The Westin Book Cadillac Detroit is a historic skyscraper hotel in Downtown Detroit, Michigan, within the Washington Boulevard Historic District. Designed in the Neo-Renaissance style, and opened as the Book-Cadillac Hotel in 1924, the , 31-story, 453-room hotel includes 65 exclusive luxury condominiums and penthouses on the top eight floors. It reopened in October 2008, managed by Westin Hotels, after a $200-million restoration. History The Book-Cadillac Hotel was developed by the Book Brothers—J. Burgess, Frank, and Herbert. They sought to turn Detroit's Washington Boulevard into the "Fifth Avenue of the West." Part of that vision was the creation of a flagship luxury hotel to compete against the Hotel Statler, three blocks to the north. On May 1, 1918, the brothers bought the Cadillac Hotel, at the northeast corner of Michigan and Washington Boulevard, which had been built in 1888. They intended to demolish it and replace it with a modern hotel, but World War I material shortages delayed the work. The Cadillac finally closed on June 26, 1923, and was quickly demolished. The Books commissioned architect Louis Kamper, who had designed the Book Building for them in 1917, to design their hotel. The Book-Cadillac Hotel was the tallest building in the city and the tallest hotel in the world when it opened on December 8, 1924. The hotel cost $14 million to build and contained 1,136 guest rooms. Public spaces on the first five floors included three dining rooms, three ballrooms, a spacious lobby, and a ground floor retail arcade. On the hotel's top floor was radio station WCX, the predecessor to WJR. The hotel operated successfully until the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed and the Book brothers lost control in 1931. For much of the period after the Books lost ownership, the hotel was run by hotel industry pioneer Ralph Hitz's National Hotel Management Company. On May 2, 1939, a meeting took place in the hotel lobby between New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig and team manager Joe McCarthy in which Gehrig told McCarthy to leave him out of the starting line-up from that day's game against the Detroit Tigers, ending his 2,130 consecutive games streak. In 1951, Sheraton bought the hotel, renamed it the Sheraton-Cadillac Hotel, and undertook massive renovations. All public spaces except the ballrooms and Italian Garden were redone and escalators replaced the grand staircase. In 1975, with business declining and the hotel in need