Detroit's Civil War Veterans Hall

At the corner of Cass and Grand River stands a five-story Richardsonian Romanesque building that Detroit built for its Civil War veterans. The Grand Army of the Republic began building here in eighteen ninety-seven, designed by Julius Hess and completed after his death by Richard Raseman. The city paid most of the forty-four thousand dollar cost, while the GAR contributed six thousand.

Inside were shops, offices, and a small auditorium where aging soldiers gathered to remember battles most Americans already wanted to forget. The organization that once claimed four hundred thousand members across the country dwindled as the veterans died off, and the building passed through other hands. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-six, a triangular wedge of a building sitting on an odd sliver of downtown Detroit.