PicoBlog

The National Theatre on Monroe Avenue in downtown Detroit, photographed Dec. 1, 2023, during its deconstruction.

The National Theatre has got to be one of the longest-running historic preservation sagas in Detroit. This shit has cosmic sweep!  

We can turn the clock back nearly 50 years and land in the middle of an already drawn-out conflict. Here’s Beulah Groehn, a mother of the historic preservation movement in Detroit, speaking to the Detroit Free Press for a story that appeared in print on Jan. 5, 1975:  

“The thing we have to get across is that conservation of buildings is conservation of energy ... We’re saving materials, we’re saving labor, when we’re saving a building … If we’d just renovate the buildings we have, instead of drawing up plans for ones we can’t afford to build, within six months we’d have instant buildings drawing taxes and contributing to the city.”

Oh my God, Beulah is already so tired here and these talking points are so broken-in. It’s the mid-1970s and Detroit’s preservation ordinance is not yet 10 years old. The headline of this story is “City’s newest historic landmark doomed” and it’s one of the most Detroit headlines I have ever read.  

What had happened here is that the commercial district on Monroe Avenue at Farmer Street — including the National Theatre — had just been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. City leaders had responded, more or less officially, “Who cares.” Unmoved by arguments about the architectural significance of an intact block of pre-20th Century Victorian-Italianate commercial buildings, they said they planned to raze it all and create a large parcel of development-ready land to pair with the Kern Block site, which had been vacant since 1966. (This is where the Compuware building is today.)

Monroe Avenue at Farmer Street, downtown Detroit, photographed as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey. From the Library of Congress.

An incredible 13 years later, Beulah is still talking to the Free Press about the Monroe Blocks, which had not yet been razed or restored. For over a decade they had been surveyed and studied, plans floated and deflated, hopes of saving it elevated and depressed. “We could have put people to work 10 years ago,” a frustrated Beulah tells a Free Press reporter in 1988, after the Downtown Development Authority voted to demolish the block. I admire Beulah for adding a whisper of optimism that Coleman Young could step in to stop the bulldozers, but we know how this story ends. The Monroe Blocks came down in January 1990. (As crews left the demo site, the Free Press reported that city officials could not be reached for comment about their plans for the vacant parcel, which, lol.)

Except for the National Theatre, which the city had agreed to mothball. It was a small victory in the midst of a crushing defeat — a terra cotta-clad, Albert Kahn-designed, Pewabic tile-studded, golden-domed victory. And it was a problem to be solved in the future.

Photo of the National Theatre lit up at night. Albert Kahn Associates Archives via HistoricDetroit.org.

The National, built in 1911, is exceptional in many ways. It is Albert Kahn’s only surviving theater — maybe the only theater building he ever did. It is the last building standing from Detroit’s original theater district. As one of the few, if not the only, remaining burlesque theaters in Detroit — The National hosted dance shows with a live orchestra well into the 1960s — it holds a special place in the city’s music and performing arts history, too. Plus, it’s just a striking building that doesn’t look like anything, anywhere — a “Baroque-Moorish-Beaux-Arts hybrid with a Moroccan or Egyptian flavor,” as our buddy Dan Austin of HistoricDetroit.org describes it.

So here we are in the future, nearly 35 years later. Over those years, much was imagined for the National. A group of investors from Dallas proposed it for a “European-style dance club.” A collector wanted to turn it into a Black film history museum. (Would have been rad.) Restoring the National was explored, but not pursued, during the construction of the Compuware building in the early 2000s. 

Meanwhile, preservationists picked up the torch that Beulah and others had carried for the Monroe Blocks. Kept it burning for literal decades. Preservation Detroit (then Preservation Wayne) organized a clean-up of the National in 1999 that I still hear about all the time; some of you reading this newsletter were probably there. A baby preservationist (ok it was me!) wrote an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press in 2013 about the importance and the potential of the National as the pace of downtown development picked up.

Five years after that, in 2018, Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock broke ground on a massive development at Monroe Blocks. The company had taken ownership of the National and planned to preserve only the facade, using it as a gateway to a pedestrian promenade. In the preservation community this was not well-received. Among other open letters and statements of protest, burlesque legend Lottie “The Body” Graves told the Detroit Sound Conservancy that the building should be redeveloped as a theater and renamed for her. Members of the Neighborhood Advisory Council that negotiated the Monroe Blocks Community Benefits Agreement asked Bedrock to commit to preserving and reusing the entire building, but Bedrock officials said that the theater was too deteriorated and too small to be feasibly repurposed as a performance space.

Then, well: Dan Gilbert had a stroke, the world had a pandemic, Bedrock had a leadership shake-up, and the Monroe Blocks project was iced for five more years.

Until — barely exaggerating — today.

The National Theatre, photographed January 4.

Last year, Bedrock rolled out updated plans for the Monroe Blocks that scaled things back but also refreshed the vision for The National, moving the facade to face Cadillac Square and building a new performance venue behind it. Woe betide the automotive reporter who was sitting next to me when this news broke and had to receive my monologue about the entire preservation context of this press release.

Finally, late last year, deconstruction work started. For a month or two, The National came down slowly, brick by brick. Until yesterday, when it came down fast.

The National Theatre, photographed Jan. 29. For a more professionally photographed series on the National’s deconstruction, HistoricDetroit.org has a whole gallery up.

When I started writing this, I thought it would be sort of a personal essay about my own relationship to The National, which has been long, in the scale of my lifetime. It was the first advocacy effort I worked on when I got involved in preservation. It was an ongoing story in the local newsrooms I worked in for seven years. My son was born and grew into a school-aged child in the time between Bedrock’s first announcement of the Monroe Blocks project and the deconstruction of the theater.

But watching The National come down yesterday — seeing inside of the 113-year-old theater for the first and only time — it sank in for me how much of a blip that was, in Detroit time. Except for some debris, the Monroe Blocks site is cleared, the effort of a half a century. For probably the first time in hundreds of years, the entire block is empty. Not likely for long, but who can say? The history of this site has taught me not to assume anything about its future.

share with someone who appreciates too much backstory!

Share

The Wormer family plot at Elmwood Cemetery on a blue winter day.

Hey, you may have heard that I got a new job at Elmwood Cemetery (!!!), where I will be leading our public programs and communications. As a reader of this newsletter, I’m sure you are aware that this is a literal dream come true. Sorry to logroll, but if you’re interested in the kinds of things I write in the Little Detroit History Letter, you may also be interested in signing up for news from Elmwood about our upcoming history tours, tree tours, birding tours and other events to come, plus occasional wonderful stories from the cemetery’s 180-year history and its thousands of interesting permanent residents. I also have big dreams for our Instagram. Thank you for your support!

Also, a correction from last week’s newsletter about Thomas E. Clark: I appreciate the sharp as hell reader who pointed out that the laundry building was not across the street from the Book Cadillac Hotel but its predecessor, the Cadillac Hotel. We regret the error!

ncG1vNJzZmikmanBrbHDnqurp5mptaq%2F06ipsqSVqcGmvo2srJurpJawrHrCqKRoqF%2BZsrW%2BzqKrZqaRqbawusClZK2glZbBs7GMnZymp5yewaq7zQ%3D%3D