Once in a Great City Read online

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  Late that same afternoon, as firefighters hosed down the remains of the Rotunda, George Edwards, commissioner of the Detroit Police Department, sat twelve miles away at 1300 Beaubien, waiting anxiously for his desk phone to ring. The address was literal and figurative: 1300 Beaubien was police headquarters and also shorthand for cop brass. The ten-story building was yet another Albert Kahn creation, hulking on a city block between Clinton and Macomb. Edwards had been at his job less than a year. He had stepped down from the Michigan Supreme Court and taken the top cop job at the behest of Detroit’s new mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, a liberal Catholic acolyte of President Kennedy, and was tasked with reforming the force, making it more citizen-friendly, improving its relationship with the city’s black population, or “Negro community,” as it was called then. “It may well be that in the next several years the greatest contribution that I can make lies in seeking to resolve the dangerous tensions which threaten Detroit, and in seeking to make the Constitution a living document in one of our great cities,” Edwards wrote to a close friend in a letter explaining the “improbable sequence of events” that led him to take the position. But even with that idealistic vision, his primary job as commissioner, always, was to fight crime, and the word he now so anxiously awaited dealt with the complicated nexus of those two missions.

  The phone call finally came three and a half hours later, at 8:30 that night. Senior Inspector Art Sage, head of the vice squad, was on the other end of the line. “Boss, we got it,” Sage reported triumphantly. “We got the whole schmozzle.”

  The whole schmozzle in this case was the gambling operation run out of the Gotham Hotel, long known to local cops and feds as the iron fortress of the numbers racket in Detroit. In the late afternoon dimness, two Department of Street Railways buses had pulled up to the establishment off John R Street at 111 Orchestra Place. The doors whooshed open, and out stormed 112 men wielding fire axes, crowbars, and sledgehammers from a joint task force of Detroit police, Michigan state police, and the intelligence unit of the Internal Revenue Service. The first officers off the bus also carried a warrant to search the entire hotel. Never before had they been able to obtain such a sweeping search warrant; for previous raids, of a more modest scale, they had had to ask for legal authority to search one room, two or three at most, and had been foiled by the gamblers, who protected their fortress with a sophisticated system of internal security monitors, alarms, and spies working inside the hotel and circling the nearby streets with two-way radios.

  This time a federal undercover agent was planted inside for the single purpose of beating the desk clerk to the alarm buzzer, which he succeeded in doing. With a plan, an expansive warrant, and a full raiding company eager to go, the odds seemed better that the law would find what it was after. “They broke in here like members of the Notre Dame football team,” John J. White, the Gotham’s proprietor, told a sympathetic reporter from the Michigan Chronicle. In its headline of the raid, Detroit’s leading black newspaper inserted the word “raging” before “football team.”

  The Gotham was not just any hotel. In its day, it was the cultural and social epicenter of black Detroit. John White was a capitalist success story, a small-town kid from Gallipolis, Ohio, who came to the big city with his siblings after his mother died, hovered around the gamblers and off-books financiers of Hastings Street, and eventually acquired enough money to buy the hotel in 1943. At a time when that section of town—not far from Wayne State University, one block from Woodward Avenue, and a short walk from Orchestra Hall—was mostly white, he extended the perimeter of the historically black district known as Paradise Valley. The Gotham, two solid brick towers connected in the middle with a penthouse on top, had once been the grand personal residence of Albert D. Hartz, who made his millions selling medical supplies. It was built for him by—who else?—architect Albert Kahn.

