Lee Plaza Detroit: The Rise, Abandonment, and Restoration of an Art Deco Landmark

ByAndrew Walsh

In May 2025, construction crews broke ground on the restoration of Detroit’s Lee Plaza, a 15-story Art Deco tower on West Grand Boulevard that had sat vacant and deteriorating for nearly three decades.

The restoration, led by the Roxbury Group, Ethos Development Partners, and Lighthouse, carries a $60 million price tag and a completion date of late 2026. (City of Detroit, May 2025)

For most of the time it was empty, the building was best known as a destination for urban explorers and ruin photographers. Its gutted ballroom, graffiti-covered hallways, and gaping holes where terra cotta ornamentation had been pried from the facade became some of the most reproduced images showing the decline of Detroit.

The building’s original story, however, was considerably more glamorous.

“A 17-Story Lighthouse”

When the Lee Plaza opened for occupancy on December 1, 1929, its developer Ralph T. Lee called it “the finest thing of its kind in America.” He was not being modest, and he was not entirely wrong.

Atop the building, a 9,000,000-candlepower beacon blazed from sunset to sunrise as a guide to air pilots passing over Detroit after nightfall. The United States Department of Commerce’s aviation bureau had officially designated the Lee Plaza as the beacon site for the city of Detroit: each night, an engineer in the building’s basement threw a switch and the massive roof lamp illuminated the sky for miles in every direction (historicdetroit.org). The Lee Plaza was, as the Detroit Free Press put it at the time, “a 17-story lighthouse.” (Detroit Free Press)

The building had been designed by architect Charles Noble for Ralph T. Lee, a self-made real estate developer who had built and sold more than $10 million in Detroit apartment buildings before conceiving the Lee Plaza as the culmination of his career.

The general contractor was the Otto Misch Company, working with reinforced concrete construction and a facade of orange-glazed face brick and terra cotta. Sixteen stories rose above West Grand Boulevard at Lawton Street, positioned to draw tenants from New Center, where General Motors had recently established its world headquarters.

The 200 individual apartments ranged from one to four rooms, but the building’s real distinction was its shared spaces. The lobby was finished in Italian marble, with wrought iron fixtures and two oak-paneled lounges, one with a large fireplace. Through the center of the lobby ran Peacock Alley: a barrel-ceilinged, mirror-walled corridor extending 88 feet to the rear of the building, its vaulted ceiling hand-painted in blues, golds, and greens.

To the right was the dining room, seating 125 in green leather chairs beneath a high coffered ceiling described as among the most elegant in Detroit. To the left was the ballroom — “a stimulating setting for life’s gayer moments,” the building’s own brochure declared — with a vaulted ceiling, four crystal chandeliers, and mirrored panels that made the room appear even larger than its considerable size. Three gearless elevators ran from the first to the seventeenth floor, their shaft doors cast in bronze. In the basement: billiard parlors, beauty parlors, a barber shop, a valet, and a commissary. (Detroit Free Press)

The elaborate decorative work throughout the public rooms was the work of Corrado Parducci, a Detroit-based architectural sculptor whose commissions also included the ornamental details of the Guardian, Penobscot, and Buhl Buildings. Here, they include coffered lobby ceiling, the hand-painted barrel vault of Peacock Alley, and the plasterwork in the ballroom. (Historic Structures; National Register of Historic Places nomination)

The Free Press reported that “there will be nothing remotely like the Lee Plaza anywhere in this country.”

From Senior Housing to Vacant High Rise

The timing was unfortunate. The Lee Plaza opened months before the stock market crash of 1929, and Lee himself was bankrupt within a few years, selling the building to the Detroit Investment Company, which fell behind on payments by $1.1 million by December 1930. The building passed through a series of owners before the City of Detroit acquired it through the Housing Commission in 1968, repurposing it as low-income senior housing, a use that sustained the building for nearly three more decades before federal funding changes made the aging structure too expensive to operate. It closed in 1997. (Historic Detroit; City of Detroit)

What followed was a slow and well-documented deterioration. Stripped of its architectural elements by scavengers, exposed to the elements through broken windows and a compromised roof, the Lee Plaza became a fixture in the visual vocabulary of Detroit’s struggles with deindustrialization and disinvestment. Its gutted ballroom, the same room where crystal chandeliers once hung above a hand-colored vaulted ceiling, became one of the most photographed spaces in the city, featured in the internationally exhibited 2010 photography book The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

As documented by Historic Detroit, the theft of the terra cotta lion heads became a particular cause célèbre. Removed from the building’s exterior, they eventually turned up incorporated into an award-winning condominium redevelopment in Chicago, a cross-state legal and preservationist fight that drew national attention and illustrated both the appetite for architectural salvage and the vulnerability of unprotected historic buildings. Some of those lion heads are now being recreated for the restoration.

Multiple redevelopment proposals came and went. A 2015 plan announced a $200 million redevelopment; by 2016 it had collapsed. The city issued new requests for proposals in 2017 and 2018, finding no viable path either time. The building continued to decay.

How Detroit Finally Saved the Lee Plaza

The project that finally broke ground in May 2025 was seven years in the making. The Roxbury Group, the same firm that had previously saved the Metropolitan Building and David Whitney Building from demolition, acquired Lee Plaza from the city in 2019 for $350,000 and spent the intervening years assembling a complex financing package drawing on Low Income Housing Tax Credits, HUD rental subsidies, American Rescue Plan Act funds, and state and local sources. (Historic Detroit; City of Detroit)

The $60 million first phase will restore 117 units of affordable housing for seniors earning at or below 50% of area median income, with affordability guaranteed for at least 45 years. The iconic ballroom will be restored. The terra cotta lion heads will be recreated. Preservation experts will repair cornices, spandrel plaques, and the historic wood-paneled lounges. A second phase, pending financing, would add approximately 65 additional units on the upper floors. (City of Detroit, May 2025; WhatNow Detroit, May 2025)

The Lee Plaza story is not unique to Detroit. And across the industrial Midwest, cities have seen landmark buildings pass through cycles of grandeur and decline, and then either get demolished or adapted for a new life.

What’s interesting here is how long the building stayed in the public consciousness through its abandonment, and how it survived just long enough for a viable path forward to emerge.

By late 2026, the ballroom will be restored, the lion heads recreated, and Peacock Alley will be walked again for the first time in nearly thirty years.

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