Full-service / Detroit
Hotel Norton
Closed – archive entry · 1918–1959 · demolished 1959
A 14-story, 250-room hotel on Griswold Street (1918–1959) with rooms looking over the Detroit River to Canada; Yamasaki's One Woodward Avenue stands on the site.
WMrapids · CC0
Quick facts
- Rooms
- 250
- Floors
- 14
- Opened
- 1918
03 / The story of this place
What was here?
Charles W. Norton came from an innkeeping family in Brighton, Michigan, and from 1908 ran a small men-only hotel at the northwest corner of Jefferson and Griswold. Across the street he then built this 14-story, 250-room hotel, designed by Bonnah & Chaffee, and opened it with a party on June 19, 1918. Its rooms looked out over the Detroit River to Canada, for a few years only the Statler matched it among Detroit's modern hotels, and many guests lived there for good, one reporter for 41 years. The family also opened the Norton-Palmer in Windsor in 1927. When MichCon wanted a riverfront headquarters, the family sold, the last guests checked out on February 26, 1959, and the hotel was demolished that summer.
- Opened 1918; 14 stories, 250 rooms
- River views across to Canada
- Last guests left in 1959
- Architect
- Bonnah & Chaffee
- What’s there now?
- One Woodward Avenue, Minoru Yamasaki's former Michigan Consolidated Gas Co. tower (completed 1962), built after the Norton was cleared for MichCon.
Hotels nearby
Back to hotels ↗
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Detroit Foundation Hotel
Extended stay / Downtown · Cadillac Square / Campus Martius
Kasa Cadillac Square Detroit
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