The Leland: Detroit's Oldest Downtown Hotel

The Leland Hotel opened in April of nineteen twenty-seven, named for Henry Leland, the exacting engineer who founded Cadillac and Lincoln. Designed by the firm of Rapp and Rapp in the Italian Renaissance style, it offered eight hundred air-conditioned rooms, a ballroom, and eleven street-level shops, a full city block of elegance near Grand Circus Park. Two years later, the Depression arrived and the ownership declared bankruptcy.

The hotel kept operating through bankruptcy, and for decades it was the oldest continuously operating hotel in downtown Detroit. Labor leaders, boxing promoters, and figures from the city's organized crime world all passed through its lobby. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand five, the Leland today remains a fixture of downtown, battered, beloved, and still standing.