Books Cadillac Hotel Mini Porcelain Hotel Creamer Detroit Michigan HTF IT is 2 1/4 inches tall. the 33-story Book-Cadillac Hotel. Ground broke in 1923, and the landmark opened Dec. 8, 1924.
The Neo-Renaissance hotel would incorporate a variety of architectural elements from Europe. The elaborately designed and ornate Italian Garden and Venetian Ballroom were two such rooms. The hotel was huge, with more than 1,200 rooms for guests (each with its own bathroom, a luxury at the time), three ballrooms, restaurants, lounges and a series of shops.
On the Michigan Avenue side, statues of Gen. "Mad" Anthony Wayne, city founder Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Chief Pontiac and Robert Navarre look down on the street below.
The hotel catered to Detroit's more affluent visitors and quickly became the city's top destination for out-of-towners and conventions. Its success helped to put venerable, though outdated, hotels out of business. Business was booming for the first years of its life, but the Book brothers would lose the hotel in the early 1930s because of the Great Depression.
In 1939, the hotel would become immortalized in baseball lore. It was on May 2 of that year that New York Yankee first baseman Lou Gehrig collapsed on the Book-Cadillac's grand staircase. Gehrig told his manager while sitting in one of the hotel's bars that he was taking himself out of the starting lineup against the Detroit Tigers, breaking his string of 2,130 consecutive games played. He would later be diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The hotel, which has been renovated into a part-hotel, part-condo development, spent part of its life in a similar arrangement, the Cadillac Apartments. Around this time, the Book-Cadillac made its motion picture debut in Frank Capra’s 1947 movie “State of the Union,” starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. They would not be the first celebrities to stay at the hotel, nor the last. It also saw such notable guests as the Beatles and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. (who, the story goes, met at the Book-Cadillac). Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover checked in over the years. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed at the hotel when he was in Detroit to give a speech shortly before he was slain. During the racial tensions of the 1960s, King is reported to have called the Book-Cadillac “a pearl in a sea of turmoil.” Visiting baseball teams often stayed there, so Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and a host of other sluggers slept within its walls.
Star power alone cannot save a hotel. As chains such as Pick and Hilton bought up hotels, the Book-Cadillac was sold to the Sheraton chain in 1951 for $6 million ($47.4 million today) and renamed the Sheraton Cadillac, stripping the Book
. It is. Inches tall. Managed ebay accepted Buyer pays shipping and handling of $6.00 in the US more for international shipping