  To walk into the Gotham on any day for most of the two decades after White took over was to enter a hall of fame of black culture. Everyone had stayed there. On the wall behind the front desk were signed photographs of Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, Adam Clayton Powell, and the Ink Spots. The Brown Bomber, who had grown up in Detroit from age twelve, became a breakfast regular in the Gotham’s Ebony Room, ordering five scrambled eggs with ketchup and a bone-in steak. The hotel’s front counter had been built by Berry Gordy Sr., a jack-of-all-trades and father of the namesake president of Motown Records. Berry Gordy Jr.’s four older sisters—and soon enough all of Motown’s women singers—were taught etiquette, posture, and social graces by Maxine Powell, who stayed at the Gotham for many years and held classes there. On a wall behind the thickly cushioned leather chairs in the lobby were color portraits of Sugar Ray Robinson, Judge Wade McCree, Congressman Charles Diggs Jr., and other black notables. John Conyers Jr., a young lawyer who would go on to join Diggs in Congress, made his way through Wayne State University Law School by selling Filter Queen vacuum cleaners; his biggest sale was to John White and the Gotham housekeeping staff. The Gotham deal was of such note, Conyers recalled, that it was reported in the following Wednesday’s edition of the Michigan Chronicle. The leading black businessmen in Detroit gathered regularly at the hotel in formal-wear for events of the Gotham Club, distinguished fellows who were also lifetime members of the Detroit branch of the NAACP.

  Employees at the Gotham were instructed to follow John White’s courtesy code, which was printed and posted on every floor: Never argue with a guest. It is never enough to be pleasant only with our guests. Spread it around among your fellow workers also. Guests judge our hotel by the three C’s: courtesy, cheerfulness, and cordiality. Make it obvious you like people. Try to be tolerant toward the grouch and tactful with the impatient guest. A cheerful “Glad to see you, sir,” or “It’s nice to have you back with us madam,” has made many a hotel cash register ring with repeat business. (The Gordy family was connected to the courtesy code as well: the posters were printed by the Gordy Printing Company run by Fuller Gordy, Berry Jr.’s oldest brother.)

  The poet Langston Hughes took note of the courtesies and other refinements at the Gotham in a 1949 column published in the Chicago Defender. “There is a kind of miracle taking place in Detroit,” he wrote. “For this miracle good Catholics would thank Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. I, as a good race man, thank whatever gods there be for the wonder of it all. This miracle I speak of is the Hotel Gotham, owned, managed and staffed by Negroes. The Hotel Gotham is one of the few Negro hotels in America where the dresser drawers open without a struggle, and where when you get them open they are not filled with the debris of all the guests who have occupied the room before you got there—hairpiece, spilled powder, comic books, cigarette butts, waste paper. It is one of the few Negro hotels where the closet shelves are neatly dusted and clean, and there are no beer bottles in odd corners that the maids have forgotten to remove, and no discarded bed springs leaning against the walls in the halls.”

  Who knew that the great bard could also be a combination of city health inspector and Leona Helmsley? In any case, the attributes of the Gotham that he so admired were shared by many other notables. Sammy Davis Jr. rented the entire fifth and sixth floors during stays in Detroit. B. B. King got married in room 609. Goose Tatum of the Harlem Globetrotters stayed in room 603. Louis Armstrong’s valet would wash fifty handkerchiefs a night in the hotel’s laundry. Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Carmen McRae, Cab Calloway, Dinah Washington, and Nat King Cole enjoyed the luxury of the Gotham when they were performing at the Paradise Theater down the street or at the Flame Show Bar on John R. Many of them were chauffeured to the Gotham and around town in the back of a black Chrysler limousine driven by Papa Dee, a pint-size escort with long black-and-silver hair who dressed like Wyatt Earp. The Reverend C. L. Franklin, Detroit’s flashiest and most entertaining preacher over at New Bethel Baptist, once kept an office at the Gotham, and he and his daughte
rs, Erma, Carolyn, and Aretha, often took meals in the Ebony Room, whose world-class chef, Arthur Madison, was revered for, among other reasons, his delicious cheesecake and pastries known as Gotham rolls.

  Martin Luther King Jr. stayed at the Gotham in the late summer of 1959 and wrote a thank-you letter dated September 25 after returning from a vacation in Hawaii: “Dear Mr. White, This is just a note to say how delighted I was to have the opportunity of meeting you on my recent visit to Detroit and being in your beautiful hotel. I certainly appreciate all of the courtesies that you extended, and I was greatly impressed by your concern for, and dedication to the ideas that we must all work to realize.”

