The Town Residences is proof that good architectural things come to those who wait - and wait and wait. This building sat unfinished, a ghost-like, windowless shell on the fringes of downtown, for more than two decades. You could call it Detroit’s own Sagrada Família.
The 13-story, Art Deco-style tower came off the drafting table in 1924 as a clubhouse for the National Town & Country Club. As its name implies, the club was a nationwide social organization, and was started in the 1920s in New York City. One of its selling points was that members of one chapter had privileges at the others around the country. Of note, the group was far more inclusive than most other social clubs of the era, with Black, Jewish and Catholic members being invited to join, though not women unless they were the widow of a life member. By comparison, organizations like the Detroit Athletic Club would not allow women, Jews or African Americans to join.
The Detroit chapter of the National Town & Country Club was founded in 1924. Lifetime membership fees were $15,000, a tidy $278,000 in 2025 valuation, when adjusted for inflation. But Detroiters, being flush with auto cash, were good for it: Just four years after its founding, the local chapter had about 2,000 members, with membership limited to 3,000.
Among them were real estate developer and club President and Chairman Edward A. Loveley and architect H.J. Maxwell Grylls of the firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls (SHG), who sat on the club’s board. These two men would play a key role in the construction of their club’s would-be home.
This building was developed by Loveley’s firm, Stormfeltz & Loveley. Its lead designer was Wirt C. Rowland of SHG, the same man behind the Guardian, Buhl and Greater Penobscot buildings, among other landmarks in the city. The architects spent a year visiting clubs all over the country to incorporate them into the project. The contractor on the job was W.E. Wood & Co.
Social clubs were all the rage in the Roaring Twenties, and Detroit was home to a number of them, most of which were aimed at the so-called Gasoline Aristocracy that rose to wealth during Detroit’s emergence as the Motor City.
“Born in the minds of a group of prominent Detroit clubmen, the idea was based on the fact that the old exclusive clubs are crowded and each has a long waiting list,” the Detroit Free Press wrote July 14, 1929. “The Pontchartrain was to open its doors to this eligible list who were denied membership in other exclusive clubs through lack of facilities to accommodate them.”
To illustrate just how en vogue social clubs were for the well-heeled during the time, Loveley was already a member of the Detroit Athletic Club, the Detroit Club, the Lochmoor Club, the Detroit Yacht Club, the Detroit Boat Club and the Oakland Hills Country Club, among others.
Loveley was born June 11, 1879, in Springfield, Mass., but moved to Detroit in 1904, establishing his firm with Harry A. Stormfeltz that same year. The company made a fortune by building subdivisions across the growing city - more than 50 in all - including the wealthy enclaves of Palmer Woods and Palmer Park. The developer bought what is now called 7300 Woodward in New Center from Ford Motor Co., and in 1926 remodeled it as its new headquarters.
Meanwhile, Stormfeltz & Loveley set its eyes on turning Bagley Avenue from a bunch of Victorian-era homes and commercial buildings into a hustling and bustling economic center. The National Town & Country Club Building would be near the heart of it all. Stormfeltz & Loveley formed the Detroit Properties Corp. (DPC) to lead the work, which was said to represent $35 million in investment, the equivalent of $645.2 million in 2024, when adjusted for inflation. Among the properties DPC built as part of the so-called Bagley Avenue Development project were the Michigan Theatre Building, United Artists Theatre Building and Leland Hotel. Bagley Avenue was also widened as part of the makeover, from 40 feet to 90 feet.
What would have been
The vision for the club’s new digs would take a number of different twists and turns. The first SHG rendering of the National Town & Country Club ran in a publication of the Thumb Tack Club, an architectural organization, depicted a 30-story Gothic-inspired design. A year later, it was shown as a 17-story Renaissance-style concept in The Detroiter, a publication of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce. Finally, SHG and the club settled on the final Art Deco look and a shorter, 13-story building. The cost of the project was estimated at the time to be $4 million, about $74.1 million in 2025. The steel-frame and concrete construction would be sheathed in orange- and buff-colored brick with Mankato stone trim.
“The building’s unique design, combining clean-cut modern styling from the early post-World War II era with substantial remnants of the original Mediterranean/Art Deco finishes, especially in the blocky central tower and upper facade, has made it a highly recognizable landmark in downtown Detroit,” the building’s nomination for the National Register of Historic Places noted.
