A name that is nearly as synonymous as Hudson’s with early 20th-century Detroit department store shopping history is Kresge.

Sebastian Spering Kresge opened his first store in 1899 on the east side of Woodward and sold everything for 5 and 10 cents. The company expanded to over 85 stores by 1912. In Detroit, Kresge expaned by opening a store at 1201 Woodward, on the corner of State. That main Kresge building was a 5, 10 and 25 cent store. The green storefront store just down the block, at 1403, was a 25 cent to $1 store.

Even this much space wasn’t enough, and Kresge moved its offices in 1914 from above one of its stores to a brand new, Albert Kahn-designed building at Park and Adams, now known as the Kales Building. From there it eventually moved to another Albert Kahn building on Second Avenue in the late 20s, where they remained until the company, by then renamed as Kmart, moved to Troy in 1969.

The building we got into last weekend was the then-green storefront building at 1403 Woodward, the 25 cent to $1 store known informally as “the dollar store,” built in 1894 on the west side of the street. Gradually, the store down the block at State and Woodward supplanted the dollar store, until in 1959 the dollar store closed, dispersing its 64 employees to other Kresge stores, most going down the street to this store.

The Kresge dollar store on Woodward is still identifiable from a distance by the remains of a hand-painted sign on its uppermost walls. It’s the building we had tried to get into in the winter by entering a ground floor hair salon, formerly Parklane Hosiery, but that visit was interrupted by my friend gashing his head open on a hanging shard of glass, an experience he will be forced to remember always by the giant scar now on his head. We went back several weeks later, and wound up in the former Butler’s Shoes store, but it didn’t offer any entrance into the rest of the building. We’ve been determined ever since to actually get in. Avenge the scar!

This weekend we finally came up with a way to get in there, though it took considerable physical effort. All the climbing and walking left us utterly exhausted and dirty by the end of the day.

There are three levels of emptiness we find in these abandoned skyscrapers. The first is when it’s exactly as it was when the building closed, with artifacts and relics left in place, in varying degrees of disorder caused by vandals. A good example of this is the Broderick Tower or the Lafayette Building.

The second level is when the place is cleaned out, but the walls, wood and shelves remain in place. The Lafer Building and the Harvard Square Centre Building fall into this category.

The third level is when they prep a building for demolition or renovation and they scrape everything off the walls, floors and ceilings, as they are currently doing with the Book Cadillac and as they have done with buildings like the Metropolitan. You’re basically left with a concrete skeleton and nothing even remotely interesting.

The Kresge store, part of the same block as the Merchants Row lofts project, is in the second stage – old wood doors, drawers and shelves everywhere, but barely any artifacts left. Nevertheless, there still were some interesting finds.

In other buildings around town I’ve found graffiti from the 40s and 50s that bears little resemblance to graffiti found today. The drawings and caricatures are strange, of characters and faces distinctly dated, and the writing is even weirder and uncontemporary. And like other old graffiti I’ve stumbled across, I couldn’t find a single obscenity anywhere.

Most scrawls consisted of names followed by a date, like “Bobby Honeycutt 1955”or “Vince Killewald 7-8-42.” Some guy named Sid wrote his name on various dates throughout the building on concrete pillars. One of his friends replied to his scribbles with the rejoinder: “Sid is a Dirty Rabbit.”

The oldest I found was a list of names, about eight feet off the ground, of people who simply wanted to freeze the moment, which they did by noting at the end of the names list that it was “Tuesday Night, 9:00 p.m., Feb. 19, 1929.” Another wall had the score of an unspecified office game played in 1933 and 1934.

The coolest find was a list of the dates of the “First Snow in Detroit” that some people took the trouble to note each year from 1929-1959 in colored chalk on a wood wall.

Later layers of graffiti were found on other floors. We found writing on pillars dated from 1964 that occurred just as the Beatles became popular, because lots of stuff like “Rosemary loves the Beatles,” and “Ringo” was written everywhere.

A lone piece of paper from World War II remained on a window, urging conservation of resources like water and electricity to help ensure victory in the war effort.

The House of Nine floor, a women’s clothing store for years, looked pretty much like you’d expect it to, based on the pink sign on Grand River. Pink-trimmed dressing booths lined the walls, silver pillars and shiny wallpaper defined hallways, and funky green carpet finished the scene.

On the sixth floor was a cashiers’ office, the target of a robbery in 1954 in which a suspect described as a “parolee” busted into the office, took a bunch of cash and darted down the stairs onto Grand River, only to meet up with a cop. The suspect fired at the cop, wounding the officer. The parolee was then filled with bulletholes by the police. Meanwhile, midday shopping crowds scattered like crazy. I found out about this episode from an old newspaper article in the Burton Collection at the Detroit Public Library.

Got to the roof as usual, but saw someone watching TV in one of the semi-legitimate lofts in the building next to the Christian Science Building, and didn’t want to attract too much attention to ourselves. We sat down and took in the sun, exhausted from the effort.