Detroit News Complex

About this property

The Detroit News Complex consists of two buildings: a historic office building at 615 West Lafayette Boulevard in Detroit, Michigan, and an associated parking structure, located across the street at 901 West Lafayette. The two buildings were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015. The main building held the offices of The Detroit News until 2013, and was also the site of the first commercial radio broadcast (on WWJ) in the United States. The Detroit News was founded in 1873 by James E. Scripps, who controlled the paper until his death in 1906. He was succeeded by his son-in-law George Gough Booth. The paper's circulation grew rapidly in the 20th century, with over 100,000 in 1906 and over 225,000 in 1918. Booth, foreseeing this growth, planned to expand the paper's offices then on Shelby Street. However, the paper's growth exceeded the constraints of the space, and in 1913 the News acquired this block on Lafayette for $250,000. The site at the time included the 1858 home of Zachariah Chandler, a remnant of when the area had been a fashionable residential district. Booth hired architect Albert Kahn to design the new building. The two men worked together on the design, with Booth detailing his vision of a grand, civic-minded refinement of the essentially industrial nature of the building. Ground was broken at the site in November 1915, and construction was completed by October 1917 at a cost of $2,000,000. Additions to the structure were made almost immediately: in 1918 a paper storage warehouse, also designed by Kahn, was added, and in 1920–21 a sixth floor was added to the original building. In 1924, a parking garage across Third Avenue was constructed, containing retail shops and a full-service garage in addition to parking spaces. In 1920, radio station WWJ began broadcasting from the building. WWJ was the first commercial radio broadcaster in the United States. The Detroit News Building remained the home of The Detroit News for nearly a century. However, fortunes of the newspaper industry declined, particularly in Detroit. In 1998, as part of the Joint Operation Agreement between the News and the Detroit Free Press, Free Press staff moved into the building, vacating the Detroit Free Press Building. In 2014, the Free Press and News staff moved operations to leased space in the former Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Detroit Branch Building, and the Detroit News Building was sold to Bedrock Real Estate, a branch of Quicken Loans. The Detroit News complex consists of two buildings constructed in 1915–1924: the Detroit News Building and the associated Parking Garage.

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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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