Budget & hostels / Detroit
Hotel Fairbairn
Closed – archive entry · 1924–1958 · demolished 1983
An eight-story, 450-room men-only hotel on Columbia Street (1924–1958) that took Black tenants from 1945 and was listed in the Green Book. Comerica Park covers the site now.
Quick facts
- Rooms
- 450
- Floors
- 8
- Opened
- 1924
03 / The story of this place
What was here?
The eight-story Fairbairn opened on June 1, 1924, as a “home away from home for bachelors”: a men-only club hotel by architect Percival R. Pereira with 450 rooms, circulating ice water, billiard and reading rooms, and a basement cafeteria and barbershop. Bigger stag hotels such as Webster Hall soon outclassed it, and by 1939 rates had fallen to $5 a week. In 1945 it was leased for Black tenants, and The Negro Motorist Green Book listed it from 1955 to 1958, when it billed itself as “your home away from home.” City directories list it as the Fairbairn through 1958; it then served as the Columbia Medical Hospital and Nursing Home until 1980 and was torn down after an August 26, 1983, demolition permit.
- Opened 1924 as a men-only hotel
- 450 rooms on eight floors
- In the Green Book 1955–1958
- Architect
- Percival R. Pereira
- Green Book
- Listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, the travel guide that showed Black travelers where they could stay safely during segregation.
- What’s there now?
- Seats along the third-base line of Comerica Park.
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