The Kales Building is a high-rise

apartment building An apartment (American English), or flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are ma ...

in downtown

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at t ...

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and t ...

. It is located 76 West Adams at the northeast corner of Adams Avenue West and

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, across from

Grand Circus Park The Grand Circus Park Historic District contains the Grand Circus Park in Downtown Detroit, Michigan that connects the theatre district with its financial district. It is bisected by Woodward Avenue, four blocks north of Campus Martius Park, a ...

, in the Foxtown neighborhood, just north of Downtown. The building was designed by Albert Kahn and constructed in 1914, and stands at 18 floors, with one basement floor, for a total of 19 floors in height. It was originally named the Kresge Building and it was given its current name in 1930. Kahn went beyond the typical Chicago School and styled the Kales Building with a clean-lined detail façade with Neo-classical and

Renaissance revival Renaissance Revival architecture (sometimes referred to as "Neo-Renaissance") is a group of 19th century architectural revival styles which were neither Greek Revival nor Gothic Revival but which instead drew inspiration from a wide range o ...

elements such as the

hipped roof A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downwards to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope (although a tented roof by definition is a hipped roof with steeply pitched slopes rising to a peak). Thus ...

and

arch An arch is a vertical curved structure that spans an elevated space and may or may not support the weight above it, or in case of a horizontal arch like an arch dam, the hydrostatic pressure against it. Arches may be synonymous with vau ...

ed upper windows.

History

When completed in 1914, the Kales Building housed the headquarters of the S.S. Kresge Company, forerunner of retailing giant

Kmart Kmart Corporation ( , doing business as Kmart and stylized as kmart) is an American retail company that owns a chain of big box department stores. The company is headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, United States. The company was inc ...

.Profile of S. S. Kresge World Headquarters Building
''Detroit1701.org''. Retrieved on November 24, 2007. Kresge only occupied 9 of the 18 floors. The rest of the floors were leased out to doctors and dentists and the storefronts included a pharmacy. S.S. Kresge Co. moved out of the building in 1930 for a new headquarters at Cass Park and the old headquarters remained a prime location for medical offices. The last tenant, New York Custom Shoe Shop owned by Antonio Bava, moved out of the building in 1986 and it sat vacant until its restoration in 2004.

Redevelopment

In the 1990s, plans were brought up for the future

Ford Field Ford Field is a domed American football stadium located in Downtown Detroit. It primarily serves as the home of the Detroit Lions of the National Football League (NFL), as well as the annual Quick Lane Bowl college football bowl game, state cha ...

and

Comerica Park Comerica Park is a baseball stadium located in Downtown Detroit. It has been the home of Major League Baseball's Detroit Tigers since 2000, when the team left Tiger Stadium. History Construction Founded in 1894, the Tigers had played at the c ...

on the west side of Woodward. Demolition of the Kales Building was considered to make space for parking. The building's future was put in limbo when the proposed stadiums were shifted to the opposite side of Woodward. Then the city requested the Greater Downtown Partnership to try to sell the property to developers. During the summer of 1999 the GDP held 'request for proposals' for the Kales and the nearby Statler Hotel to attract bids from developers planning to redevelop the building into loft apartments. The renovation was announced thereafter and initial cleanup work began in 2000. The Kales Building was renovated in 2003-2004 into 117 residential units with ground-level retail.

References

External links

The Kales BuildingSkyscraperPage.com's profile on Kales Building
{{Clear Residential skyscrapers in Detroit Apartment buildings in Detroit Historic district contributing properties in Michigan National Register of Historic Places in Wayne County, Michigan Neoclassical architecture in Michigan Renaissance Revival architecture in Michigan 1914 establishments in Michigan Albert Kahn (architect) buildings

History

Redevelopment

References

Further reading

External links