The first floor of the historic Leland House in downtown Detroit felt as cold as the street outside. That’s where Dianne Lamb stood on a recent morning, bundled in a hooded winter coat, her breath visible in the unheated air. She’d slept two hours and was worn out from packing. For the past 12 years, she’s lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the fabled building.
Until the day after Thanksgiving, the 58-year-old thought she’d retire here.
Then management handed out letters at the front desk saying DTE Energy planned to cut the power and everyone had to be out within five days because of unpaid electricity bills that are now in the six figures.
“We just wanted more time,” Lamb says, her voice hoarse from exhaustion. “People have been here 15, 20 years. I’ve been here 12. Some people don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have anywhere to go, and I really don’t have friends that can take me in. I don’t have any family. This is just insane. It’s crazy.”
Even now, it’s easy to forget that the 98-year-old Leland was an opulent and storied hotel, drawing baseball stars, gangsters, opera singers, union leaders, and celebrities long before becoming one of the last affordable buildings downtown.
To make ends meet, Lamb works two jobs. She rides her bike to one and catches the bus from the nearby Rosa Parks Transit Center for the other. Her apartment costs hundreds less than anything similar in downtown Detroit, where prices have soared as investors convert neglected buildings into pricey apartments and lofts. The average rent in downtown is now $1,817, a steep increase over the past decade, making it inaccessible to most Detroiters. That’s more than double the average rent at the Leland.
“This was perfect,” Lamb says of the Leland, her eyes welling in tears. “I could afford it. I really like it here.”
Now she’s trying to line up a new place, but she worries she won’t find anything she can afford nearby, where her job and bus connection are.
And she’s far from alone. The Leland House rents out about 40 occupied units at affordable prices, making it one of the last places downtown where working-class tenants, artists, service workers, and retirees can afford to live.
A building in limbo
On a frigid morning on Monday, three days after receiving the notice to leave the building, U-Haul trucks lined the block outside the Leland, where frustrated tenants loaded their belongings. To make matters worse, the only working elevator gave out as tenants were moving out, unable to handle the heavy load of people, boxes, and furniture.
It felt like the end of an era.
For Emanuel “Butter” Hill, who has lived at the Leland for 18 years and does maintenance work there, the thought of moving out and never seeing his neighbors again brought him to tears.
“We’ve got people who’ve been here for 40 years,” Hill says, pausing to steady his voice. “We’re like family here. This building means so much to us. We’re a community.”
After some tenants had already moved out, DTE Energy agreed to give the Leland House Limited Partnership until Friday to pay a $57,000 deposit on the overdue power bills to keep the power on. On Thursday, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court approved a last-minute arrangement after the Leland secured a $1.2 million short-term, high-interest loan. Judge Maria Oxholm barred DTE from cutting off power without her approval. Some of the money, she said, must be used to pay the DTE deposit and maintain casualty insurance.
“Several people worked tirelessly in a very short period of time to obtain the financing for the Leland and to do everything possible to make sure the residents had electricity in their apartments,” Luis Ramirez, a representative for Leland House, said in a statement after the court hearing. “Ownership looks forward to doing everything possible to keep the residents in place, and protect their health, safety and welfare.”
Under the agreement, the debt must be repaid once the building is expected to be sold next spring. But nothing about the sale is certain, and details about the plans remain murky.
‘That building has a soul’
The crisis at the Leland has been mounting for decades. Originally a glamorous hotel that attracted famous guests during Detroit’s heyday, the building at Cass and Bagley is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, facing a city nuisance lawsuit, and is millions in debt.
The building’s long decline has been especially painful for former workers like Mary Buckshaw Konkel, who spent 17 years there and still dreams about the place.
“Anybody who worked there long enough will tell you — that building had a soul,” she says. “If you were sensitive to it, you could feel the darkness too. Not ghosts. Just everything she had gone through. She never got the renovation she needed. Just band-aids.”
For residents, the Leland is far from perfect, but it has a magnetism that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived there or frequented its eclectic nightclub. It’s also one of the last downtown buildings where working-class people can afford to stay.
“I always looked at the Leland as fantasy, but for a lot of people, it was a reality because it became a life-saver and sanctuary for so many people,” Konkel says. “People stayed because they finally felt like they belonged somewhere. They overlooked the idiosyncrasies.”
That’s true for Daryl Stewart, a 67-year-old artist and percussionist who toured with Parliament-Funkadelic and moved to the Leland in 2012 for $450 a month.