In March 1926, a site occupied by what the Detroit Times described as a two-story, wood-frame “old Mexican boarding house, once a dignified dwelling,” was purchased. With the Pontchartrain Club’s construction, “respectability is pushing into a region that has not known any excessive amount of that sort of thing for about a generation,” the Times wrote May 30, 1929. Previously, the land had been part of Sen. Lewis Cass’ farm, which was divided up and sold to developers after his death in 1866.
The clubhouse was to feature a number of amenities - such as athletic facilities, eight bowling alleys in the basement, a billiards room on the mezzanine overlooking the lobby, a library and dining rooms - on the lower floors and four floors of sleeping quarters above for members and overnight guests, 96 rooms in all. The fourth floor was to house Turkish baths, as well as courts for squash, handball, volleyball, indoor tennis and badminton. Massage, needle baths and electric cabinets for ultra-violet ray treatments were also to be provided. The swimming pool, measuring 25 feet by 75 feet, was to have been on the fifth floor. Hidden bulbs and green tile was to present the effect of the “clear, crystal-green waters of the sea,” the Free Press said July 14, 1929. The walls and ceiling were to be lined in cork that was hand-painted. Much ado was also made about The Pontchartrain being the “first club building in the world” to have air-conditioning.
The ground floor, with its two-story lobby, would embody “the comforts of home, the luxury of a castle, the quietude of repose and a subdued gorgeousness,” the Detroit Free Press wrote July 14, 1929. The lobby was to be floored in Austrian travertine.
Also off the lobby was to be the lounge, a 38-by-76-foot room with 28-foot ceilings done in colored plaster. Plans called for it to be paneled in walnut and finished in travertine stone, “giving the effect of a baronial hall,” the Free Press noted. A massive fireplace fronted in travertine was to extend from floor to ceiling.
“From every corner of the civilized world, material has been gathered to make the Pontchartrain the most luxurious, modern and beautiful building of its kind in the world,” the Free Press continued. “Africa has given its rarest woods, ebony, mahogany and others - the Far East, stains, shellacs and rare colors - South America, daintily tinted stones - the Russian Steppes, marbles - each country has contributed of its best toward this citadel to the social side of man whose cornerstone is fellowship and brotherly love. … Born of the desire that Detroit shall hold its place in the social sun, the Pontchartrain Club is the culmination of the efforts of a group of this city’s foremost history makers.”
The main dining room was to measure 95 feet by 38 and be located on the second floor. Adjacent to it were to be a number of private dining rooms. The kitchen would have been on the second mezzanine, allowing for meals to be delivered quickly to tables.
The second-floor elevator lobby was to open into the Palm Room, which could hold large gatherings. The space was to be octagonal on one end, with two doors on each side; one would have led to the dining room and the other to the grill room. It would have been lit during the day by three 18-foot windows that opened upon iron balconies, and by night by two massive crystal chandeliers and a series of crystal wall sconces, “so arranged that all direct lighting may be turned off in the room and light reflectors (can) throw light upon the ceiling, giving a soft, diffused light for dancing,” the Free Press glowed July 14, 1929.
In what the Times described as “unusual provisions … made for the wives and families of members,” the third floor was to be devoted to female guests and the wives of members. It was reachable by a dedicated private elevator and complete with a ladies dining room, beauty parlor, library, lounge and reception room.
“Facilities of the new Pontchartrain are so cleverly arranged that women or men may enter and leave the building, enjoying therein the full advantages of the club’s various departments, without encountering members of the opposite sex,” the Free Press wrote July 14, 1929.
The ladies’ lobby would have opened off Bagley Avenue and connected by a private elevator to the third floor. This lobby was to be a semi-circular space in shape with fluted wooden pilasters and vaulted plaster ceiling. Off the lobby were the coat check rooms and an elevator lobby as well as a “cosmetics room.” A library was to adjoin the lounge and be done in knotty white pine from floor to ceiling. “A reading alcove overlooking First Street will provide a restful retreat,” the Free Press said.
A groundbreaking was held at 12:15 p.m. on Sept. 5, 1928, with Loveley, being the club’s chairman, doing the honors of turning the spade. The Detroit News sent a crew out to capture movie footage of the moment.
