Dan Gilbert buys Detroit’s Book Tower skyscraper

Billionaire businessman Dan Gilbert said Friday he’s buying the long-vacant 38-story Book Tower skyscraper and two other adjacent buildings on Washington Boulevard and plans to tranform them into a "a game-changing, mixed-use development.”

Gilbert’s Bedrock Real Estate Services doesn’t release purchase prices, but sources told the Free Press he’s paying about $30 million for the package that also includes the 13-story Book Building and an adjacent 2-story community center. The buildings, totaling about 517,000 square feet, span the entire 1200 block of Washington between Grand River Avenue and State Street. The seller was Vancouver, British Columbia-based AKNO Properties.

The renovation could be a key piece of an ongoing redevelopment of Washington Boulevard. Since 2008, the area has been anchored by the completely refurbished Westin Book Cadillac, which sat dark for 25 years before reopening to much fanfare. The Great Recession struck and not much in the way of development happened until the recent reopening of the David Whitney Building and the conversions of the Gabriel Richard Building and Detroit City Apartments.

The acquisitions are the latest in Gilbert’s five-year shopping spree of major real estate in greater downtown. In May, he bought the 35-story, 210,000-square-foot David Stott Building and the 10-story Clark Lofts. With the recent purchases, Bedrock says it now owns or manages 80 buildings in downtown Detroit, including the Greektown Casino-Hotel. Gilbert also owns the now-cleared Hudson’s site, where he plans a signature building meant to have an awe-inspiring contemporary design.

Gilbert on Friday described the Book Tower project as “one of the most exciting redevelopments in our entire Detroit real estate portfolio. We will bring this beautiful, world-class iconic landmark back to life in a manner that will make all Detroiters and visitors proud. We can’t wait to get started.”

The Book Building opened in 1916, and the tower followed 10 years later. The small building in the deal was supposed to be a massive, 81-story tower that would have been the tallest office building in the world. The Depression stunted that development at only two stories. They were built by the Book brothers, who developed much of Washington Boulevard as we know it today, including the Book Cadillac.

The project is not without its challenges.

The 36-story tower and 17-story building have been empty since 2009, when its last tenant, Bookies Tavern, left the tower. The Book Building is mostly gutted, signs that renovation work had started at one time but never completed.

Those six years have left parts of the tower with crumbling plaster, vandalized walls and some scrapping.

Bookies Tavern was owned by members of the Lambrecht family, who also once owned the entire Book Tower from 1988 until 2006.

The family sold the building for $6 million in 2006 to New York-based Northeast Commercial Services Corp., land records show. The New York firm had plans to redevelop the Book Tower into a mix of office space and 175 residential condos, but then lost the property to the project’s lender.

The lender, KSI Capital Corp., sold the building to AKNO for $5.5 million in August 2008.

Bookies Tavern, now known as Bookies Bar & Grille, continued to lease space in the tower until it moved to its current location on Cass Avenue.

Bookies co-owner J. Lambrecht said Friday that he is glad to hear that Gilbert is the old building’s new owner.

“I’m glad that someone who actually has the wherewithal to get a project done has it,” Lambrecht said.

“It’s a beautiful building with lots of character and you couldn’t build something like that today.”

Parking is also an issue Gilbert must overcome. The Book complex originally had a garage, but that was demolished some years ago. Any residential use for the massive property will require him to find - or build - dedicated parking.

“The total renovation of the building is about a $140-million project, including the cost of the building,” said Stewart Beal, president of Beal Properties, which worked with a different developer interested in the complex. “They were looking at 50,000 square feet of commercial space and 275 lofts and building a parking structure on the site of the smaller building.”

The parking structure would have accounted for $30 million of that $140-million price tag. So Gilbert could be looking at a $90 million to $100-million cost just in construction work.

Preservationists were excited by the Friday announcement.

“The Book Tower is a major missing piece of Detroit’s architectural fabric,” said Amy Elliott Bragg, president of the board at Preservation Detroit. “It’s so big, it’s so tall, it’s been an empty, looming building in Detroit’s skyline for so long. So this is huge news for Detroit and preservation."

Staff writer J.C. Reindl contributed to this report

Contact Dan Austin at daustin99@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @HistoricDET.