“It can be a beautiful monster,” Stewart says of the Leland. “The monster part is what we have to deal with. The beautiful part is the humanism that came forward.”
Konkel’s title was director of theatrical housing, but she filled in when other work was needed. She painted, patched, reglazed tubs, served drinks. She says her mission was to give tenants a sense of comfort, even as the building around them deteriorated.
“We made people feel like they could be themselves and feel like this was their home,” Konkel says. “Some people lived there 20 years on month-to-month rent. They felt part of something. It was the Leland community.”
Living at the Leland came with tradeoffs. In the winter, many residents relied on electric space heaters. By summer, the building baked. A 2022 city inspection found standing water in the basement, submerged electrical equipment, missing smoke detectors, no heat in common areas, and only one working elevator. The city sued, calling the building “a danger to the safety and welfare of the public” and “not fit for human habitation.” A 2014 fire exposed a nonfunctioning standpipe system, forcing firefighters to battle the flames with handheld extinguishers.
The building’s slow decline began to take a toll on Konkel.
“That building could be an energy vampire. It really drained you,” Konkel says. “But I will always be proud to say I worked at the Leland. We put our heart and soul into it.”
A glamorous start
The Leland is the kind of building that reminds you that Detroit once brimmed with people and possibility, a city that roared with industry and grew, for a time, into the nation’s fourth-largest city. When the building opened as the Leland Hotel in 1927, it was pure glamour, featuring more than 700 rooms with private baths, nearly a dozen shops, an opulent ballroom, and a towering lobby with 17-foot-tall arched windows.
Designed in the Italian Renaissance style by Rapp & Rapp, a Chicago architectural firm better known for ornate movie palaces like Detroit’s Michigan Theatre, the Leland boasts a stately exterior clad in brick and terra cotta with granite trim.
When the hotel opened, Detroit was a boomtown with 1.5 million residents. At the time, the Leland competed with about 200 hotels within one mile of downtown, according to the Detroit Convention and Tourist Bureau.
The hotel employed 550 people, compared to the handful that work at the building now.
The building’s elegance and modern amenities attracted many famous people, from mobsters to sports legends. The hotel’s Hideaway Bar on the fourth floor became a hangout for legendary union leader Jimmy Hoffa and his fellow International Brotherhood of Teamsters leaders. Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang also used the hotel’s bar and ballroom to meet. In 1955, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther and Ford’s chief negotiator John Bugas hammered out their landmark guaranteed-wage agreement at the Leland.
When Hoffa disappeared in July 1975, the Leland was one of the first places police checked. In the 1980s, the FBI dug up the basement in search of Hoffa’s body but found no trace of him.
The names of the hotel’s famous guests are too long to list, but they include baseball legends such as Babe Ruth and Hank Greenberg, musicians George Clinton and Usher, opera stars, Ice Capades performers, and reportedly gangster Al Capone.
By the mid-1960s, the hotel transitioned into the Leland House, a combination apartment-hotel with an outdoor pool and parking garage. It joined the Ramada hotel chain in 1988, then reclaimed its historic name just before Detroit hosted the Super Bowl in 2006. In 2005, the Leland landed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Fading and neglected
But as Detroit’s population plummeted and jobs migrated to the suburbs in the 1960s, the city lost its stature. The Leland began a decades-long decline that stripped away much of its grandeur.
After a series of ownership changes, local developer Mike Higgins bought the building but struggled to maintain it.
In 2018, Higgins stood on Mackinac Island and announced a $120 million top-to-bottom renovation plan that promised hundreds of affordable and market-rate apartments and a 650-space parking deck by 2020. Rockford Construction signed on as development manager.
The plans never materialized, and Higgins nearly lost the building to tax foreclosure. Rockford also sued Higgins over nearly $430,000 in unpaid work.
In a lawsuit filed by the city in 2022, Detroit officials claimed the building was “in a state of decay, deterioration, and dilapidation,” noting that inspectors found a lack of heat in common areas, broken smoke detectors, a malfunctioning elevator, and standing water in the basement.
Tenants and former employees describe Higgins as brilliant, charismatic, and imaginative, but not always grounded in reality. He later developed heart problems, and his habit of eating steak and candy bars didn’t help. They remember him fondly for caring about his tenants and giving working-class people a place to live, even if he didn’t deliver on his promises.