Steel work started Dec. 1, 1928, when a gold-plated rivet became the first driven into a girder as part of that day’s festivities. On June 8, 1929, the Detroit Times reported that work was progressing rapidly: The granite base was set, the sewers were installed and connected, steel stairs were in place.
But things would not move as quickly in the decades to come.
Meanwhile, in the first hint of possible trouble, the cost of the building was reduced to a more modest $2.3 million, or about $42.9 million in 2025 inflation-adjusted figures – a cost-cutting of $32.2 million in modern times.
The club was said to have raised $2 million of that $2.3 million by the time the building’s cornerstone was laid on July 16, 1929. S. Wells Utley, past president of the Chamber of Commerce, served as master of ceremonies, with Congressman Robert H. Clancy, Acting Mayor John C. Nagel and Police Commissioner William P. Rutledge and then-current Chamber of Commerce President George M. Welch also speaking. Loveley gave brief remarks to several hundred of his fellow members and sang the virtues of social clubs to “the rising generation.” He then announced that the building would be formally open by March 1, 1930. Guests were then invited to tour the building’s progress, then whisked off to the Leland Hotel for lunch.
Inside the cornerstone were placed copies of the three daily Detroit newspapers of the day, photos of the prominent promoters of the club, stationery, letterheads, a membership brochure, a list of members, membership cards, a copy of the club’s by-laws and a horseshoe that had been found while excavating the site of the building.
It would turn out that the horseshoe wasn’t of the lucky variety.
The Town & Country name is put out to pasture
By the time of the cornerstone-laying, the Detroit chapter of the National Town & Country Club had rebranded itself as the Pontchartrain Club. The new name was announced by Loveley on May 4, 1929.
The Pontchartrain name is one that traces back to the founding of the city itself in 1701. Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac went to Count Pontchartrain - the French minister of marine affairs - to get permission to explore the Great Lakes. He told the count that if the French didn’t secure the region, the British would. That’s all the count needed to hear, and he gave Cadillac the thumbs-up. Cadillac and his band of merry hommes established an outpost on the straits of what is now the Detroit River. In an impressive feat of brown-nosing to his sponsor, Cadillac dubbed the outpost Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit: Fort Pontchartrain of the Strait. The Pontchartrain name was also used for Detroit’s largest and most luxurious hotel, which stood on Campus Martius from 1907 to 1920.
“When the new $4 million clubhouse reaches completion and assumes its place in the social and recreational life of the city as the Pontchartrain Club, it will stand as a permanent memorial to the man who furthered the first settlement and development of Detroit,” Loveley said of the count, in a May 5, 1929, article in the Detroit Times.
The Detroit Free Press, in a blurb that same day, said that the new name was chosen “because of the preponderance of sentiment in favor of maintaining the name of the historically famous Count Pontchartrain.”
The club also adopted the Pontchartrain family’s coat of arms as its own and planned to hang in the clubhouse’s lobby a portrait of the count that was in possession of the Detroit Historical Society. The portrait originally hung in the old Pontchartrain Hotel downtown. Membership in the club at the time of the name change was reported to be “well over 2,000.”
Meanwhile, as the Pontchartrain Club continued to reach into the sky, work continued on the improvements along Bagley Street. “Yet a few short years ago,” the Detroit Times wrote Nov. 15, 1929, “Bagley was just an old side street. Today, it is a shopping, amusement, business and hotel center. Progress made possible through the rapid and steady strides in industry and business of Detroit, the Dynamic.”
Unfinished business
But with the exterior completed, work on the clubhouse ground to a standstill in 1929. The Wall Street crash of that year led to the Great Depression, erasing fortunes, destroying the club and putting the project on hold. A few months after the market crash, the Pontchartrain Club had to frantically raise money to avoid losing its incomplete building. Members had until midnight March 1, 1930 to close a $400,000 gap ($7.6 million in 2025 valuation) to complete the subscription of a $1 million second mortgage lien, or about $19 million today.
The day before the deadline, 250 club members met at the Leland Hotel to figure out how to pull it off. Despite the Depression having battered the economy and their pocketbooks, they managed to hit their goal with just three hours to spare - all in an attempt to keep their club and clubhouse alive.
