without a covering of skin from her shoulder to her fingertips, and her left arm, from her elbow to the wrist, will have to be covered with new skin."
All quiet at the Library
The hotel otherwise led a fairly quiet existence, but there was at least one humorous anecdote:
"Beamer is not usually superstitious, but the number 13 does not appear upon the door of any room in his Library Park Hotel," the Detroit Free Press reported June 30, 1902. "A traveling man came to my hotel not long ago," Beamer told the paper, "and asked for a room. Nothing was left except Room 13. At first, he refused to take it, but as the other hotels were crowded, he decided to linger. The next morning, the maid reported that the nickel number on the door of 13 had been torn off. That's the way the traveling salesman solved the problem."
By 1912, seminal Detroit retailer Henry the Hatter, which started in 1893, was operating out of one of the Library Park Hotel’s storefronts. Other tenants over the years included a shoe store, a bakery and an optometrist and jeweler.
Beamer retired and sold his interests in the hotel in June 1919 to Albert E. Hamilton, who had been managing the establishment for 17 years.
Nate Keiter, doorman of the nearby old Detroit Opera House, lived in the Library Park Hotel for 30 years and was its longest tenant. "You could always tell when Nate was in, because his bicycle would be tethered to a post in front," The Detroit News noted in a March 8, 1939, article. Al Green, longtime orchestra leader at the Temple Theatre, lived there, too.
The hotel continued to operate until 1941, with rates of $1 a day or $4 a week, about $23 a day or $94 a week in 2025. . The hotel would be surpassed by larger, glitzier hotels and hardly appeared in the newspapers until a classified ad in July 1941 said the Library Park Hotel was being torn down by the Great Lakes Wrecking Co. - and fixtures and bits and bobs were up for sale.
Because there was no obituary or final farewell for the building in the papers, it’s not clear why it was razed. The best guess is that the hotel was antiquated and couldn’t compete with places like the Book-Cadillac, Statler or even Wolverine hotels.
For decades, the site was used for parking, until 2014, when Bedrock’s Z Garage parking structure was built on the site.
Beamer died Dec. 2, 1943, at Grace Hospital at age 82.