One of my favorite abandoned buildings in downtown Detroit is the relatively anonymous Woodward Building, located on the southeast corner of Clifford and Woodward, in the recently redeveloped Merchants Row area. I’d explored it about 18 months ago, and I recently offered myself an invitation to root around inside there again. And wouldn’t you know it, I accepted!

The intersection of Clifford and Woodward was already a busy one even as early as the 1890s. Clifford, which heads west from Woodward, was paved with brick even back in those days. At the time the street was home to small businesses like McCray Refrigerator and Cold Storage Company, and a small engine company of the Detroit Fire Department.

The eight-story Woodward Building was built in 1914, as the city was rapidly growing and entering an expansion phase in which the prevailing three- and four-story Victorian buildings downtown were being demolished and replaced with skyscrapers many times taller. The longstanding Jones Building, which would be torn down in a few years, was just west of it on Clifford, where a parking lot now stands. Across the street, on the northwest corner of Clifford and Woodward, stood the Detroit Telephone Exchange building.

Designed by prolific architect Albert Kahn using an eclectic combination of Chicago School influences, the Woodward Building featured narrow terra cotta piers and iron spandrels on its lower levels, now obscured by typically tasteless 1970s-era remodeling. Classical pediment inserts made of iron are necklaced around the building between the third- and fourth-floor windows. The building is topped by an elaborately detailed cornice featuring terra cotta rosettes pointed downward, rectangular modillions, and pointed antefixes arrayed along the upper perimeter.

The building was home to a curious array of offices and businesses during its lifetime. In the 1930s the sixth and seventh floors contained the Detroit Commercial College, training applicants in business and sending them out onto Woodward in search of employment in an era when it was pretty hard to find.

The second floor housed Karsten’s Cafeteria right after the building opened, a business that has several locations along Woodward over the years, while the upper floors contained a number of jewelers, orthopedists, and watch repair shops. For years, Chandler’s Shoes operated out of the ground floor, which houses a shoe store to this day, in an area unconnected to the rest of the empty building. Rembrandt Studio Photographers held the top floor for many years.

During the 1940s, as World War II ground on, much of the building became vacant, but it rebounded in the 1950s, attracting the same types of businesses it had housed before.

The building had its fair share of odd tenants over the years. During its early years, in room 502, was “E.P. Prophet and M.A. Prophet, Christan Scientists.” In fact, the building seems to have been a draw for fringe religious movements; the Scientologists held an entire floor in the building’s later days.

The Woodward Building not only housed the Michigan Fur Matching Company, but also complemented that with the Detroit Fur Workers Union three floors up, so if workers and management came to disagreements at least it was within convenient walking distance. To this day the building is scattered with natty, old, imitation fur hats, filthy and coated with dirt, but appearing frighteningly animal-like at first glance when you’re rounding a dimly lit corner. It’s only when your heartbeat drops from fight-or-flight level do you realize that the furry lumps are as lifeless as the building.

As the ’60s wore on and turned into the ’70s, the building had trouble filling its floors, until vacancies outweighed occupancy and it became economically unwise to keep it open, handing it the same fate as dozens of downtown Detroit buildings. By late-1974 it shut its doors, remaining closed to this day, 31 years later. As millions of people in millions of cars have passed by it every day and every night, year after year, it sat frozen in the state it was in on its last day. Recently there’s been talk of developing it into lofts, but so far the only tangible sign of progress is the addition of a modern door on its Clifford side.

The Woodward Building is a perfect, life-sized time capsule. Stacks of Michigan Bell telephone books in one office feature the year 1974, as do several calendars remaining on walls. The entire building is 1974 – its hardware, its decor, its memorabilia. Everyone who had been in it just walked away one last time 31 years ago, leaving behind whatever they couldn’t carry or didn’t need. Few of them probably imagined their things would remain there untouched for over three decades.

A once-prosperous retail floor was later devoted to ’70s-era advertising displays from Lane Bryant, including row after row of dress shirt stands in a room whose main focal point is an advertising display featuring a towering replica of a woodsy chalet, topped with shingles. The floors were designated as surplus storage for Kresge and Lane Bryant, and they quickly filled up with useless displays as business at those nearby retailers dried up. The economic slump of those years and the view that Detroiters are flight risks is reflected in the sign on the wall: “Important credit rules – you MUST check in every 7th day or sooner.” To them, recession + Detroiters = deadbeats.

Throughout the hallways and rooms, old paint peels off the walls in large leaves, curling outward in tighter arcs after each cycle of seasons. Shredded paint chips are spread throughout the hallways of the building, spilling into each floor’s offices, coming to rest in wind-sculpted piles along baseboards or under radiators.

Like a lot of buildings whose decor was conceived in the 1970s, the hallmark of the interior is rooms and offices painted in bright colors. It seems the model for interior decoration in downtown Detroit in those days was to make every office like a 2-year-old child’s room. Lemon yellows, pumpkin oranges, lime greens, embarrassing pinks – no color was too foolish to impose on hapless adult business people. The offices in the David Broderick Tower had the same paint schemes inflicted on it, as did those in the Farwell Building in Capital Park, among others around town.

The Woodward Building also features an electrical system that would give modern electricians bad dreams. Featuring knobs the size of grapefruits and wires the thickness of pencils, it looks like it could have been installed by Thomas Edison himself. This sort of antique would look strikingly engaging in a museum, yet it sits on the top floor of an abandoned building, well preserved but hidden.

It’s somewhat spooky being in an abandoned building at night. It’s actually colder inside than it is outside, because the sun never gets a chance to warm most of the rooms. Daytime is eerie enough in these places, but at night every noise takes on a threatening significance. And since the winds penetrate through dozens of open or cracked windows, there are a lot of sudden rattling or banging noises to be heard, not to mention ghosty howling. Dark corners are everywhere, potentially obscuring lunatics, squatters, or scrappers hiding in the shadows.

The view from the roof, always the icing on the cake in explorations, provides its own form of a glimpse into the past. The Woodward Building’s east end reveals just how different Detroit has become in just the past few years. All along Woodward, lines of cars stood stuck in traffic, something that didn’t exist 10 years ago downtown. Now they’re lined up to be here.

But the view from the opposite side of the building, facing Capitol Park, with its open-air bus stop and hobo plaza, still resembles what all of downtown used to look like – darkened buildings standing silent and abandoned in the winter’s night, streets lit but devoid of cars, and only a few pedestrians, waiting not to get into restaurants but waiting to leave on the bus. A mere block over, yet a whole world away.