  During his meeting with King, White broached the idea of placing a copy of one of the civil rights leader’s books in every room to go along with the traditional top-drawer Bible. In a follow-up letter to King’s thank-you note, White reported that the deed had been accomplished: “Dear Rev. King, We finally received our order for the books and have placed them in the rooms. They have been well received and we have received many compliments from our guests regarding the selection of Stride Toward Freedom. I enjoyed your philosophy so much that I felt the book must be passed on. I have sent a copy to the Police Department to be placed in their library.”

  And now here came those police barging into the Gotham with fire axes and crowbars and sledgehammers. Inspector Sage and Anthony Getto of the IRS had worked out the plan the night before at the federal building. They calculated that more than $15 million in illegal operations flowed through the hotel each year, most of it in numbers, and they were finally going to crack what was described as “one of America’s largest non-taxpaying enterprises.” Extra federal officers were flown to Detroit overnight to supplement the local cops. They divided into squads, each squad assigned a floor of the hotel. Although the agent stationed in the lobby beforehand managed to outrace a gambling spy to the alarm buzzer, a quick-thinking Gotham regular cut off power to the elevators soon after the first officers bum-rushed the front door. One squad raced to the tenth-floor penthouse, where a private club was operating, and interrupted a dice game with at least $5,000 in cash on the felt table. But when a club member demanded to see a search warrant, two officers had to clamber all the way down the stairs to the first floor to retrieve it, then huff and puff back to the top.

  The proprietor was detained in his office. White, who had been honored with a Man of Distinction award in 1956 for advancing race relations and providing jobs in Detroit’s black community, knew many of the officers and was on cordial terms with the department, but the exchange of pleasantries now covered a high-stakes confrontation. He later claimed that he would have given the police a pass key to every room had they asked for one, but instead they were “smashing everything in sight,” floor by floor, axing their way into all 171 rooms. A reporter who had been tipped to the raid described how officers “started breaking down every door. Hallways were littered with splintered doors hanging from hinges.”

  Along with the penthouse, Sage and Getto and their men were interested in the corner suites, where their intelligence indicated that numbers runners would be counting the daily take. The suites were mostly empty, no runners caught in the act, but abundant clues remained. Commissioner Edwards had been fixated on the Gotham all year, since he had received an anonymous letter the previous January documenting the hotel’s sophisticated gambling operation. He came to believe, he said later, that “stopping gambling at the Gotham was mandatory for the reputation of the city, the reputation of the police department, and for the reputation of the police commissioner.” Now, on his first visit after the raid, he saw the evidence, including fifteen pairs of loaded dice and several decks of marked cards. “In the largest room of [each] suite, a number of tables had been pulled together and covered with felt to make them a large working area for processing ‘the business’—the bet slips and the tabulations. In each there were adding or calculating machines to automate the process. The windows were carefully blanketed to exclude any shred of daylight. Liquid refreshments [were evident] for lightening the labors. Impressive evidence of the volume of business done was provided by the linen closets. In place of blankets, sheets, and pillow cases, these contained boxes of coin wrappers—more coin wrappers than I have ever seen in a bank.”

  Forty-one people were arrested. John White and eight associates who were believed to run the numbers operation were charged with failing to buy federal gambling stamps, while the others faced lesser state gambling charges. A professional safecracker was brought in to drill open several safes and after a few dry holes hit a jackpot of $49,222. The neat stacks of betting slips and other documents they recovered reaffirmed the contention of vice experts that among the bettors were thousands of Detroit factory workers playing ten to fifteen dollars a week on the numbers.

  After being released on a $10,000 bond, White returned to the Gotham and drew up a list of damages and grievances. To a Chronicle reporter he described the raid as “a needless and uncalled for binge” that produced little. He took photographs of the damages and accused the officers of consuming his whiskey, soda, milk, and food. He canvassed employees and residents and charged that many personal items were missing, including six transistor radios, two binoculars, and a motion picture projector. The chef, Arthur Madison, said that his room was destroyed by the raid, the door axed, his dressers ransacked, and clothes strewn on the floor. Maybelle Moore, the hotel manicurist, reported seven dollars missing from her cash box.