“Mike was a visionary, but sometimes you have to hand over the reins to people who know what they’re doing and care about the building and the people,” Konkel says. “Mike was very, very good at acquiring properties, but he wasn’t as good at managing them.”
Others agree.
Higgins died in 2023. His ownership group filed for bankruptcy in November, listing more than $20 million in debt and leaving the building’s fate in question.
The ‘Disneyland of industrial bars’
One of Leland’s lasting legacies is City Club, a legendary goth-and-industrial haunt that became a sanctuary for anyone searching for a place where weirdness was celebrated. In 1983, Higgins turned the grand ballroom into a dark, pulsating club originally called Liedernacht, which translates to “night song” in German. But after a fight with his club partner, Higgins went solo and changed the name to City Club in 1985.
For the next four decades, Detroit’s “Disneyland of industrial bars,” as a one-time regular described it, was a grimy sanctuary for goths, punks, ravers, and anyone who wanted to let their freak out. It was normal to see someone in head-to-toe rubber, cyber-dreads, or a gas mask chain-smoking outside at 3 a.m.
City Club hosted renowned national acts such as Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Rob Zombie, the Beasties Boys, Smashing Pumpkins, Public Enemy, Skinny Puppy, and Depeche Mode. For years, the cover charge stayed at $3 or $4.
Sybil Carter, who began cleaning ovens at the Leland in the mid-1980s, took charge of the club during its infancy after Higgins asked her to manage it. To get the word out about the club, Carter handed out free passes at malls and other places where young people flocked. Students at the College for Creative Studies hung their work on the walls. Local artist Jeremy Harvey moved in and created surreal circus murals. The whole place operated more on creativity and grit than money.
“It was never in the shape that people think a club should be,” Carter says. “But I think that was the draw. It was cleaned all the time, but it didn’t look like it was.”
She once made the Beastie Boys rap for her at the door to prove their identity, and then threw them out minutes later for trying to look up women’s skirts, she recalled for a colorful Metro Times story in 2012.
As with most good things at the Leland, age and neglect began to catch up with the club, making it increasingly unsafe for the people who worked, partied, and performed there. Without heat in the club, Higgins relied on aging forced-air units for a little warmth. Pipes froze and burst, and electrical failures became routine. The lighting was sparse, leaving parts of the club in near-darkness.
Troy Parker, a onetime regular, developed a friendship with Higgins and implored him to get the place up to code. He says the City Club was “roasting in the summer and freezing in the winter.”
“It was a dark hole. You couldn’t see people,” Parker recalls. “I told him we’d have to do it on the cheap because he wouldn’t invest. He just wanted space heaters. I told him you can’t run a club like that, but I did what I could.”
With Higgins’s blessing around 2010, Parker spent three years trying to “get rid of the dungeon feel” and make the club safer. He patched up old wiring, installed industrial fans, added space heaters for the employees, and made other improvements. Higgins invested in a new stage with lighting, but that was about it.
Parker says city inspectors no longer let things slide.
“Those were different times,” the 63-year-old says. “This was before Detroit started changing, back when the city looked the other way. Things are different now. They aren’t turning a blind eye anymore.”
Still, the club kept going because it meant a lot to people. It offered them a freedom they couldn’t get elsewhere. City Club was where artists worked the door, where young queer people found each other, and where shy suburban misfits could become glittering, leather-clad demigods for a night.
“Music saved their soul and sanity. I think that is why City Club was so important to so many people,” Konkel said. “You can dress how you want and dance how you want. Not everyone has to come in with black lipstick and Alice Cooper eyes.”
Like many legendary bars and theaters in Detroit, City Club could soon become another unique space swallowed by time and neglect, clearing the path for a downtown increasingly dominated by high-end lofts and shops. Detroit is a graveyard of odd, beautiful spots left to die.
“City Club survived about 40 years. That’s a long run,” Parker says. “It never had any money behind it, but lots of clubs closed while City Club kept going. But I think the final nail in the coffin is coming. It lasted as long as it could.”
‘What are we going to do?’
For tenants, the prospect of losing their homes less than a month before the holidays was devastating. Many can’t afford higher rents and have no idea where they’ll sleep next week. Their fate is now in the hands of a monopoly utility and a handful of wealthy investors.
Getting only a few days’ warning struck many of them as callous and cruel. DTE Energy CEO Gerardo Norcia’s total compensation in 2024 was about $12.6 million, a 22.5% increase over the previous year. In 2024, DTE reported $1.4 billion in profits and sent $607 million to Wall Street shareholders. Meanwhile, customers are getting hit with steep increases. In January, regulators approved a $217 million electric rate hike.
