71 West Willis Street
Billinghurst Hotel, Doorstep Homeless Shelter
(Address includes 71-73 West Willis Street)
The Billinghurst Hotel officially opened on August 6, 1922. According to ads in the Detroit Free Press, it was billed as the “newest and most thoroughly modern bachelor hotel in the city.” It was built for A. C. Billinghurst, the former Croxden Hotel (Cleveland) and Hotel Willard (Detroit) manager. He employed Lundblad & Lundblad as architects, and it was a hotel that catered to longer stays at a moderate price point. These hotels were all the rage when it was built. You could rent a fully furnished apartment with hotel amenities by the week and month.
In creating the hotel, management hoped to “create an institution which will possess the comforts of a private home with all the advantages of a metropolitan hotel.” Although this idea didn’t last long, the idea was innovative. When it opened, rooms rented for $8, $10, and $12 a week. In 2023, that’s $146, $183, and $219, respectively.
By 1923, Billinghurst and J. C. Hirsack, another man associated with the hotel, had been tapped to give their input on a new build further up Woodward. The Hotel Prenford would be managed by Billinghurst and Hirsack and be nearly identical to the hotel on Willis. It used the same architect, builders, and contractors. I was shocked to learn that it’s still there, operational and that I had passed it hundreds of times. It’s the Hotel Normandie. Looking at the two structures side by side, they’re still nearly identical.
I can’t be certain, but I assume that, over time, the hotel transitioned into regular hotel service. Detroit was once littered with small, independent hotels. As capitalism’s stranglehold on the United States economy tightened, it became harder for these mom-and-pop hotels to survive. Detroit’s decline didn’t help, either.
In 1961, the hotel cost $7 a night and had television, maid service, and parking.
In 1966, Richard H. Rule, 36, lept from the rooftop and ended his life. He had recently been released from Ionia State Hospital, a mental institution. These hospitals saw heavy reform in the 1960s, and deinstitutionalization was generally good; however, many facilities closed or sent patients home without proper care for long-term treatment.
In 1983, Leroy Hasty, a 26-year-old resident of the Billinghurst, stabbed his former roommate and friend, Roger Martin, to death. Martin, 62, was a former GM Tech Center employee.
By the 1980s, the Billinghurst Hotel had become known as a welfare house. It was kept afloat by young, single residents who received checks from the government. These hotels were common in Detroit. Although these checks kept the lights on, owners were still tight for cash, so they rarely updated and often lacked the safety precautions that nicer hotels or apartments would offer.
A fire swept through the Billinghurst in the early morning of Friday, February 17, 1989. It started on the first floor and quickly spread throughout the structure, causing panic. The building didn’t have a sprinkler system or adequate fire alarms, so many residents first heard about the fire from the smoke or heard their neighbors screaming about it.
Detroit Police Sergeant John Stevenson saw the blaze and residents screaming out the windows for help, so he called the fire department and rushed to the scene to assist those in danger. After helping one woman out of the building, he was forced out by the billowing smoke. He found discarded mattresses in the alley, cut open the chainlink fence on the structure’s west side, and dragged the mattresses from window to window so helpless residents could jump onto something softer than the concrete or grass below. He said that he saw 20 to 30 people jump from windows.
Joann McIntyre, a 30-year-old resident of the Billinghurst Hotel, told the Detroit Free Press that “some of the people who were jumping from the third or fourth floor didn’t hit a mattress. When I went out, there were bodies all over.” DFD ladders eventually rescued many residents, and some tied sheets together to shimmy out the window. One hundred two of the residents were Michigan welfare clients. Fifty-four residents were moved to the Hotel Yorba, another accommodation that had become a haven for those needing cheap rent by the late 1980s. Luckily, no children lived inside. At the time, the Billinghurst Hotel was owned by Terry Harder.
According to the Detroit Fire Department, 18 pieces of fire-fighting equipment and 80 firefighters were used to control the fire that was first reported by Sergeant John Stevenson at 3:12 AM and controlled by 4:47 AM. In the end, four residents were killed, and just under 60 were injured, including four police officers.
Although arson was ruled out as a cause, dozens of residents had to uproot their lives after the fire. Elvis Cummings, 29, was quoted in the Detroit Free Press, “I have nothing right now, not even a cigarette.”
Although treacherous, the fire didn’t end the Billinghurst. It was fixed up and continued to operate as a cheap option for those down on their luck.
