Famous people's places / Detroit – Downtown
Old Detroit City Hall
Closed – archive entry · 1961
Detroit's Victorian seat of government on Campus Martius from 1871 to 1961, torn down over fierce preservationist objections; One Kennedy Square stands on the site today.
01 / The story of this place
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Detroit's second city hall opened on Campus Martius in 1871, a mansard-roofed Second Empire building with a clock tower that served as the seat of city government for ninety years. Mayor Frank Murphy, later Michigan's governor, a United States Attorney General and a Supreme Court justice, governed the city from it between 1930 and 1933 as he pushed relief programs through the Great Depression. By the 1950s the aging building was considered obsolete, and in January 1961 the Common Council voted narrowly to demolish it despite a public campaign to save it that went as far as the United States Supreme Court. Demolition began in August 1961. The cleared site became Kennedy Square, later replaced by the One Kennedy Square office tower, completed in 2006, which occupies the ground the old city hall once stood on.
- Opened in 1871 on Campus Martius
- Frank Murphy served as mayor here, 1930–1933
- Demolished in 1961 despite a Supreme Court appeal to save it
- Site is now occupied by the One Kennedy Square office tower
Famous Detroiters
Famous people tied to this place 1
Lexicon entries for the people who lived, worked, performed or liked to spend time here.
- Frank Murphy 1890–1949 · mayor of Detroit, governor, U.S. Supreme Court justice
Worked here
The Victorian city hall on Campus Martius where he served as mayor; it was demolished in 1961 and the site is now part of the Campus Martius public square.
Sources & fact check · Checked: 2026-09-25
An independently written bilingual guide. This collection is not an attendance-based ranking.
03 / Events
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