DETROIT - No more will we be referring to it as the "once-grand" Book Cadillac hotel.

Thanks to the work of general contractors Marous Brothers Construction, its subcontractors, and the building trades, the Westin Book-Cadillac Hotel is grand once again.

Late last month the building trades were performing finishing work in only a few areas, including painting and completing final punch-list items in preparation for the hotel's grand opening charity gala the weekend of Oct. 24-25. The hotel will start accepting guest reservations a week later.

"I tell people that at this point there are a thousand 10-minute projects going on," said Marous Brothers Project Manager-Site Division Michael Schumaker, in a walk-through of the hotel on Aug. 28. "We are still doing finish work like lighting and tile, but a lot of what we're doing is just putting things back together."

At that time, about 200 trades workers were still on site. A number of offices at the hotel had already been turned over to Westin personnel. The vast majority of guest rooms were complete and awaiting the installation of furniture.

By now the story of the Book-Cadillac should be familiar to our readers. Completed in 1924 at Washington Boulevard and Michigan Avenue, the 33-story Italian-Renaissance-style Book was the tallest hotel in the world, and offered 1,200 guest rooms. Five presidents stayed at the hotel, and numerous sports figures and celebrities. New York Yankee Lou Gehrig, afflicted with the disease that now bears his name, ended his 2,130-game playing streak in Detroit in 1939, after collapsing on the Book's grand staircase.

The hotel had its economic ups and downs over the years, and for better or worse was renovated a few times during the decades it was open. Downtown Detroit's economic decline grew worse in the 1970s, and finally the hotel was forced to close its doors in 1984.

The building eventually was left unguarded, and urban scavengers did their worst, removing or destroying the interior fixtures like chandeliers and elevator call buttons, as well as the plumbing. What the scavengers didn't ruin, rain and snow did. The rich plaster ornamentation, and anything of value in the old hotel, was wrecked by the time renovation work began in 2006.

"When I first saw the building three years ago, I thought it was going to be a huge job," said Dave Kaplan of Kaczmar Architects, Inc., which handled the re-design of the hotel's interior spaces. "I was concerned about whether the building itself was sound. But it was built in the 1920s, and they built buildings like tanks in the 1920s."

The Book's solid structure - and the lack of funds to raze the building - kept it standing over the years. An agonizingly slow process of assembling financing to restore the building started and stopped earlier this decade, with Cleveland developer John Ferchill finally assembling no less than 22 investors in the project. He told one publication that without the infusion of $75 million in government historic tax credits, it would have made more economic sense to demolish the Book and rebuild it, rather than perform the renovation.

The hotel's concrete floors were completely gutted, and a new floorplan with larger guest rooms was put into place. The trades installed completely new plumbing, wiring, and repaired and replaced thousands of brick. The masonry exterior has been cleaned, and the building looks…like new. A new parking deck on the east side of the hotel and a covered walkway will provide convenient access for guests.

The showcase areas for the interior of the hotel are its three ballrooms on the fourth floor: the Italian Garden, the Venetian and the Crystal. Kaplan said that while those spaces are not an exact match, "we did the best we could. Recreating a lot of the details would have cost too much." So he said designers went to work with drawings that would "pick up details and the historic feel of the space, and trigger memories of the space."

He said the architects found enough original plaster in the ruined hotel to help recreate new moulds for the renovation. Old photos helped, as did having original drawings from the hotel. Although most of the public spaces were white, any colors of new interior finishes were mainly guesswork, because of the lack of old color photos.

The new hotel will have 455 rooms on floors 4-29. Floors 24-29 will host 67 luxury condominums. The guest room levels have been finished in a modern Westin design, Kaplan said.

"It was a real challenge to try and reproduce the interior of the building, and still meet modern building requirements," Schumaker said. "We had to hide things like duct work and sprinkler heads, and still maintain the character of the building."

Kaplan, who along with Ferchill and Schumaker hails from Cleveland, said he has watched the progress of the work with weekly visits.

"I would say the level of work here has been a ten out of ten," Kaplan said. "These guys who did this work looked at the drawings like we did, and then they went above and beyond in doing the work. They did amazing work with great attention to detail."

APPLYING A COAT of white paint to the second floor Lobby Lounge inside the revamped Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit is Brett Lyszak of Painters Local 675 and Eugenio Painting. The hotel reopens next month after being shuttered 24 years ago. Scavengers stripped it and left it as a ruin.

CLUSTER LIGHTS in the second floor guest registration area of the Book are installed by Terry Knechtel of IBEW Local 58 and Bayview Electric.

THE RENOVATED Italian Garden room on the hotel's fourth floor.

THE BOOK'S exterior, as seen from Washington Blvd.