The Park Avenue Hotel in Detroit was once recognized as one of the gems in Lew Tuller’s hotel empire in the beginning of the 20th century. In the 50's, the hotel was owned and managed by the Salvation Army, who used it as a home for the elderly, and then as a rehab center for the homeless and drug addicts until 2003. Since then, the hotel has been abandoned, and plans of turning the hotel into condos or apartments didn't come through. And so it happened, in the summer of 2015, the once so grandiose building, was demolished and imploded (see video below).

The Park Avenue Hotel featured 252 rooms and the latest in hotel glitz and glamor: fancy furniture, hide-away wall beds and built-in dressers. Kamper [architect Louis Kamper] outfitted the building’s lobby in the Tudor style and gave it imitation stone walls (ritzy at the time). In the back of the lobby was a lounge room with wooden paneling, English-style furniture and impressive chandeliers. If you kept on walking past the lounge, you’d come across the hotel’s main dining room and two private dining rooms. The hotel also featured many of the mainstays in hotels of the time, including a barbershop, drug store, cleaners and tobacconist.

But ahead of the Great Depression, it became clear that Lew Tuller had overexerted himself. One by one, he would lose his hotels. The Security Trust Co. seized the Park Avenue Hotel from him in 1928. While the hotels would stay in business, they did not offer the same style and service as they did under Tuller’s leadership.

And just as the 1920s through ’40s were kind to Detroit, the 1960s through ’90s were not.

The hotel in the 60's:

Conference room:

A cross:

An executive chair:

Some furniture:

The demolition:

Detroiturbex.com has a nice set of images of the historic hotel as well.

And for more like this, see the work of photographer Kevin Bauman and his project "100 Abandoned Houses".

Photo credit: Image from the 60's via HistoricDetroit.org. Recent images copyrighted by Alanna St. Laurent. See the rest of Anna's Park Avenue Hotel images here.

H/t to Devour.