“The Pontchartrain Club will be rushed to completion by the builders as soon as possible,” The Detroit News wrote the day after the meeting.
It wouldn’t be.
The Depression would leave the Pontchartrain Club a beautiful but unfinished, windowless architectural shell for more than two decades. Later news reports said the building was 73 percent completed at the time work stopped, and at least $2.5 million had been spent on it, about $47.5 million in 2025 money. Its members would get nothing to show for their financial contributions, as the Pontchartrain Club soon folded and the unfinished clubhouse thrown into limbo.
Over the next nearly two decades, the building would be floated as everything from offices for a railroad system to a veterans headquarters to a City-County building to apartments to a hotel. The Detroit News reported in a town gossip column on Oct. 29, 1933, that "Negotiations are under way to complete the building which was to have been the Pontchartrain Club on First Street and turn it over, under lease, to a fraternal organization you all know ..." The paper didn’t name names, which is just as well because it didn’t happen.
On June 30, 1938, it was disclosed that Ernest S. Jackson and Harry Silverman were acquiring the unfinished clubhouse from the mortgage holders and building contractors in order to turn it into a hotel. As part of their plan, the developers asked the City to reduce the $167,000 in back taxes owed on the vacant property, the equivalent of about $3.8 million in 2025, to $42,000, worth about $955,000 now. Without that forgiveness, the developers said they couldn’t make the deal pencil out.
“Apparently, the property was assessed on the theory it was to be completed as a valuable property,” the developers’ attorney, William Friedman, told The Detroit News for a story the following day. “But uncompleted, the building is actually worth little, if anything.”
The council agreed to slash the inherited tax debt, but Mayor Richard Reading vetoed the move, citing an opinion by the City’s corporation counsel that the move was illegal. A taxpayer agreed and sued, and the Council was ordered by a Circuit Court judge that September to show cause as to why it should be allowed to forgive one property’s debt when everyone else had to pay their fair share.
The Detroit News Editorial Board opined on Oct. 7, 1938, that “we do urge that when the property finally comes into the City’s possession because of tax delinquency, the skeleton building be torn down. For years, it has stood in its ghostly emptiness, a too-noticeable reminder of an unfinished task in a city which boasts of its ability to finish whatever it undertakes.”
The Council then agreed to cut the taxes by $29,000 ($660,000), but Reading vetoed it a second time, on Nov. 9, 1938, saying the move would establish a bad precedent.
Then World War II and war-time rationing arrived on the Depression’s heels.
The State Land Office Board seized the building over delinquent taxes in November 1939. No taxes had been paid on it for more than a decade, and with no credible suitors to buy it, the State rented its ground floor out as a storage lot for new cars, collecting $145 a month in rent, about $3,300 in 2025. In early February 1941, talks began about the State completing the Pontchartrain Club for use as a state office building, a plan pitched by Auditor General Vernon J. Brown that he said would cost about $1 million ($22.8 million in 2025).
“The State would make a worthwhile investment if the plan goes through,” he told The Detroit Times for a Feb. 20, 1941, story. “The building is adding no value to an already blighted area. If it could be used for State offices, the valuation of surrounding properties would rise and result in more revenue for the State and City. For us, it would be an ideal location.”
He also noted that the State was spending nearly $80,000 ($1.8 million in 2025) a year in rent on office space in Detroit alone, so a State-owned building would pay for itself in 12 years.
“I have talked to members of the Land Board and to legislators with the thought in mind that the State might desire to complete the building,” Brown told the Times. “I have found most persons favorable to the idea.”
But he needed approval by the state Legislature. He wouldn’t get it.
If at sixth you don’t succeed …
In February 1941, the First & Bagley Holding Corp. - made up of some of the partners originally tied to the project - bought the unfinished Pontchartrain Club back from the State at a tax auction for $34,600, about $787,000 in 2025 valuation. That was considered to be a fraction of its assessed value, though the group was the only suitor to place a bid.
In July 1942, reports surfaced that the War Production Board (WPB) was eyeing the vacant Pontchartrain Club Building as a home for Army Ordnance officers stationed in Detroit. The City pushed back on Uncle Sam, as it had been lobbying for 18 months for the Barlum Hotel, now known as the [Cadillac Square Apartments]((https://historicdetroit.org/buildings/cadillac-square-apartments), to be used for the purpose instead. The City had also seized the Barlum over unpaid taxes.
