Detroit's glorious Guardian Building celebrates 80 years

It's exotic, playful, majestic and utterly over-the-top. Call it the architectural equivalent of Aretha's hat.

The Guardian Building, downtown Detroit's art deco "Cathedral of Finance," is celebrating its 80th birthday this year. Forty stories of architectural delirium, the orange brick pile at Griswold and Congress streets opened in the heady days just before the 1929 stock market crash.

Yet the optimism surrounding its inauguration was short-lived. Just 11 months later, the financial company that built it -- the Union Trust -- would go down in flames, after the stubbornness of one Henry Ford scuttled a government rescue package.

Of Detroit's three great art deco skyscrapers from the late '20s, architect Wirt Rowland's Guardian is neither the tallest -- that falls to the Penobscot Building, also by Rowland -- nor as well-known as Albert Kahn's Fisher Building.

The Guardian, however, trumps its more subdued cousins in sheer visual extravagance, from the exterior brick color -- matched to one of Rowland's drawing pencils -- to the visual riot of Pewabic and Rookwood tile both outside and in. Take the stairs up to the five-story upper lobby, passing through an "altar screen" topped by a Tiffany clock, and you can't help feeling that you've entered some glittering cathedral.

Henry Ford turned his back

Royce Yeater, who heads the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Chicago office, calls the Guardian Building "one of the best art deco skyscrapers in the country. It just sort of explodes at you."

None of this aesthetic glory would have mattered in the dark days of 1930. Like so many banks today, the Union Trust -- renamed the Union Guardian Trust after a merger -- suddenly found itself insolvent as the Depression deepened. The Feds agreed to bail out UGT with $37 million, but only if its largest depositors -- Henry Ford among them -- accepted a government guarantee of their funds but left them untouched for the duration.

Everyone agreed except Ford, who shrugged off pleas from Michigan Sen. James Couzens, as well as the head of the Hudson Motor Car Co.

James W. Tottis, author of "The Guardian Building: Cathedral of Finance" (Wayne State University Press, $50) says, "Henry Ford essentially says, 'Bankers be damned!' " Ford withdrew his money and his company's, says Tottis, which caused the firm's collapse.

To prevent a panicked run on Detroit banks, Gov. William Comstock declared the nation's first "bank holiday," an off-and-on emergency tactic employed over the next few years. The firm, which was said to hold 40 percent of all bank assets in the metro area, went into receivership.

Restoring the grandeur

In hindsight, it's Detroit's great good fortune that the landmark was completed before financial ruin set in, otherwise an unfinished tower might have scarred the skyline -- or been completed with slapdash indifference.

Like many buildings from this era, the Guardian suffered acutely in the 1950s and '60s, with drop ceilings installed, the astonishing stained glass in the elevator alcoves bricked over, and a host of other humiliations.

In 1981, Michigan Consolidated Gas Co. bought the Guardian and started renovations, although visitors were discouraged from entering the stupendous upper lobby where the firm had installed a warren of work cubicles.

In 2003, the Sterling Group acquired the building, which was nearly empty at the time. It hired the SmithGroup -- the successor firm to Smith, Hinchman and Grylls where Rowland worked -- to do an assessment and complete the restoration of the building to its original magnificence. The Guardian, now about 60-percent inhabited, was recently sold to Wayne County, which will move its staff in over the next 18 months.

Alison Christy, a barista at the elegant Rowland Café that's now the centerpiece of the upper lobby, speaks for many when she says, "I never knew a place like this existed in Detroit. When I came for my interview," she says, "my jaw just dropped."

Indeed, the building's exuberance -- in contrast to the somber elegance of the Penobscot and Fisher buildings -- calls into question whether architect Rowland pushed the design envelope too far.

Architect Jeff Hausman, who heads the SmithGroup's Detroit office, dismisses that argument.

"I would beg to differ that it's over-the-top," Hausman says, speaking in his office with the spectacular river view on the Guardian's 17th floor. "I would say it's right on the edge."

Guardian facts

Height : 486 feet

Number of orange exterior bricks: 2 million

Dominant architectural detail: Notched arch, or zigurrat, on windows, passageways, drinking fountains and tilework

Never restored: "Sky Fountain" on roof, made up of oscillating search-

lights (till World War II)

Also by architect Wirt Rowland: Penobscot and Buhl buildings in Detroit; Kirk in the Hills Presbyterian Church in Bloomfield Hills

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