  White also claimed that adding machines and accounting slips found in one room were items a friend and hotel tenant had brought to the Gotham after his gasoline station at the corner of Brady and John R had been leveled in the name of urban renewal. The excuse would not hold, but the role of urban renewal in the raid was undeniable. Over the previous several years, in the name of progress, the city powers that be—politicians, planners, developers, construction magnates, and financiers—had overseen the demolition of large swaths of old black Detroit. Hastings Street, its vibrant, seedy heart, had been obliterated, making way for the Chrysler Freeway. The word on the street for what was going on was not urban renewal but “Negro removal.”

  Now the Gotham was designated for demolition to make way for a hospital parking garage. A federal judge had granted the sweeping search warrant precisely because the hotel’s fate was assumed and the place was being emptied. When White complained to the law-enforcement raiders that they were destroying the Gotham, they responded by telling him not to worry, that the medical center was going to take his property anyway. The hotel that Langston Hughes had declared a miracle, that fed Joe Louis his eggs and steak, that displayed Martin Luther King’s civil rights book in every room was giving way to change, for better and worse. Some part of Detroit was dying at the Gotham with every swing of the ax and blow from a sledgehammer, as surely as it was dying twelve miles away, where young Bob Ankony watched an inferno render the Ford Rotunda into smoldering ruins on that same November day.

  Chapter 2

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  ASK NOT

  ONE MONTH EARLIER, at 10:55 on the morning of October 7, Raymond Murray was stationed at the west entrance of the Sheraton Cadillac hotel when the president of the United States walked out toward a rippling sea of people stretching two blocks down Washington Boulevard. Murray was a rookie cop, sprung from the army and just a month out of the police academy, still living with his mother on Mansfield Street on Detroit’s west side. He had finished first in his academy class on the scholastic tests, but it was his lack of seniority rather than apparent potential that got him assigned to the presidential detail when he reported for roll call that morning at 1300 Beaubien. He did not have a squad car and walked the mile from headquarters to the hotel. Sheraton Cadillac was the official name—it had been part of the chain for a decade by then—but Book Cadillac is what many people in Detroit called it, ever since the Book brothers opened it in the twenties as the largest hotel in America.

  With its 1
,200 rooms, four restaurants, capacious ballrooms, and dark, plush gentlemen’s bar, the Book Cadillac was to establishment Detroit what the Gotham Hotel had been to black Detroit, a fulcrum of culture, sports, society, and political power, the place to stay and be seen. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn lodged there when filming Frank Capra’s State of the Union. American League teams booked the Book when they came to play the Tigers. It was at the Book on May 2, 1939, that Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, feeling the incipient effects of his as-yet-undiagnosed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, went up to the room of his manager and asked to be scratched from the Yankees lineup after playing in 2,130 straight games. Elvis and Sinatra and Presidents Hoover, FDR, and Truman made it their Detroit hotel of choice, and now President John F. Kennedy was staying there.

  He had arrived the night before on the second stop of a political swing through the Midwest. This was JFK’s first visit as president, but Detroit and nearby Ann Arbor held special meaning in his rise as places where he formulated some of the rhetoric and promise of his New Frontier. He had launched his 1960 general election campaign with a Labor Day speech to sixty thousand Detroiters who filled Cadillac Square and heard him recite an early and less poetic variation of what would become the immortal “ask not” line of his inaugural address: “The new frontier is not what I promise I am going to do for you. The new frontier is what I ask you to do for our country.” Six weeks later, at two in the morning, after landing in Detroit, Kennedy made his way to Ann Arbor and greeted ten thousand students waiting for him outside the University of Michigan Union. There, in an impromptu speech, he first broached the notion of what would become the Peace Corps. “How many of you, who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana?” he asked. “Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the foreign service and spend your lives traveling around the world?” The answer came back with resounding affirmation when thousands of Michigan students signed a petition saying they were ready to serve their country peacefully abroad.