The good news is the long-abandoned Book Cadillac Hotel is being renovated. The bad news is that an even older building right next door is being torn down to make room for a parking garage for its tenants.

The building, just to the east of the Book Cadillac, was originally built for the People’s Outfitting Company, once one of the largest department stores in the city but now pretty much unknown by most Detroiters. It’s been empty for almost a decade, boarded up better than just about any abandoned building in Detroit. The only hints of its contents from outside are the sight of yellowed blinds hanging lopsided in dirty windows.

A closed-off skywalk, already partly demolished, connects it to a neighboring building that’s also empty. The only activity there has been on its windowless eastern wall, which has been used for years for large advertisements. But the inside remained a mystery to us until demolition crews thoughtfully made it somewhat easier to explore before pulverizing its interior, a process taking place right now.

The site, at 150 Michigan Avenue, on the northeast corner of Shelby, previously was occupied by the Fair Freund Brothers store, at the time the only wholesale toy store in Detroit. It was housed in a four-story building situated in a sea of them at the time, during the pre-skyscraper era. The store was founded by Adolph and Ignatz Freund, German immigrants who came to Detroit in 1877. They built and opened their store a year later, selling “Toys and Fancy Goods” such as baby carriages, carts, wagons and dollhouses.

The business faded after a time, and in 1893 the building it had occupied at Michigan and Shelby was sold to Leopold Wineman, who founded the People’s Outfitting Company department store.

From the start, People’s offered customers both 30-day and 60-day charge accounts with no interest charges, unheard of at the time in retail department stores. “It’s Easy to Pay – the People’s Way” was its motto for the policy. At the time, the store lauded the interest-free accounts as “a dignified and wholesome method of buying (which) develops the habits of thrift and frugality, and enables everyone to make ‘home’ the best place on earth.” The policy was so unique it made national headlines.

After a few years, People’s outgrew the building and purchased the adjacent one. The company soon outgrew both of them and added a floor atop each in 1903. Even this stopgap measure wasn’t sufficient.

In 1908, the store had to commission the construction of a warehouse at Grand Boulevard and E Street to clear room for retail displays in the main store. It soon outgrew that too, and a separate, five-story warehouse, designed by Albert Kahn, was built at Warren between Maple and Williamson. It was so large its garage could hold 50 trucks at once.

But the rapidly expanding store could not operate in its small, original space, and a new 12-story building, cloaked in terra cotta, with large, open floors, was built on the site.

The entrance and upper levels were done in Italian Renaissance style, and the vestibule and display windows featured mosaic-tiled floors. The main concourse was tiled with colorful ceramic, and the plate glass windows at street level were the largest single sheet glass of any store in Detroit. The second floor, consisting mostly of offices, were ringed with a balcony from which the lower level could be viewed.

The new store, with 78,000 square feet of retail space, opened to the public on May 11, 1916, with a large party featuring a day of concerts inside. In addition to the moderately priced home furnishings the company had become famous for, the store began offering more high-end merchandise, promising “furniture of every description for every room in the home.” People’s offered everything imaginable, from furniture, carpets and drapes to jewelry, cameras, Victrola phonographs, washing machines, pianos and even auto tires. At the time it billed itself as Detroit’s largest furniture department store.

By the 1920s, People’s was one of the country’s largest department stores, with branches in Buffalo and Syracuse in New York; Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Springfield in Ohio; Scranton and Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania; and Indianapolis in Indiana. It also began offering home delivery.

Leopold Wineman, the store’s founder, died in 1925. His two sons, Henry and Andrew, ran the store after his death. Andrew died in 1954 at age 74. Harry took over running the company until he died three years later at age 78, and was succeeded by his son James.

In 1959, under James Wineman’s direction, People’s merged with the State Sample Co. department store, whose five-story building, constructed in 1932, was adjacent to it, wedged between Kinsel’s Drugs and People’s, and the company was renamed the People’s Outfitting—State Sample Co. The wall separating the two buildings was torn down to combine them into one.

The merger spelled the end of three generations of family control of People’s by the Winemans. Harold Kaplan, president of State Sample, took over the new company.

