This was an interesting story in today’s Free Press:

New life set for Book-Cadillac

Developer plans to reopen landmark hotel in 2008

BY JOHN GALLAGHER
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER
One of Detroit's most famous vacant icons, the Book-Cadillac Hotel, will reopen in early 2008 in a $176-million renovation, Cleveland-based developer John Ferchill said Wednesday in a long-awaited announcement.

Ferchill's confirmation that the project finally is a done deal came two years after an earlier restoration deal involving the Kimberly-Clark Corp. fell apart.

Ferchill, who specializes in renovations of historic structures in older cities, said he plans to create a 455-room hotel known as the Westin Book-Cadillac along with 66 upper-floor condominiums selling in the low $300,000s.

It promises to be downtown's biggest and most significant renovation project since the reopening of the Fox Theatre in 1988, which sparked the creation of a theater and entertainment district.

Despite a history of false starts and disappointments with the Book-Cadillac, city officials say Ferchill's project represents a solid deal.

Among other reasons, Ferchill has scheduled a closing date on his financing package for Dec. 19, with construction expected to start immediately after.

And city officials are encouraged by Ferchill's record of pulling off similar deals in Cleveland and elsewhere.

In addition, he has already built the Hilton Garden Inn in Detroit, which opened in 2004.

"They have a reputation as a company that gets the job done, very hands-on, very no-nonsense type of a developer with a proven track record," said George Jackson, president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., which helped negotiate the deal with Ferchill.

The hotel will employ 400 to 500 staffers and include five ballrooms, including an entirely new one with a capacity for 1,000 people to be built on a vacant lot adjacent to the Book-Cadillac.

The hotel will also have at least three restaurants, including a sports bar and a high-end steakhouse.

Ferchill said he will spend $18 million on furnishings alone.

"This has been an incredible joint effort by the Detroit community to help us get this done," Ferchill said. "We are really, really high that this will be a first-class hotel that everybody will be proud of."

In its heyday, the Book-Cadillac played host to luminaries like John F. Kennedy and baseball star Ted Williams, as well as tens of thousands of Detroiters who attended proms, weddings and parties there.

If the vacant hotel stood as a dreary symbol of Detroit's decline, the renovation project will mark not only a physical remake, but also a psychological boost for the community, Jackson said.

"It will be a shot in the arm for all of downtown," Jackson said. "The Book-Cadillac is a real icon in this community, and this restoration will be a project that we can all be proud of."

First opened in 1924 and designed in an Italian-Renaissance grandeur by architect Louis Kamper, the Book-Cadillac's fortunes declined with those of Detroit in the decades following World War II.

The hotel finally closed in the mid-1980s and since then had deteriorated to a near-ruin, with broken windows, extensive water damage and most material of value stripped away.

But the city never gave up on the hotel, and Ferchill had expressed interest in renovating it for the past few years.

Only after Kimberly-Clark's bid fell apart in 2003, though, did Ferchill get involved again.

Construction should take two years and be finished by spring 2008.

Of the $176-million price tag, $160 million will pay for the hotel itself, and the remainder will pay for the upper-floor condominiums.

Putting together a deal like this is far more complex than simply getting a routine construction loan from a bank.

Ferchill, working with the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., had to piece together multiple pieces of interlocking financing to raise enough cash to do the deal.

Among the main pieces of the financing, the project will have a $50-million bank mortgage arranged by Fifth Third Bank; a federal HUD (Housing and Urban Development) loan of $18 million; about $11 million in Downtown Development Authority grants that mostly will pay for interior cleanup of the hotel; more than $60 million in historic-renovation and brownfield tax credits that will be sold to investors, and about $12 million in equity investment that most likely will involve carpenters union pension funds. Several other sources make up the balance.

The City of Detroit's participation remains what it was in the Kimberly-Clark deal, mainly providing development authority funds to clean up the hotel prior to construction.

The funding gap that forced Kimberly-Clark out of the deal was closed by Ferchill Group when it came up with additional tax credits for investors to buy, more equity investment and other non-city sources.

… which got me thinking about Detroit’s reputed comback …

It’s been in the making for several years now, but opening up a bunch of restaurants downtown serving $9 sandwiches isn’t going to cut it. But I, along with a lot of people, do see progress and hope in the effort and actually believe it will happen. Fifteen years ago I could’ve moved any where in the country, but I elected, for a reason, to stay here, in this fractured, beat-up, abandoned town, a tarnished and faded gem once so unbelievably luminous.