However, in October 1991, Governor John Engler signed a law that would end general assistance payments to 82,000 single men and women without children. Initially, this was seen as a catastrophic move for broke young people and the landlords who cashed their checks every month. This caused the homeless population in Detroit to skyrocket, rocking the already underfunded shelter system in the city and threatening the closure of numerous budget-friendly hotels across town.
To combat the rise in homelessness, Engler initiated a new program to bolster shelters. He stated, “Anyone who needs and wants shelter will receive it.” This new funding led various nonprofits to partner with former welfare-funded hotels and apartments to create new homeless shelters, and the Billinghurst Hotel would be one of them. According to the Detroit Free Press, this program cost Michigan more than the former per capita. A general assistance check cost the state $5 per day, whereas it cost $10 per person to house a homeless person in the shelter. Not everyone in the general assistance program became homeless, so whether the cost-cutting measure was successful is hard to say.
In October 1991, Detroit had 1,139 beds available per night for people experiencing homelessness. By the following winter, it had over 3,000.
By 1993, the Billinghurst Hotel’s transformation was nearly complete; it rose from the ashes of a few years prior. The Salvation Army sponsored the homeless shelter, where Detroiters did community work in exchange for lodging and meals. Residents worked as security and were given jobs around the building. There was a 6 PM curfew, no outside people were allowed inside, the rooms were dormitory style, and everyone was frisked on their way inside because no drugs or alcohol were allowed. Booker Glover, who saw the transition from the old general assistance-funded Billinghurst to the new program, told the Detroit Free Press, “This place used to be chaos. People were roaming the halls, yelling, slamming doors. Now, it’s calm and pleasant.” In addition to food and shelter, the Billinghurst and other makeshift homeless shelters across Detroit offered counseling, employment referrals, and, sometimes, traveling nurses.
In addition to helping a looming homelessness crisis in the city, this program ensured that Detroit wouldn’t “have a half-dozen more large, abandoned buildings this winter.” Without these programs the Billinghurst would likely have been abandoned and demolished.
In the 1990s, the shelter was renamed the Doorstep Homeless Shelter and run by Jon Rutherford, a former Denby High School quarterback. The service ran another shelter at Lillibridge and East Jefferson. The operation on West Willis was an emergency shelter for women and children and housed and fed nearly 300 people daily. At one point in 1994, the tenant count was 287, including 156 children. The Department of Social Services coughed up $10 per person daily for Doorstep to operate the shelter, who accepted donations to keep things running.
Eventually, a larger Doorstep Homeless Shelter was opened on Woodward in Highland Park. I’m not certain when their operation on West Willis closed, but the nonprofit was in the news extensively in 2001.
John Rutherford, still running the operation, was asked by a mayoral candidate for the nonprofit he ran to donate $50,000 to his mayoral campaign. Rutherford obliged; in return, the then-Michigan State Representative wrote Rutherford a recommendation letter to the Detroit-Wayne County Mental Health Board advocating for Rutherford’s nonprofit to receive a $22.7 million contract, which ended up happening. The mayoral campaign was successful, and Kwame Kilpatrick became the youngest mayor in Detroit’s history on January 1, 2002. Although no laws were broken, many Detroiters questioned why a government-funded operation donated $50,000 to a mayoral campaign.
Back on West Willis, the Billinghurst Hotel was eventually abandoned. Although it stayed in relatively good shape, it now sits somewhat alone on a lonely street in the Cass Corridor.
The neighborhood started seeing new investments around the same time the Doorstep Homeless Shelter here may have closed. Restaurants changed hands, new ones opened, and the first tangible sniffs of what we now call Detroit’s resurgence were on the horizon.
In 1998, Scott and Carolyn Lowell purchased Traffic Jam & Snug, a restaurant on the corner of 2nd and Canfield. In 2001, they bought and renovated the Blackstone Hotel, originally the Cassel Hotel, built in 1917. In 2002, they took over the Bronx Bar and opened Cliff Bells in 2006. These projects, completed with the help of business partners, made the Lowell family influential in the Cass Corridor.
Around 2012, they purchased the Billinghurst Hotel at 71-73 West Willis. By 2018, the structure had been stabilized and secured, and work appeared to be ongoing in 2020. However, during the pandemic, work seemed to stop. After the Traffic Jam & Snug fire in May 2022, there appear to be no immediate plans to proceed with the project. However, it’s well maintained and seems to be looked after.
I feel certain that the future of this structure is safe; however, I also know that in Detroit, anything is possible. I hope to see work continue here soon.
