Westin Book Cadillac Hotel

The Westin Book Cadillac Detroit is a luxurious historic skyscraper hotel located at 1114 Washington Boulevard in Downtown Detroit, Michigan, within the Washington Boulevard Historic District. Designed in the Neo-Renaissance style, and constructed as the Book-Cadillac, it is part of Westin Hotels and embodies Neo-Classical elements and building sculpture, incorporating brick and limestone. Among its notable features are the sculptures of notable figures from Detroit's history—General Anthony Wayne, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, Chief Pontiac, and Robert Navarre along the ornate Michigan Avenue façade and copper-covered roof elements. The flagship hotel is 349 ft (106 m) tall with 31 floors, and includes 67 exclusive luxury condominia and penthouses on the top eight floors. It reopened in October 2008 after completing a $200-million reconstruction project and contains the Roast restaurant and 24 Grille.

History

The hotel was developed by the Book Brothers—J. Burgess, Frank, and Herbert. The brothers sought to turn Detroit's Washington Boulevard into the "Fifth Avenue of the West." Part of that vision was the creation of a flagship luxury hotel to compete against the Detroit Statler Hotel three blocks to the north. They commissioned architect Louis Kamper, who designed their Book Building in 1917, to design the building. In 1917, the brothers bought the old Cadillac Hotel at the northeast corner of Michigan and Washington Blvd., but World War I material shortages delayed the start of work on their new hotel. Construction finally began in 1923, and the building, which bore part of the name of the old structure, was the tallest in the city and the tallest hotel in the world when it opened in December 1924.

Cadillac

Cadillac /ˈkædᵻlæk/, formally the Cadillac Motor Car Division, is a division of U.S.-based General Motors (GM) that markets luxury vehicles worldwide. Its primary markets are the United States, Canada, and China, but Cadillac-branded vehicles are distributed in 34 additional markets worldwide. Historically, Cadillac automobiles have always held a place at the top of the luxury field within the United States. In 2014, Cadillac's U.S. sales were 170,750 vehicles.

Cadillac is among the oldest automobile brands in the world, second in America only to fellow GM marque Buick. The firm was founded from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company in 1902, almost nine years before Chevrolet. It was named after Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who founded Detroit, Michigan. The Cadillac crest is based on his coat of arms.

By the time General Motors purchased the company in 1909 Cadillac had already established itself as one of America's premier luxury carmakers. The complete interchangeability of its precision parts had allowed it to lay the foundation for the modern mass production of automobiles. It was at the forefront of technological advances, introducing including full electrical systems, the clashless manual transmission and the steel roof. The brand developed three engines, with its V8 setting the standard for the American automotive industry.

Book

A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is a leaf, and each side of a leaf is a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book.

Books may also refer to works of literature, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature. In novels and sometimes other types of books (for example, biographies), a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, and so on). An avid reader of books is a bibliophile or colloquially, bookworm.

A shop where books are bought and sold is a bookshop or bookstore. Books can also be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that as of 2010, approximately 130,000,000 unique titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, printed books are giving way to the usage of electronic or e-books, though sales of e-books declined in the first half of 2015.

Detroit

Detroit (/dᵻˈtrɔɪt/) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan, the fourth-largest city in the Midwest and the largest city on the United States–Canada border. It is the seat of Wayne County, the most populous county in the state. Detroit's metropolitan area, known as Metro Detroit, is home to 5.3 million people, making it the fourteenth-most populous metropolitan area in the United States and the second-largest in the Midwestern United States (behind Chicago). It is a major port on the Detroit River, a strait that connects the Great Lakes system to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The City of Detroit anchors the second-largest economic region in the Midwest, behind Chicago, and the thirteenth-largest in the United States.

Detroit is the center of a three-county urban area (population 3,734,090, area of 1,337 square miles (3,460 km²), a 2010 United States Census) six-county metropolitan statistical area (2010 Census population of 4,296,250, area of 3,913 square miles [10,130 km²]), and a nine-county Combined Statistical Area (2010 Census population of 5,218,852, area of 5,814 square miles [15,060 km²]). The Detroit–Windsor area, a commercial link straddling the Canada–U.S. border, has a total population of about 5,700,000. The Detroit metropolitan region holds roughly one-half of Michigan's population.

Westin Hotels & Resorts

Westin Hotels & Resorts is an upscale hotel chain owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. As of 2013, Westin operated over 192 hotels.

History

Early History

In 1930, Severt W. Thurston and Frank Dupar of Seattle, Washington met unexpectedly during breakfast at a diner in Yakima, Washington. The competing hotel owners decided to form a management company to handle all their properties, and help deal with the crippling effects of the ongoing Great Depression. The men invited Peter and Adolph Schmidt, who operated five hotels in the Puget Sound area, to join them, and together they established Western Hotels. The chain consisted of 17 properties, 16 in Washington and one in Boise, Idaho.

Western expanded to Vancouver, British Columbia and Portland, Oregon in 1931, and by 1941 into Alaska and California. By the early 1950s, Western also had properties in Montana and Utah.

Growth and Name Change

Early management developed each property individually. After more than two decades of rapid growth, many of its properties were merged into a single corporate structure in 1958, focusing on bringing the hotels together under a common chain identity.