Hotel Wolverine

03 / The story of this place

What was here?

The Freud brothers built it to replace the rooms lost when the Hotel Pontchartrain closed: the 17-story, U-shaped Wolverine opened on March 19, 1921, with 500 rooms, each with a tub and shower. Big-band leaders loved it, Tigers such as Hank Greenberg and a rookie Al Kaline lived here, and next door its tiki nightclub, The Tropics, had a replica South Pacific village and rain falling on the bar roofs. After a slide in the 1950s and 1960s, its last 25 residents were moved out on August 15, 1968, so it could become 235 units of subsidized senior housing, which the city closed in 1985. Vandals stripped the empty building, and on March 22, 1997, it was imploded as the first building cleared for Comerica Park, without damaging the Gem Theatre 15 feet away.

• Opened 1921 with 500 rooms
• Home to Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline
• The Tropics tiki club next door

Architect

L.P. Rowe (G.H. Gottschalk & Co., Chicago)

What’s there now?

A surface parking lot owned by Olympia Entertainment, next to the Gem Theatre.