Decaying Prewar High-Rises Stand as Relics of Optimistic Era

The towers loom ahead as you drive down Woodward Avenue, rising out of the morning haze like the Rockies from the Plains. It is a thrilling sight; in places like this, Americans created the skyscraper city.

But as you drive closer you see windows dark or boarded or broken, and sooty facades and deserted doorways. Suddenly, you are not approaching a skyscraper city. You are whistling past a skyscraper graveyard.

The David Broderick Tower, 35 stories, is locked and empty, its elevators picked over by scavengers.

The Book Tower, 36 stories, is better known as a nesting place for falcons than businesses. Its facade is two-toned: A cleaning project was discontinued for lack of funds, leaving the top darker than the bottom.

The David Stott Building, 37 stories, had its electricity turned off in 1994 after a former owner failed to pay the bill. Tenants took up a collection to raise the caretaker’s back salary; then they moved out.

The Penobscot Building, 47 stories, once the tallest outside New York and Chicago, is leasing space at bargain rates to a less genteel roster of tenants, including the public defender’s office.

Most graveyards reek of the past, but this one feels like the future. In Detroit and the other cities of its birth, the pre-1940 skyscraper--a soaring testament to American optimism and confidence--is devalued and possibly endangered.

Most of the old towers fit one of three categories: vacant and closed; occupied by too few tenants paying too little rent to produce a profit; or profitable but forced to accept tenants (such as public agencies) that make the building less desirable to corporations or big firms.

Slender where newer buildings are squat, sheathed in limestone or terra cotta instead of steel and glass, prewar skyscrapers express man’s primal urge to build toward the sky.

They are civic monuments, like the 12-story Sycamore Building (1922) in Terre Haute, Ind., and the 14-story Hersh Tower (1931) in Elizabeth, N.J.; Kansas City’s 35-story old Federal Building (1932) and Cleveland’s 52-story Terminal Tower (1930); and the world’s tallest building for 40 years, the Empire State Building (1931).

They are also real places loved by real people.

People such as Mike Kirk, an architect who worked on the 32nd story of the David Stott Building from 1983 to 1992. He’s standing in the three-story lobby, pointing out the elaborate grillwork, reminiscing.

“Everyone knew everybody,” he says. Tenants used to share copiers and invite each other to Christmas parties, like in an apartment house. The floors were small, the elevator operators gossiped, and all in all, the Stott “was more like a neighborhood than an office building,” Kirk says.

Then, as if to prove Kirk’s point, a man in a uniform walks up, beaming. “Hey, Mr. Kirk!”

It’s Don Rose, the caretaker who stuck with the building through its power cutoff. Now a new owner is trying to bring the building back, and Rose is on the team.

The Stott remains a dramatic peak on Detroit’s skyline. Built on the eve of the Depression, its shaft of tan-orange brick rises from a granite base to the 23rd floor, where the tower begins a series of graceful setbacks.

The architectural renderer Hugh Ferriss called the Stott and its kind “an uprising of truly great proportions . . . forerunners of the future city.”

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Built to last forever, some of these old towers may not last the century.

“They’re architectural icons of a day that has passed,” says David Birch, president of Cognetics, a Massachusetts marketing and economics research firm. “They’re gorgeous, but they have no function.”

In February, a New York judge took official notice of the change. He reduced the tax assessments of several prewar buildings that he described as “empty monuments to a time when downtown was a great financial center of the world. That time apparently has passed. . . . “

Skyscrapers have been demolished before. When it was completed in 1908, the 47-story Singer Tower in Lower Manhattan was the world’s tallest building. In 1967, when its lot was selected for an even larger building, it became the tallest building ever demolished.

But now large numbers of such towers are falling into obsolescence or even dereliction, as their tenants move into the slew of office buildings started in the 1980s.

The new towers have what big business wants: big, open floors uninterrupted by columns, so space can be arranged and rearranged as needed; extra electrical capacity; efficient air-conditioning and heating; fast, reliable elevators; handicapped access; spiffy lobbies.

Most buildings designed before 1940 have too little continuous floor space and too many columns. Companies were smaller then, workers needed less space, and small floor plates kept everyone close to the best source of light and air then available--the window.

So, although renovation typically costs half as much as new construction, sometimes it just seems easier to build new--even in Detroit, no one’s idea of a magnet for development.

In 1990, Texas developer Gerald Hines opened a 43-story building, One Detroit Plaza. Built with government subsidies, it sucked tenants out of the city’s old first-class buildings, such as the Penobscot. They, in turn, lowered their rates to lure tenants from second- and third-class buildings.

The predatory chain ended at buildings such as the David Broderick, built in 1927 at the northern portal to downtown, and vacant for about five years.

Jin H. Lee, a graduate student in civil engineering at Wayne State University, is cataloging Detroit’s vacant buildings and trying to devise a formula to predict their rate of decline--a project usually undertaken in earthquake zones.

When Lee visited the landmark Madison Theater next to the Broderick Tower, its graceful domed ceiling was caved in. Metal scavengers had invaded the Broderick and thrown elevator motor parts from the roof, hoping to retrieve them. Instead, they destroyed the Madison’s dome and exposed its ornate interior to water damage.

Lee comes from South Korea. Nothing prepared him for the ruins of Detroit. “Such big, beautiful buildings, just sitting there. . . . “ he mumbles, shaking his head.

If these buildings are no longer viable as offices, there are three options: They can be converted for other uses; they can be closed until the market improves, or they can be demolished.

In Detroit, the David Broderick’s owners hope to convert it to an apartment house. But even with tax breaks, many developers are skeptical: Skyscrapers rise in packs, a factor of urban land economics. How many people want to live on shadowy, narrow streets with no schools, parks or markets?

You can mothball buildings, but you still must pay taxes and renovate your old building when the market improves. By then, the building is even older and more outmoded.

The most optimistic scenario calls for a gradual cycle of decline, in which cities lower tax assessments and landlords lower rents, opening towers to small business, government agencies and nonprofit institutions.

The least optimistic one involves wrecking balls and dynamite and an orgy of high-rise demolition. Robert Fitch, a critic of the “office economy,” says the prewar tower reminds him of another building type--the tenement house, which was torn down in vast numbers in the ‘30s and never built again.

Camilo Jose Vergara, a photographer who says downtown Detroit “moves me like no other place,” has proposed a most unlikely solution: a skyscraper museum.

He wants the city’s abandoned high-rises to be “stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American acropolis.”