And by “it,” I guess I refer to Detroit’s “comeback,” “rebirth” or “renaissance” or whatever tag upon which you wish to slap. I would prefer to call it what it is — cleaning up a mess that’s gone ignored for 25 years. It’s like your garage. Say you haven’t cleaned your garage in about four years. Shit piles up. You’ve got bags of junk, boxes from three holidays ago, broken tools, nearly every square inch covered with junk you a.) don’t need, b.) can’t use and c.) are too fucking lazy to take to the curb. And then one day, you’re so goddamn bored with your life (or there’s nothing better on TV at 1 in the afternoon on a Saturday; I mean, come on, how many times can you watch “Red Dawn”?), that you decide to get out do something about it.

And if you’ve ever addressed such a mess, the initial assessment is grim. This sucks. So you start. And you bag up this and you haul out that, you pound some nails into a wall and hang up the rakes, hoes and garden implements, you dig through the boxes and bags of two-year-old God knows what and you start making a little room amid the clutter. There’s invariably a point where you look at it all and say “I’ve been at this for three hours and it doesn’t look any different than when I started.” But, in reality, you have. You just can’t see it because you’re in it. And that’s where Detroit is right now, a little less than halfway through cleaning up the shit. Well, probably a lot less, but it’s a start.

So, you’re banging out your garage, maybe take a little break and then get back to it. You haul a bunch of junk out to the curb, that broken antique sewing machine, those three mismatched tires from a car you owned, like, five years ago, some inoperable jamboxes, lawn bags from last spring, that kind of stuff. And now you have more room. You clean up the lawnmower (maybe flip it over and run a sharpener over the blade, put in a new plug, clean out the fuel filter), move some items around, organize the tool bench you’ve ignored since the day you moved in, give the floor a good, back-breaking clean sweep and, hey, you’re done. You step back, kind of like you do when you’re done shoveling the sidewalk or raking the grass and it actually looks good. “I should’ve done this YEARS ago,” you might think. And it does look good. And it’s functional and has returned to its utilitarian nature from whence it once sat. There is a reinvention to your space, a sense of accomplishment and optimism that wasn’t there before you started.

And so it is with Detroit. It’s about 30 percent through the garage cleanup.

And it has so much further to go. You can spruce up some buildings downtown and clean everything up for the major events the city will host (Super Bowl XL Feb. 5, 2005; the NAACP Convention July 7-12, 2007, why THIS hasn’t before been held in a city that’s 90 percent black is incomprehensible; 2008 NCAA Basketball Midwest Regional, March 28-30, 2008; PGA Championship, August 2008; NCAA Final Four, March 2008), as the city has been doing for the last 18 months, but unless that stuff sticks, and stays after the game and crowd comes and goes, it’s simply, as my mother would say, “perfuming the pig.”

To get past that halfway mark and beyond, a litany of seemingly leviathan proportions need to be addressed — the crumbling infrastructure, the lack of jobs and housing for low- to even moderate-income families, the flailing school district (with its 50 percent graduation rate), a City Council rife with ineptitude, a mayor who would rather go clubbing and portray himself like some sort of g-money rapper fuckhead than nurture and foster critical investor relations in his near-broke city, a worthless mass transit system despite having thousands who rely on it daily, a depleting population (it finally dipped below 1 million, to 951,270), an alarming poverty rate (33.6 percent of Detroit residents live in poverty, this according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey) that puts it very much at the top of the country’s most impoverished cites, a crime rate that keeps residents nervous (although Detroit is no longer the murder capital; Chicago earned that shitty distinction for 2004) and, in addition to all else, a football and baseball team that, despite an intensely loyal fan base and brand new, multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art facilities, can’t field a moderately competitive squad. And that’s only a start. I haven’t even mentioned development, the economic future of the Big Three or the city’s glaring pockets of fucked up, abandoned buildings.

There’s work to be done. And it’s easy for people to stand on the sidelines or outside of the region to point and kind of giggle or shake their heads. Detroit’s not a tourist town, try as it might, and that’s fine. An intra-state revival and renewed interest in Michigan’s largest city might be a perfect start to livening the joint up a little bit and providing some sort of economic infusion to southeast Michigan. Everyone loves to go up north on weekends in the summer, me, chief among them. But if half of those motorists headed north on I-75 took one weekend out of the summer and reversed directions, venturing to Detroit, a city rich in heritage, culture and, hopefully some day soon, an across-the-board, sort of universal sense of stimulation for visitors, we might be a lot closer to finishing this garage and getting back inside for the late afternoon game.