The Detroit Saturday Night Building, at 1959 East Jefferson, is one of Detroit's more significant, yet little-appreciated, Art Deco buildings. Detroit Saturday Night was a newspaper established in 1907. They hired Smith, Hinchman & Grylls to design their headquarters at 550 West Fort Street, which was completed in 1911. But by 1928, they had outgrown that building and again hired Smith, Hinchman & Grylls to design this larger new building at 1959 East Jefferson. Wirt Rowland designed their new building, and it opened in 1929.
Rowland re-used several design elements from the Greater Penobscot Building for the Detroit Saturday Night Building, such as a relatively smooth and monolithic limestone face devoid of piers and pylons, organ pipe fluting, stepped arches, and a beveled roof-line.
The round convex 'organ pipe' shapes, prominent on the Greater Penobscot Building and also the Michigan Bell Madison Central Office Building appear as a stepped design renimiscent of those used in the Guardian Building, used above the main doorway and above a window at ground level. They also create a horizontal band at the top of the building, fill the space between windows on the top floor, and form pillars in the center of the building.
Compare the Detroit Saturday Night Building (photos above), designed by Wirt Rowland, with the Detroit Press Building (photos below), at 2751 East Jefferson, just a few blocks up the street, which was constructed at the same time for the same purpose by the George D. Mason and Company architectural firm. That building's architecture belongs to an earlier era, where there is a recessed central area flanked by two large protruding pylons that extend above the roofline. The Saturday Night Building (above) points the way forward: a much flatter facade with emphasis on the central area (rather than corners) and geometric designs as decoration.
To accomodate the heavy typesetting and printing equipment used by the newspaper, Rowland designed the building with high ceilings, a heavy-duty electrical system, and the capability to support heavy floor loads. For this reason, the building continued to be used by typesetting and printing firms long after Detroit Saturday Night's demise in 1937 when their owner died. Subsequent tenants included Saturday Night Press (the remains of the newspaper, after it folded), Detroit Typesetting Company, Detroit Electotype Company, Michigan Typesetting, Douglas Offset Company, and the Willens+Michigan Company, making the building home to nearly all of Detroit's major advertising typesetting firms. During Michigan Typesetting's tenure, the 80,000-square-foot addition was built on the east (right) side of the building. Willens+Michigan went under sometime in the early 1990s, bringing to an end 1959 East Jefferson's role as a home for Detroit's typesetting industry.