The Gotham Hotel stood at 111 Orchestra Place, at John R about a block north of Mack, on a stretch of street that no longer exists. It opened in 1924 as the Hotel Martinique, serving white guests. In 1943, about four months after the Detroit race riot, John White, Walter Norwood and Irving Roane bought the nine-storey, 200-room building for $250,000 and turned it into a hotel for Black travellers at a time when Black guests were barred from the downtown hotels. Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday all stayed there, and Joe Louis often ate in its Ebony Room. Integration undid the business. Black guests could now choose the downtown hotels, and the Gotham closed in September 1962. White had another line of work. On 9 November 1962, 112 officers from the Detroit police, the Internal Revenue Service and the Michigan State Police raided the building, which the Detroit Free Press called the fortress of the city's numbers racket. They arrested 41 people, White among them, and took away 160,000 bet slips, $60,000 in cash, 33 adding machines, marked cards and loaded dice. After the raid the hotel was added to the Detroit Medical Center clearance plan. The demolition permit came in July 1963.
Getting there
42.3492, -83.0565
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