Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock has finished restoring a 100-year-old building in downtown Detroit as its newest residential development.
The real estate firm held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Monday, June 22, for The Belle, an 11-story building at 1346 Broadway featuring 42 market-rate apartments as well as first- and second-floor retail space.
The building dates to 1926 and was previously known as Harvard Square Centre. It had been mostly vacant since the late 1990s, although it did host a bar on the first floor until a decade ago.
Bedrock restored the building’s exterior facade as well as key details inside, including the plaster ceilings, terrazzo flooring, brass elevator fronts and the original mail slot. The Belle is French for “the beautiful.”
Asking rents start at $1,370 per month for studio units and $1,730 for one-bedroom apartments.
“The completion of The Belle represents much more than a new apartment building,” said Jonathan Mueller, the firm’s senior vice president of development. “It demonstrates Bedrock’s continued investment in downtown Detroit and in the people who live, play and stay here.”
“This redevelopment shows that we can have our history preserved and develop for our future at the same time — we can actually do both,” said Detroit City Councilwoman Renata Miller, who represents the district.
Bedrock is the largest property owner downtown and the area’s most prolific developer. It has done numerous other office-to-housing conversions in the past decade, turning the old Detroit Free Press building at 321 W. Lafayette into upscale apartments and remaking the abandoned Book Tower at 1265 Washington Blvd. into apartments and an extended-stay hotel.
The Belle was originally designed a century ago by Detroit architect George DeWitt Mason, who also did the Masonic Temple, the Detroit Yacht Club and the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. The building is on the site of what was once Detroit’s first public high school, which opened in 1858.
Bedrock bought the empty 11-story building in 2017 from prominent Detroit landlord Dennis Kefallinos for what land records say was $6.25 million.
Bedrock’s architect for the restoration and housing conversion was Kraemer Design Group.
The Belle shares the Broadway block with two future developments.
One is an under-construction 80-unit residential project by Basco of Michigan that will be a new nine-story building that would backfill three former storefronts between 1322 to 1336 Broadway. Basco is preserving the historic facades of two of those, while the third was deemed too deteriorated to save.
Basco CEO Roger Basmajian told the Free Press last week that construction is taking a bit longer than first anticipated and they now anticipate finishing the project by the end of 2027.
The other development on the block is the restoration of the nine-story Merchants Building at Broadway and Grand River into a 121-room hotel.
That project’s developer, Detroit-based Method Development, said this spring that they are still moving forward and have chosen a boutique hotel operator, although they have yet to announce which brand or when the hotel would open.
This story was updated to correct an inaccuracy.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 100-year-old Detroit building redeveloped into The Belle apartments
Reporting by JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
