Town Residences, at 1511 1st St in Detroit (at Bagley) was originally designed by the Detroit architectural firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls in several stages from 1926-1928 as the exclusive site of the renowned Pontchartrain Club, which had approximately 2,000 members at the time. Wirt Rowland seems to have been mainly involved in the revision of the original design. His version clearly reflected his post-1926 shift away from Romanesque to geometric design features such as stepped arches, stepped roofline elements, and windows grouped in pairs and singles. That design, though, was revised again, probably by Amedeo Leone, to the version that was built. Rowland's angled arch motif (for window heads and ornamentation) was replaced with a theme based on circles.
Ground was broken for the club building the first week of September 1928. The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, and before the end of 1929 the club was in financial distress so work on the Pontchartrain Club building came to a halt. Only the shell of the building was erected. The shell stood empty for decades. In the 1950s, the building was converted into Town House Apartments, with the renovation spearheaded by architects Fridy, Gauker, Truscott & Fridy of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The window openings were altered and much of the exterior stone ornamentation was removed and replaced by brick, though the north-facing side of the penthouse remains unchanged.
Today the building is called Town Residences. It is faced with a warm, dark yellow brick veneer, light gray granite and yellow Mankato stone. The ascending tower features the art deco terra cotta details of the building’s Rowland design.
The four photos below are all I have thus far. The first 3 zoom in from the entire east-facing front of the building to the central tower, and the 4th shows the main entrance.
