Michigan Opera Theatre halts plan for new Detroit high-rise

The Michigan Opera Theatre confirmed Friday it’s pausing a plan to develop a new building, just days after Bedrock Detroit acknowledged it is scaling back the size of its Hudson tower and will no longer be in the running for bragging rights as having the city's tallest building.

The opera company said the driving force behind its decision was changing market conditions.

"Ultimately," Erica Hobbs, the theater's communications manager, said in an email to the Free Press, "we are looking for a development that maximizes our economic growth and our ability to expand artistic and community offerings."

At 480 feet, one height reportedly envisioned for the opera building, the new high-rise would have changed the city's skyline, making it one of the city's tallest structures, just under the 496-foot tall Guardian Building and slightly more than the 475-foot tall Book Tower.

It's unclear whether the two decisions to scale back tall buildings are an indication that downtown real estate owners are reining in projects in anticipation of a cooling economy or less confidence about the future.

But Hobbs said the opera company's vision — after receiving several proposals — is "on hold" because the proposals "did not significantly improve our revenue over what we already earn from the surface lot and the parking center."

Last spring, the opera theater asked for proposals for a mid- to high-rise tower that could accommodate a hotel, office space, apartments, condominiums, ground floor retail, and underground parking on a lot it owns that is just under an acre.

The Detroit Opera House building opened in 1922 and was purchased by the Opera Theatre in 1988. The Opera Theatre has called the site where the tower was envisioned one of the premier vacant parcels, just steps away from the theater district, sports arenas, the QLINE and Woodward.

In addition, Hudson tower has been heralded as a project that also was to dramatically change the city's skyline — and it still will, just not to the degree that Bedrock had been boasting it would.

"What we concluded is we wanted an iconic building," Matt Cullen, CEO of Bedrock, told journalists this week at the Detroit Regional Chamber's annual policy conference. "The need to be the tallest wasn’t on our highest list of priorities anymore."

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The $909 million project is expected to be built at the site of the old J.L. Hudson department store, which closed in 1983 and was razed in 1998. The tower, which had been slated to rise 912 feet, broke ground in December 2017.

In comparison, the Renaissance Center, the city's tallest building, is 727 feet with 70 floors.

Cullen promised that the tower is still "going to be a tremendously impactful" building.

Bedrock is owned by Dan Gilbert, the 58-year-old businessman behind the Bedrock real estate company and the development of several projects in the city. He also is the founder of mortgage giant Quicken Loans, but has been mostly out of public view since he had a stroke on Memorial Day weekend.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.