“Since Pearl Harbor, we’ve been talking to Army officials and trying to interest them in the Barlum,” City Corporation Counsel Paul E. Krause told The Detroit News for a July 14, 1942, article. “They always said they would let us know, and nothing ever happened. There stands the hotel. With a few improvements, it would be ready for occupancy. The plumbing and the elevators are there and all utilities are ready for use.”
Because metal was being rationed during World War II, what was worse to Krause was talk that the feds wanted to rip out the plumbing from the Barlum and use it to complete the Pontchartrain Club. “I had never heard of such a thing,” Krause told The News.
James E. Wilson, priorities chief of the Detroit region of the WPB, said the government could do in six months what no one else had been able to do in 13 years: finish building out the Pontchartrain Club.
At the same time, Mayor Edward Jeffries said that if the government did take over the Pontchartrain Club, it would “at least be preferable to allowing the unfinished hulk to stand vacant,” The News reported.
In August 1943, a proposal was floated to the Detroit City Council to use public funds to turn the “ghost skyscraper” into a club and living quarters for men returning from military service.
The Detroit News Editorial Board weighed in yet again, calling the Pontchartrain Club in the Sept. 7, 1944, edition of the paper “one of the world’s largest haunted houses. … No one has inhabited it; it is haunted only by the problem of its eventual utility.”
Then in February 1947, the owners submitted plans for completing the Pontchartrain Club, as well as the also-never-completed-because-of-the-Depression Elks Club on Jefferson and Iroquois avenues, as apartment buildings. Under that proposal, the Pontchartrain would have become 235 apartments.
Then on Sept. 20, 1947, a syndicate of out-of-town businessmen announced that it had purchased the building for more than $250,000 (about $3.5 million in 2025) in order to turn it into office, manufacturing and warehouse space. It was front-page, above-the-fold news in the Detroit Times.
“The biggest skeleton in Detroit’s closet is about to disappear, and there will vanish with it a symbol of a long-departed dream,” George W. Stark wrote in the Detroit News on Sept. 26, 1947. “For years, (the Pontchartrain Club) has stood at Bagley avenue and First street, rearing its rococo elegance a full 13 flights skyward, windows open to every boisterous gust, with nary a tenant, except, perhaps, the vain regrets of its original promoters. …
“The Pontchartrain Club has been, through all the years since 1928, a stark and dreary token of the postwar Depression, a bitter reminder that there is an end to the rainbow and no pot of gold to distinguish it.”
Work was to start by the end of the year. It didn’t.
In October 1949, the Pick Hotel Corp. of Chicago (which ran the Fort Shelby Hotel in Detroit at the time) announced it would turn the 13-story skeleton into 322 two- and three-bedroom apartments in a $3 million conversion ($40.6 million in 2025).
The Detroit News Editorial Board was optimistic, writing Oct. 20, 1949: “The Pontchartrain Club has been for years, despite its architectural merits, a leading eyesore. Its tenantless, gaping windows have been a reminder both of the lush day that gave birth to the club project and of the bitter season of blasted hopes that followed. … The Pontchartrain project, if it proves profitable, might lead to others and conceivably could start a movement reversing in some measure the march of population to the suburbs, now a real threat to Detroit’s future.”
If they only knew.
Meanwhile, unsurprisingly given the building's lack of luck, Pick bowed out.
In August 1951, the City Council issued an ultimatum on the Pontchartrain Club and two other properties: "Finish up and fix up, or we'll tear them down," The Detroit News reported Aug. 26, 1951. The City's Buildings and Safety Engineering Department was ordered that month to start condemnation proceedings on the Pontchartrain Club, as well as the aforementioned Elks Temple on East Jefferson at Seminole and a former police station on Canfield between Woodward and John R, which had been boarded up and unused for three years following the opening of a new Woodward station.
Following World War II, there was a tremendous demand for housing, both because of the soldiers returning home and also because of the lack of building during the conflict because of rationing. On top of that, Detroit’s economy and population were booming; after all, the city was known as the Arsenal of Democracy, and a number of people moved to the city for the bountiful manufacturing jobs in the defense plants.
