Monroe Block Development

[EastsideAl]

The south side of Monroe was once the city's entertainment district, starting with the heyday of vaudeville and burlesque around the turn of the 20th century. The city's first movie theater was opened in 1905 on the first block between Campus Martius and Farmer, and many nickelodeons and larger movie theaters popped up in the 2 long blocks from Woodward to Randolph during the silent era. The National Theater is the last remnant of that era.

After the city's entertainment and movie center began moving north to the Grand Circus area, the Civil War-era buildings on Monroe remained active as a sort of down-market commercial street into the mid-1970s. The city then took them over and emptied all the stores in preparation for demolition to clear the block for the proposed Cadillac Center mall [[hence the name of the nearby People Mover station) that was going to cover that block and the old Kern block where Compuware now sits. The Cadillac Square [[Real Estate Exchange) Building and the Gregory, Mayer & Thom Building pictured in 1953's post above were torn down at that time, along with all of the other buildings on the block [[including the original Checker Bar, a couple of remaining gay bars, downtown's last pool hall, and the conveniently burned-out Family [[Follies) Theater at the Cadillac Sq. corner) except for Cadillac Tower and the Monroe frontage.

A years-long battle between historic preservationists and a very angry Coleman Young administration then ensued over the Monroe buildings. The preservationists had been able to get the state to declare it a state historic site, get it onto the National Registry, and to get a court order to halt any demolition. The city then boarded over all the storefronts, painted it with signs that read "Monroe Block Historic Restoration", and left it all sitting there decaying for over 10 years.

Finally in 1990, when few people were paying attention anymore and with almost no notice, the Young administration declared the buildings unsafe and quickly sent the bulldozers in to take all that old stuff down.

Here is a good Wikipedia page about the buildings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe...cial_Buildings

Here are a couple of pictures of the block near the end, in 1989: