New details, renderings for Gilbert's Monroe Block plan show huge ambitions

Businessman Dan Gilbert’s ambitious goal of “going vertical” with new downtown towers looks about to become reality big time.

Gilbert’s team plans to break ground in December on its Hudson’s site plan, an architecturally stunning mixed-use assemblage that will become Detroit’s tallest building.

And Gilbert plans to follow that in early 2018 breaking ground on his Monroe Block project.

New renderings and details released to the Free Press show the mostly vacant two-block stretch will see a shimmering 35-story office tower facing Campus Martius, backed by impressive amounts of retail, residential apartments, and new public plazas and "green" space.

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If the Hudson's site tower will rank as Detroit's tallest building, the new details available for the Monroe Block remain equally impressive: It will feature 810,000 square feet of new office space, 170,000 square feet of new retail space, 482 new residential apartments, at least 900 parking spaces — many of which will be built underground, and some 48,000 square feet of public plazas and "green" space.

Total cost of the Monroe Block project: More than $800 million.

Beyond the numbers, Gilbert's aides emphasize the experiential impact of the ground-level amenities of the Monroe Block project that will contribute to a lively street scene.

"What we're doing from a public space standpoint within the development is going to be special," said Dan Mullen, president of Gilbert's Bedrock real estate arm. "It's not just a big, tall building. It's a big, tall building that interacts with street level and public spaces throughout.

"There's going to be different pods and nods of great spaces to hang out and for people to get together."

Detroit’s Downtown Development Authority gave tentative approval to the Monroe Block project last December. The City Council must still approve the land transfer and other details remain to be settled, but the project appears to be moving ahead on schedule.

Also yet to be resolved: How to incorporate the old National Theater, a 1911 gem by Albert Kahn and Ernest Wilby at 16 Monroe St., into the overall plan. Gilbert's team has promised to keep the unique facade, marked by elements drawn from Baroque, Beaux Arts and Moorish architecture, but have not yet decided what part it will play.

The new renderings and details of the Monroe Block plan released bring the project into sharper focus and illustrate Gilbert's huge ambitions for the project. Those ambitions will play out along many fronts.

Together, the Hudson’s site and Monroe Block projects will dramatically modernize the look of downtown, whose greatest architectural works — the Guardian, Penobscot and other towers — still mostly date to Detroit's Golden Age of the 1920s.

The new modernist look comes from teams of local and out-of-town architects. For the Monroe Block, the team includes Neumann-Smith of Detroit and Schmidt Hammer Lassen of Copenhagen, Denmark. For the Hudson's site project, the team includes Hamilton Anderson of Detroit and SHoP of New York.

Besides the more modern look, the projects together will also add density to a downtown street scene still marked by too many vacant lots serving only as surface parking.

And a downtown already filling up with young millennials working for Gilbert's companies will see an even greater population influx as these projects rise. That will put a premium on finding solutions to parking, traffic control, public transportation, and a host of other issues that come with a busier urban core.

Combined, the two projects will cost upwards of $1.5 billion. Gilbert hopes to finance at least some of that sum by bundling both the Hudson's and Monroe Block projects together to qualify for the new MiThrive tax incentives recently enacted by the state to promote projects like this.

One inadvertent result: Hugely ambitious projects like this will inevitably highlight the contrast between the booming downtown and the city's more stagnating neighborhoods. That contrast already bubbles up in public discussions of Detroit's revitalization efforts and remains a key point of debate in this year's mayoral race.

But for John Mogk, a longtime professor of development law at Wayne State University, there is no downside to these projects.

"These two projects continue to be a plus for the city. It shows Dan Gilbert's faith that the downtown area has a very bright future and will continue to grow," Mogk said.

True, he notes, there's not a great deal of impact spreading throughout the city from such downtown work. But, Mogk added, "Every new project has some incremental benefit to areas outside of downtown and Midtown. ... Some of those who will be employed in these new businesses that will locate there will live in close proximity to downtown. So incrementally there is a continuing beneficial ripple effect to the city. It's all a plus in my view."

And if nothing else, the new details on the Monroe Block project show that Gilbert's efforts to reshape downtown have yet to peak. If anything, they continue to accelerate, with a roster of projects, any one of which would be deemed special, let alone when done by a single team.

Among those: Besides the Hudson's and Monroe Block developments there is Gilbert's City Modern residential project under way in Brush Park, his hopes to build a new Major League Soccer stadium downtown, the creation of the new Shinola Hotel under construction on Woodward Avenue, the remake of the old Detroit Free Press building at 321 W. Lafayette as a mixed-use project, not to mention the dozens of other older buildings that Gilbert has purchased and filled up with employees and retail.

It's hard to overstate the impact that Gilbert, his partners, and his ever-growing team have had on the downtown area since moving from the suburbs in 2010. Mogk may be exaggerating a little, but hardly by much, when he says, "I don't think there's been anybody else in the history of the United States who's had a greater impact on a downtown area than Dan Gilbert has had, and in an astonishingly short number of years."

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.