But Detroit was also facing another issue: Much of its housing stock and apartment buildings were older, and areas of the city had become both overcrowded and rundown because of the double-whammy of the Depression and wartime rationing. On top of that, much of the post-war housing boom was occurring in the suburbs. That said, there were still plenty of folks who preferred to live in the big city, especially downtown, but there really weren’t many options at the time, especially modern ones with central air-conditioning, electric appliances, fluorescent lights and other innovations that were in high demand.
All of these circumstances combined to make finally completing the forlorn Pontchartrain Club financially feasible, more than two decades after work had stopped on it.
A delayed dream, finally finished
On Nov. 1, 1950, it was announced that the building had been acquired by a group of out-of-state businessmen under the name Bagley First State Corp. The purchase price was $550,000, worth about $8.2 million in 2025, and the plans called for the new owners to drop $3 million ($39 million in 2025) to turn it into a 318-unit apartment building.
The consortium of developers included Omer W. Schroeder of Cleveland, as its president, and J.R. Braun of Washington, D.C., as vice president. Braun was also vice president of the D.C.-based Byrne Organization, which served as the architects on the conversion. The Byrne Organization had lengthy experience, having worked for the U.S. Navy in Virginia and on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, as well as much of a housing development for the Ford Foundation in suburban Dearborn, Mich. The firm Fridy, Gauker, Truscott & Fridy of Philadelphia was hired as consulting engineers and architects.
The difference-maker was that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured a $1.8 million ($23.5 million in 2025) loan for the project, where it had previously refused to do so. Perhaps its mind was changed by Detroit’s housing shortage.
Work was to start the following January and take about a year to complete. In what no doubt had some folks worrying about yet another failed development bid, work started nine months late, in October 1951.
The Cuyahoga Wrecking Co. of Cleveland was tapped to “clear away elaborate stairs, piping and conduits,” The News wrote March 7, 1952, as well as tons of concrete damaged by the weather pouring into the building since 1929. Workers on the site found a number of unopened crates of materials lying around throughout the building, containing overalls, shoes and tool boxes.
“It seemed like they left in a hurry,” Roy Berke, vice president of Cuyahoga Wrecking, told The News.
During the renovation, the building’s time capsule was removed from the cornerstone in 1952.
The job was to take 18 months and create about 48 two-room studios and 270 other units. Strikes and material shortages caused delays along the way. Willard Hutchinson, a 37-year-old carpenter and father of two children, was killed on the job on Aug. 26, 1952, when he leaned into an elevator shaft to shout instructions to colleagues on the floor below and was struck by a descending hoist.
“At the present time, it is a beehive of activity,” the Detroit Times reported March 15, 1953. “Plasterers, electricians, plumbers, tile men, granite setters and many other artisans are scurrying here and there, performing their respective tasks in orderly manner. The whole building transformation is shaping up pleasingly.”
As part of the renovation, the building’s exterior was altered. Window openings were significantly enlarged, and the lower floors were refaced with what the National Register of Historic Places nomination calls “a streamlined look of the early post-World War II period.” The building’s parapet was lowered. Its basement level was turned into an underground, 25-car parking garage, which is entered through a garage door along Bagley Avenue.
Finally, in August 1953, the job was done, 25 years after ground was broken. The Pontchartrain Club opened as the Town House Apartments. It’s unclear whether this was a nod to the club’s original name of the Town & Country Club, but it appears to be a coincidence.
Rents were to be from $115 to $125 a month for the unfurnished studios to $225 to $250 for three-room units. That’s the equivalent of about $1,400 to $1,500 and $2,700 to $3,000 in 2025 valuation, respectively.
Perks included terrace decks where residents could sunbathe, high-speed elevators that climbed at 400 feet a minute, all-electric Pullman kitchens, and 16 penthouse-type units on the 13th floor (eight of those had doors opening onto the terrace). The two-room efficiency offered a living room with recessed all-electric kitchen, a dressing room with built-in dressing table and a bathroom. The three-room added a separate bedroom. The kitchens in both models were recessed and able to be hidden behind a traverse drapery. The apartments came either furnished or unfurnished, and tenants had their choice of wall colors from blue, cocoa, gray, green or pink.
