The building had been crawling with junkies, alcoholics, ex-convicts and homeless people. And that was before it was abandoned.

After it closed, the same hobos and addicts who had been there simply let themselves back in, spending nights in their old rooms, this time unsupervised and free to choose whether or not to be sober, a classic case of the inmates now running the asylum.

The building used to be the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center, a lackluster, 13-story building on Park Avenue, once Detroit’s swankest downtown street but now the lowest rung of skid row in fallen Detroit, the city of endless ironies.

Back when Park Avenue was the place to be, the building was the Hotel Park Avenue, the fourth in a chain of Detroit hotels operated by Lew Tuller, a local builder and contractor who also operated a number of smaller apartment complexes around the city such as the Wetherell, Valencia and Saragossa. He’d decided to single-handedly elevate Park Avenue to posh status, and constructed one hotel after another on the strip. Next door to his new hotel was the similarly new Eddystone Hotel; just down the street was his new Royal Palm Hotel. Down in Grand Circus Park was his original accomplishment, the now-demolished Tuller Hotel, situated at the point where Park Avenue curled around the park and spilled into downtown.

Park Avenue came alive in the 1920s, the highpoint of the city center’s growth. Skyscrapers shot up all over town, fueled by auto money pouring into the city, and developers strove to make Park Avenue Detroit’s most glamorous thoroughfare.

The Hotel Park Avenue was built in 1925 at a cost of $2 million. It featured 242 suites with living rooms, each furnished with a large davenport sofa, a desk and table, easy chairs, bridge and reading lamps, and In-a-Door beds within large furnished bedrooms. The hotel featured a dining room offering “home cooking” for all meals. Compared to hotels just a couple decades before, which often had one bathroom per floor and few other offerings, the amenities of the Hotel Park Avenue were lavish in contrast.

It was marketed as a downtown home for businesspeople who worked in the city, people who wanted the cachet of a downtown address on Park Avenue, within walking distance not only of the business district’s offices, but also the city’s theater district nightlife. Though all of Tuller’s hotels were designed to elevate the status of the avenue, the Hotel Park Avenue was the largest of his new hotels and the most extravagant.

By the 1950s the hotel faded from being a high-end residence and went into decline along with the rest of Park Avenue, which was split in two by a freeway and surrounded by worsening streets, and by the 1960s the hotel was converted to a nursing home called the Eventide Residence for the Aging.

The Royal Palm Hotel down the street swiped the name of its now-closed cousin and itself became the Hotel Park Avenue, the name it still has today. It’s known nowadays mostly for housing the Town Pump bar on its ground floor.

By the 1980s, skid row turned out to be a poor location for a senior citizens’ home but the obvious choice for the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Corps, founded in Detroit in 1939 to treat drug and alcohol addicts. By then, Park Avenue had gone from being one of the most exclusive and fashionable residential areas of the city to one of skid row’s main drags. The presence of Harbor Light left the surrounding blocks swarming with street people at all hours of the day. In 2003, it closed its doors, scattering its clients throughout the neighborhood.

Not much to tell about our visit – it was open; we went in. The lobby was still coated in its beautiful, thick old wood. Every floor above had rooms with squatters’ mattresses and blankets scattered randomly within walls accented a garish green. Windows framed the giant Eddystone Hotel next door. There were a few liquor bottles, old clothes – the usual evidence of squatters. A trophy case overflowed with softball trophies the staff had earned. Smoke alarms on nearly every floor made pinging noises, each announcing low batteries. The building was silent otherwise.

The roof, which had recently been vandalized with bland graffiti, announcing to the world that the place had been broken into, provided a unique view of downtown. Situated north of downtown’s boundaries, it offered a view of Park Avenue fading into twinkling downtown in the distance, going from dark, vacant lots and empty buildings to denser streets and lit sidewalks.

Outside, fenced in by a tall brick wall topped with razor wire, was a small courtyard, with grass greened by spring rains, and old, mossy trees twisting upward. Ancient vines clung to walls, framing doors and windows. Against one wall were the remnants of a 1950s-era brick water fountain, with the Eddystone Hotel rising behind in its filthy splendor.

On another wall was a commemorative plaque announcing the green space as a gift from a local family, designating it as “The Garden of Everlasting Love,” now a small, crumbling, unseen oasis in the middle of what became the seediest part of the city, showing no hint that it was once the city’s most glamorous area to live.