Dan Austin: Saving the GAR Building a battle worth waging

Here’s a story of a castle, a great army and a great preservation battle.

While Dan Gilbert is getting a lot of ink for all of the buildings he is scooping up (he now owns or controls 7.6 million square feet of office space and 30 buildings), a quirky little castle has quietly been undergoing a renovation of its own.

And while the Grand Army of the Republic Building is about as far from a skyscraper as you can get, saving this quirky little sandstone castle is no less important than its big abandoned brethren. In fact, this is one of the most important rehab projects the city has seen in recent years — because it proves that you don’t have to be a kazillionaire to save a piece of Detroit’s history.

For more than 100 years, the Grand Army of the Republic Building has stood its ground on the corner of Grand River and Cass. And for nearly a decade, brothers Tom Carleton and David Carleton and business partner Sean Emery — the leaders behind the creative media company Mindfield — wrestled with the City of Detroit to save it from the architectural scrap heap.

The castle

The GAR Building opened in 1900 as something of a frat house for the city’s Civil War veterans.

While there probably weren’t many keggers in those days, the old-timers would often gather to play cards and socialize, likely regaling each other with tales from their days on the front line, fighting to keep our country whole.

After the ol’ Boys in Blue had mostly died off, the city took control of the GAR Building in 1934 and threw a division of Detroit’s Welfare Department in the building.

In the early 1940s, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department turned the GAR Building into a rec center and meeting hall for groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and after-school dance troupes. But as Detroit started to bleed jobs and population, Mayor Coleman Young shuttered the GAR Recreation Center in 1982. While a shame, the move made sense: People did not live downtown; the rec centers were needed in the neighborhoods.

For nearly three decades, vandals, urban explorers and thrill-seekers would storm the castle. Some taking only photos, others raiding the castle for artifacts and wiring.

In 2006, the City of Detroit sent out a request for proposals to develop the GAR. The city went with a known commodity: the Ilitch family’s Olympia Development.

Meanwhile, the Carletons were no stranger to saving Detroit buildings. In 1992, they bought the old Good Housekeeping Building on Library near Gratiot, and turned it into the Library Lofts.

After sitting on the GAR for a few years, the city rescinded the sale to the Ilitch family — a case of “develop or get off the pot,” if you will.

The Carletons were waiting.

The partners wanted the GAR so badly, they bought it site practically unseen. At the time, with all the windows boarded up and without any electricity, they had to make their decision with only flashlights and optimism to guide them.

Navigating the rotted floors and mounds of pigeon droppings in the dark, the Mindfield team still decided they had a winner. On Nov. 1, 2011, the Carleton brothers and Emery bought the GAR from the city for $220,000.

“How could you not want to take what’s already in this city, surrounding us every day, and breathe some life into it?” said Emery, Mindfield’s post director.

A call to arms

It’s worth pointing out that this is a Detroit-based small business saving one of the city’s architectural treasures, not a major real estate developer or major hotel chain or billionaire’s business. That’s not to discount the rebirths of the Book-Cadillac and Fort Shelby hotels or the Broderick Tower, but this is a little guy dreaming big and doing his part to turn our city around.

“For anyone else who wants to try, now’s the time to do this in this city,” Emery said. “There’s an incredible private-sector, do-it-yourself mentality that’s more or less erupting in Detroit right now. ... When you look around the city and see these businesses taking the chance and succeeding, it is literally infectious. The opportunity to make a difference, grow and build something worthwhile is greater in this city than it has been in decades and is probably unique in the country. Get out there and do it.”

The Carletons and Emery plan to relocate Mindfield to the top floor of the GAR next spring. The second and third floors will be leased as office space, and the ground floor will house two restaurants. The team also plans to honor the building’s past by dedicating space as a memorial to Civil War veterans; likewise, a mosaic-tiled floor honoring the Grand Army will be preserved.

Compared with most restorations and renovations of historic Detroit buildings, Mindfield’s work on the GAR goes above and beyond to save what’s left. While the Book-Cadillac and Fort Shelby hotel renovations were crucial to Detroit’s turnaround, much of their past was carted off to the landfill.

So far, Mindfield has already sunk $1 million into the façade, remediation and cleanup of the building.

The partners are going to painstaking lengths to restore as much of the building as they can, and what cannot be restored is being re-created. The original front doors, for example, were “beat to hell” and could not be saved, David Carleton said, so they were replicated from white oak. Even the original hardware for the doors is being reproduced.

“In many ways, restoring this building transcends a labor of love. It’s so important in reverence, to the men it was to honor, so important to our history,” said David Carleton, Mindfield’s executive producer. “To do anything less than 100% would have been disrespectful to the building, to the men who kept this country together in the 1860s, who spent their dying days here.”

You might say that saving the old home of the Grand Army was a battle worth waging. Now we just have to enlist a few more preservation soldiers.

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