Ambitious plans at the time called for a number of additional store branches in the growing suburbs. But the company couldn’t survive in the toughening retail market, and like other longstanding department stores, had already seen its best days. By the early 60s business slowed so much that the company began cutting product lines from its store, reducing floor space and consolidating the retail showrooms on fewer floors. Eventually, the entire People’s business moved into the small building formerly occupied solely by State Sample.

By October 1969, People’s was bankrupt. At the time it had 10 small stores – the downtown store and its giant warehouse.

In 1970, plans were floated by a group of black Detroit businessmen to take over the department store chain and create one of the largest black-owned businesses in the city at the time, but that was contingent on receiving a $775,000 loan to pay off People’s debts. The loan never worked out, and the People’s Outfitting Company ceased to exist.

The original People’s building was converted to office space soon after People’s vacated it in the early 60s, and was rechristened the Detroit Commerce Building, a catchall name for a building with no definite direction. The first tenants included the Greater Detroit Chamber of Commerce, the Commercial Reproducing Company, a Qwikee Donut and Coffee Shops branch, and the Wineman Inventory Company, a remnant of the original People’s named for its founder. Later, more government offices took up space, including several floors occupied by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Detroit Federal Employees Credit Union took offices, as did the Automation Institute of Detroit.

The building rolled along through the massive office vacancies of the 80s and indeed lasted until 1997, when its last remaining tenants were the Detroit Historic Commission, the Detroit Transportation Corporation, Wayne County Veterans Affairs offices, and Detroit People Mover offices. A Schnelli Deli operated on the ground floor until the last day.

Since then, it’s been one of the better sealed buildings in the city, apart from a few instances when it was open to those lucky enough to stumble by with a camera.

How fortunate, we thought – now we have a final chance to view a time capsule of sorts, from years back, when downtown still thrived. Inside could be offices full of ancient paperwork and quaint décor, old-fashioned desks still holding documents of people’s lives, and decades-old calendars on the wall, freezing the building in time.

We couldn’t have been more disappointed. The inside had been renovated in the 1980s, wiping away every single trace of history the building contained. Everything was relatively modern in there, from the depressing paint jobs, to the cubicles and desks, to the calendars on the wall from 1997. And every floor was the same.

There were a handful of frail hints that the building might’ve acutally pre-dated the Dennis Archer era. The basement still retained its old curved iron staircase, hidden in choking blackness where once stoves and refrigerators were lined up by the hundreds. The carpet buckled on the upper floors from weather damage, indicating the remaining presence of the store’s original wood floors hidden under modern office carpeting.

The emergency staircase was the original, with cheap yellow paneling thrown up on the walls to give an air of modernity as people rushed by trying to save their lives in the event of a fire. And the lobby retained its 1960s remodeling touches. But little else remained inside.

There were a few signs of squatters here, though relatively few compared to other abandoned buildings in town. One room was littered end to end with porno magazines, with some pages torn out, and a special spread laid out on a counter next to a window overlooking Michigan Avenue, giving some squatter a display glass perch and given bus stop pedestrians one of the more interesting Detroit hobo exhibitionist experiences, even by Detroit standards.

A handful of wood and metal signs from the Coleman Young era were stacked on the upper floor, which also held the building’s elevator works and a family of pigeons, the final occupants of a once-busy building.

It also contained file cabinets bursting with legal records from the 1930s-50s from a law firm in the Dime Building, typewritten pages carefully tucked into meticulously labelled envelopes.

Other than that, it was a typical building slowly succumbing to a long stretch of emptiness. Pieces of the drop ceiling dangled or fell to the floor, the carpets by cracked windows grew green with mold, and large panes of glass removed in the building’s final hours stood shockingly intact, a testament to the building’s impenetrability to vandals who, judging by the millions of pieces of shattered glass scattered in other buildings, could’ve had a field day in here.

While it’s great to see something as magnificent as the Book Cadillac given new life, it’s a shame that the People’s Outfitting Company building will be lost. It may not be as pretty as the Book Cadillac, and its relatively simplistic terra cotta flourishes are no match for the exuberant lavishness of the Book Cadillac’s ostentation, but no parking garage will ever match up to its simple grace, streaming lines, and delicate, twisting, roped window arches.

It’s worth getting a last look at it soon, because they do not make buildings anything like this anymore, and it will soon be gone forever, leaving us again with one less example of the rich world of beauty that the city of Detroit once was.