The Regina, also known as the Regina Apartments, is located at 253 Erskine St. in Detroit’s Brush Park Historic District.
The architect of the three-story building is unknown, and the date of its construction is unclear. The apartment building is attached to a brick house, which was likely the home of the owner and builder of the apartment building. Some Detroit homeowners built apartments or storefronts attached to their homes for extra income. It is unclear who the architect of the home was or when it was built, but it is believed to have been around 1909. Ads in newspapers say it was inhabited by only one family from the time of its construction until around 1915. The house was originally 14 rooms.
The Brush Park Regina is not to be confused with an apartment building by the same name that once stood at 278 E. Canfield Street.
Erroneously known by some in the neighborhood as the Recina for the ambiguous "G" in the name above the main entrance, it served as a rooming house for decades. However, by the 1980s, the building had emptied out, like much of the rest of the Brush Park neighborhood. It would sit rotting for decades and was eyed for demolition.
David Camilleri, an artist and Maltese immigrant, moved to Detroit and bought the property and an empty side lot shortly before Christmas 2015 for $525,000. He set out on a $2.6 million renovation of the property without any tax breaks or subsidies from the city or state.
"Half of the building had no roof or floors, so when it snowed, it snowed all the way to the basement," Camilleri told the Detroit Free Press for a Sept. 14, 2020, article on the Regina's rebirth. "So I had to repair the whole thing."
Camilleri immigrated to New York City in 1981 and soon began doing construction-related work to make ends meet. He bought his first apartment building in 1992 in Manhattan's West Village. He went on to buy another in Manhattan and one in Queens, before selling all three and moving to Detroit. He used profits from the sales to fix up the Regina.
He gave the building new floors, walls, kitchens and bathrooms, and opened it in spring 2020, at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It opened with rents of about $800 a month - far below comparable apartments in the area - and within weeks, all 25 of the Regina's one-bedroom and studio apartments were filled.
The Regina is part of the Brush Park Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places on Jan. 23, 1980.