Throughout Detroit there are hundreds of small buildings constructed during the city’s heyday in the first decades of the last century, when money was no object and extravagant ornamentation was the architectural impulse, seen in gorgeous skyscrapers like the Guardian Building but also spilling over into smaller buildings that weren’t shy about being pointlessly decorative.

It was an era when something as small as a hardware store or corner grocery stop found itself with Spanish tiles on its roof, or intricate terra cotta details along its cornice, or elaborate zig zag brickwork embedded in its walls. The ethos was the very opposite of today, when windowless, grey, cinderblock cubes are the norm for party stores and low-end strip malls are made of cheap materials with the idea that these buildings won’t be around 20 years from now. Nowadays, on that scale, function totally dictates form. But that wasn’t always the case.

One striking example of beauty in the mundane is this party store on Detroit’s west side. It was built in the late 20s, and was influenced by the prevailing Art Deco designs of the time. Featuring an Aztec Deco theme, with symbols inside Aztec-inspired reliefs lined atop the walls, between royal figures and geometric ornaments flanking a large image of a crowned king at the corner summit, surrounded by sun-wielding priests, all made of grainy sandstone, their frail peaks and edges withering from innumerable breezes and years of rainstorms.

As with most of these once quaintly graceful structures, the current occupants have no real sense of the gratuitous beauty they’ve inherited, judging in this case by the tacky signs bolted onto carefully designed brick patterns or the owners’ decision to paint over the original gold- and copper-tinted bricks with colors that can be classified only as ridiculous. Such aesthetic dementia certainly diminishes the effect of the building, but enough of the building’s overindulgent creativity still remains intact to give witness to its original state. And indeed, unlike most structures built on that strip at the same time, this one at least still exists, enabling us to regard a vanishing past.

Built in 1928 on the corner of Welland and Six Mile, it began life as Early J. Melvin Drugs. By 1931 the street it abutted changed its name to San Juan, part of a neighborhood enthusiasm for streets named after California cities, and for a while it was called San Juan Drugs. It became Berkowitz Drugs in the mid-30s and Burk’s Prescription Pharmacy a couple years later, the name it kept until the late 70s, when the owner retired. It went from a drug store to party store to liquor store in a long series of successive owners, most recently becoming Good Stop Liquor, on a strip where it’s apparently been deemed necessary to have a liquor store every 120 feet.

The old building still stands on litter-strewn McNichols, the name given to Six Mile in the mid-30s in honor of Father John P. McNichols, who ran the University of Detroit at the time it opened its campus at Six Mile and Livernois. There are hundreds of strange little buildings like this all over town, little party stores or wig shops or used clothing stores housed in buildings that are too sublime for their current, lower-rent purposes.

They simply do not make buildings like this anymore. Purposeless artistry costs too much money, takes too much time and serves no real functional need, which is why these remnants of another world are so fascinating, because they are fossils of extinct forms and dead beliefs, reminders that we used to strive for beauty for its own sake even in the most mundane circumstances.