Meanwhile, the remaining tenants just want some certainty, and maybe some compassion.
“We’re all asking, ‘What the fuck? What are we going to do?’” Stewart says. “Some people have been here for 30 years. It’s not a bunch of 19- and 20-year-olds. There are people here who can’t just get up and move.”
State law requires utilities like DTE to give tenants in multi-units at least 30 days’ written notice before shutting off power when the landlord hasn’t paid the bill. That didn’t happen in this case, tenants say.
Asked about the notices, DTE spokesperson Amanda Passage insisted in a written statement to Metro Times that the company followed the law.
“As with all customers who own multi-unit dwellings, in compliance with regulatory requirements, we provided a 30-day public notice on all entrances and exits of the building to inform tenants of potential disconnect,” Passage said.
Tenants are adamant they never saw notices.
“They are lying through their teeth,” Matthew Erard, an attorney who has lived at the Leland for 16 years, says. “I’m not aware of anyone having seen a posted notice from DTE at any point in time.”
City leaders are also to blame, tenants say. Erard points to a city ordinance that requires Detroit’s building department to set up a rent-escrow account within five days of a shutoff notice, notify tenants, and use those funds to keep the utilities on if enough money is collected. Erard says he spoke to multiple supervisors at the Buildings, Safety Engineering, and Environmental Department (BSEED) and was unable to find “anyone who was at all familiar with its provisions or willing to review them.”
“It is extremely troubling that the city has legislatively enacted procedures governing the precise circumstances that we’re confronting – which would enable tenants to prevent the shut off from occurring, while also ensuring utilities are paid — but yet the city department charged with executing those procedures is neglecting to fulfill its legal obligations,” Erard says.
In a statement to Metro Times, Detroit Corporation Counsel Conrad Mallett disputed claims that the city did anything wrong.
“The Ordinance citation you reference was designed to provide a solution to a single issue — a landlord collecting rent but not paying utility bills,” Mallett said. “It was not designed to address a multi-faceted issue of non-payment of utility bills and building bankruptcy and a laundry list of long-standing health and safety issues due to poor building conditions — all of which exist at the same time at the Leland House.”
He added that “the law department has been working for at least two years to get the owner to remedy the building conditions, to no avail, and we are still in court on this issue.”
It should be noted that Mayor Mike Duggan, who has not publicly weighed in on the situation, has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from DTE executives and the company’s political action committee.
“It’s winter. This isn’t our doing,” Lamb says. “This is the owner’s doing. We just thought DTE would be more sympathetic.”
As Stewart put it, “DTE, these motherfuckers are always picking on the little man.”
An uncertain future
What happens next is anyone’s guess.
“It’s rage against the machine,” Stewart says. “We’re up against corporate America. They really want us out of here, and they want the property. … This is the new Detroit.”
Hill says it’s sad and frustrating that Detroiters who stuck through the hard times are brushed aside for big-pocketed investors.
“No developer is more important than the people who live here,” Hill says. “The ones who struggled and never left the city, the ones who built the city back up, they are not getting anything.”
Even from afar, Konkel shares their heartbreak.
“I still dream that I’m walking through the Leland, and it’s beautiful again,” she says. “That building wanted to shine. It has gone through so many tragedies. ”
Konkel left before the Leland got the best of her, but she still loves the building and its residents.
“We are survivors,” she says. “I gave everything I could and had nothing left to give. I had to keep my soul and my sanity. The building needs to hear that it was a sanctuary for people.”
Birmingham-based Tir Equities LLC, owned by real estate investor Ara Darakjian, has been trying to buy the Leland House and is in talks with Higgins’s company. But Darakjian said the sale cannot move forward until major repairs are completed and the building’s outstanding bills are settled. He has an option to buy the building, but any deals are on hold until the bankruptcy case plays out.
Darakjian has not publicly shared his plans for the building, and he declined to comment for this story through his spokesperson.
Whatever happens, bigger questions remain: Who gets to stay downtown as the last affordable spaces disappear? And what happens to a historic, storied building that held Detroit’s artists, workers, musicians, misfits, and elders for nearly a century?
The Leland has survived fires, bankruptcies, and decades of neglect. Its remaining residents and City Club may not be as lucky.
This article appears in Dec. 10-23, 2025.