“Town House offers living within walking distance of downtown office buildings, stores, shops, theaters, etc.,” The Detroit News wrote Aug. 21, 1953. “This gives the professional or business men and women more hours of rest and relaxation. Saved are anywhere from one to two hours a day driving to and from business, necessary for those who live away from the city; and it not only reduces the time spent thus but also the energy and nervous strain spent in battling heavy rush-hour traffic. … Town House offers the ease and graciousness of luxury living.”
The lobby was carpeted and finished in walnut dado with gray walls, green elevator recesses. The building’s office was painted coral red. There was also a store off the main lobby that sold frozen dinners, fruits and vegetables, ice cream and the like for residents’ convenience.
“Our first tenants all are top executives who work in the area of the building and want to live near their work,” part-owner Hal D. Cantin, told the Detroit Times for an Aug. 9, 1953, story. “Others have moved here from Detroit’s principal hotels. They are older people, mostly, including several who took part in the original plans to build the Pontchartrain Club.”
In February 1959, the Detroit Housing Commission offered to buy the Town House for $2.9 million ($32..2 million in 2025) to turn it into a home for senior citizens. The owners agreed to the selling price, but it appears that the deal never went through because in the 1970s, the building was acquired by the Hayman Co.
Mostly quiet on the west side front
In the 1980s, the building’s name was tweaked to the Town Apartment Tower. It continued to offer studio and one-bedroom apartments, both furnished and unfurnished. Amenities at the time included a uniformed doorman, a cafe, on-site laundry facilities and a fitness center.
In May 1999, the Hayman Co., still the building’s owner at the time, announced that it would convert some of the apartments into a Hawthorne Suites hotel over a six- to 12-month span. At the time, 140 of its units were unoccupied.
“We’ve owned the building for 27 years, and some residents have been there the entire while,” William Humphrey, a Hayman operations vice president, told The Detroit News for a May 19, 1999, article. “We intend to have a section of the property maintained as extended-stay and apartment-style, so it'll be a gradual change. As demand builds for hotel rooms, it'll behoove us to convert more. Initially, we may only have 150 of 315 units designated as hotel accommodations.”
Like so many plans for this building, that didn’t happen. Instead, Hayman was approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to accept housing vouchers that paid a portion of lower-income tenants’ rent. In the early 2000s, rents ranged from $465 to $1,000 per month for one of the penthouses. Those with the housing vouchers paid only a percentage of their income out of pocket.
On March 18, 2007, an arsonist struck the Town Apartments three times in one day, with firefighters having to be deployed each time. Though no injuries were reported, residents were forced out into the frigid weather as crews put out the fires.
Fires were set in the hallways and hallway closets on the fourth, eighth and 12th floors, once in the morning, again around 9 p.m. and then a third time just 30 minutes later.
“There is an arsonist working there,” Detroit Fire Department Senior Chief Kenneth Routin told The Detroit News for a story the following day’s edition. “It's not a very safe building at this time.”
In July 2014, the building was sold to Colorado-based Triton Investment Co., which embarked on a $5 million renovation that saw the lower-income rents replaced by market-rate ones. Walls were knocked down to combine units, and its 318 apartments now number about 250. Its name was changed ever so slightly once again, to the Town Residences.
Triton planned to install new kitchens, appliances, lighting, paint and flooring in most of the units, as well as upgrade the laundry room and fitness center while adding bicycle storage. A new front awning, signage and windows were added to the building’s exterior.
Detroit-based Kraemer Design Group, which has had a hand in a number of historic renovations and restorations in the city, served as the project architect. ROK Construction Services, also based in the city, was the general contractor.
Rents were increased to $695, including utilities, for a studio and up to $1,195 for a two-bedroom.
The same year that Triton acquired the Town Apartments also saw it buy five other Detroit properties the Kean Apartments, Hibbard Apartments, Van Dyke Manor, Parker Residences and Trombley Lodge Apartments. It also owns the Water’s Edge at Harbortown and a number of condos in the Harbortown development.
“Detroit is a great story, the city is coming back, and we see a lot of opportunity for people who want to live in historically-significant properties,” April Sedillos, executive vice president of Triton, told DBusiness Magazine for a Sept. 4, 2014, article.