There wasn’t much to Detroit when S.K. Harring opened the National Hotel on Dec. 1, 1836, on the southeast corner of Campus Martius. The city was a sleepy hamlet of only about 9,000 people, and nothing that stood downtown then stands today. The hotel would go through a string of owners, each growing and remodeling parts of it.

Then, in 1857, William Hale bought the property and hired the architectural firm Anderson & Jordan to overhaul the building. It was then leased to W.H. Russell, who opened it as the Russell House on Sept. 28, 1857.

With its location facing Washington Boulevard which was once considered the “Fifth Avenue of the Midwest,” The
Hotel Book-Cadillac was built and owned in 1924 by the Book brothers, J.B. Jr., Herbert, and Frank. Frank was born
and raised in the old Hotel Cadillac which the Hotel Book-Cadillac replaced. Built in the 1830s, old Hotel Cadillac
hosted presidents Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

Historic Hotels of the World