Detroit-Leland Hotel

About this property

The Detroit-Leland Hotel is a historic hotel located at 400 Bagley Street in Downtown Detroit, Michigan. It is the oldest continuously operating hotel in downtown Detroit, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. The ballroom of the Detroit-Leland has hosted a nightclub, the Leland City Club, since 1983. The hotel is now named The Leland and no longer rents to overnight guests. In the early 1920s, Edward A. Loveley and Harry A. Stormfeltz formed the Detroit Properties Corporation, with the purpose of developing Bagley Street outward from Grand Circus Park. The first building constructed was the Michigan Building at Bagley and Clifford, designed by the Chicago firm of Rapp & Rapp. The Michigan Building opened in 1926. The second building project undertaken by the Detroit Properties Corporation was the Detroit-Leland Hotel. Loveley and Stormfeltz again tapped Rapp & Rapp to design the building, and the Cleveland firm of Lundoff-Bicknell as contractors. Construction began in 1926, and the building cost $4.5 million. The Detroit-Leland Hotel (named for Cadillac founder Henry M. Leland) opened its doors in April, 1927. It had 800 air-conditioned hotel rooms, along with a dining room, coffee shop, ball room, and 11 stores at street level. However, by 1929 the ownership was having major financial problems and declared bankruptcy. The hotel remained in bankruptcy until 1936, but kept operating throughout this period. The Leland Hotel would notably be the hosting site of what would be considered the first NBA draft in history with the 1947 BAA draft (the BAA (Basketball Association of America) being the predecessor of the modern-day NBA via merger with the NBL) taking place there on June 2, 1947. By the 1950s, ownership had changed hands to Robert J. Sterling and his brothers Oliver and Edward. The Sterlings renovated the hotel in 1959/1960, prompted by the opening of Cobo Hall. In 1964 the hotel was again sold, this time to Robert K. and Donald Werbe, who renovated the hotel to have 473 apartments in addition to hotel rooms. The hotel changed hands again in the 1970s, with Mayer Morganroth and John R. Ferris as owners, and in the 1980s when the Leland House Limited Partnership Company, headed by Michael W. Higgins, was formed. The 1980s recession hit the hotel hard, and the Leland became part of the Ramada hotel chain in 1988. The hotel reverted to its historical name in 2006. The Leland House Limited Partnership Company owned the Detroit Leland until June 2026, when a federal bankruptcy judge approved the building's sale to Mudhish Development Company LLC for $3 million. The court also found that tenants displaced by a power failure in 2025 were entitled to compensation.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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