DETROIT - After 90 years of use and abuse, the Fort Shelby Hotel is undergoing an unlikely renovation.

With the roof open to the elements - there were trees growing on it - the hulking hotel at Lafayette and First Streets had been virtually empty since it closed in 1974, and had been considered a long-shot for a second chance at redevelopment.

But last year, finally, the right combination of tax credits and investors came together to fund the $82 million renovation project. The finished product will include a 204-room hotel operated by Double Tree Suites on the first ten floors, while floors 11-22 will house 52 luxury apartments. The facility will also contain more than 30,000 square feet of conference space, a restaurant, and a few smaller businesses that typically populate hotels.

"It's a renovation that's vital to the city," said Tom Simko, vice president of operations for The Brinker Group, which is managing the Fort-Shelby renovation. "The tower was done by Albert Kahn, and it's a nice, old design. Anytime you can restore a building like this to its original luster, it's encouraging."

The Fort Shelby Hotel was named after a long-buried fort near the site. Construction took place in two different phases - first a 10-story building in 1917 followed by a 22-story tower in 1927. The hotel's exterior incorporated extensive brick, limestone and terra cotta.

The fortunes of the Fort Shelby Hotel closely mirrored the economy of the region. The 22-story addition was just one of numerous tall structures in downtown Detroit that were constructed in the wildly prosperous pre-Depression years.

"The hotel rode the bust and boom cycles of the Great Depression and the post-World War II years," says the Forgotten Detroit website. "In 1951, ownership was transferred to Pick Hotels. In the 1960s and 70s, the hotel's interior was remodeled, but its relatively isolated location on the southwestern edge of downtown was no longer a draw for out-of-towners. The Pick-Fort-Shelby closed in 1973. An ill-fated attempt to re-make it into a youth-party hotel failed quickly a year later."

The last remaining tenant, a bar occupying part of the first floor, closed in the 1990s.

The project currently employs about 80 to 90 Hardhats, and that's a number that will peak out at more than 200 this summer. The original hotel had 900 rooms, but evidence of them is long gone. "The rooms were really small by today's standards," said Brinker's Jeff Kuhary. "On every floor, we tore out just about everything, except what they wanted us to keep for historical purposes."

Much of the structure is still currently in its concrete shell state, but the trades are moving quickly to rough-in the walls, plumbing, fire protection, and wiring. On a smaller scale, this project is similar to the Fort Shelby's more notorious cousin a couple blocks to the north - the Book-Cadillac Hotel- which is on a similar timeline for completion.

"A renovation like this is all about the unknowns - the latent conditions that you tend to find after opening everything up," Simko said. The biggest unknown, he said, was a major six-story steel structural column on the west side of the building that had severely deteriorated due to the incursion of rain water. It was shored up by encasing the column in cast-in-place concrete.

While there was water incursion, it ultimately had little affect on the viability of the project. The 10-story was built with a cast-in-place concrete structure. The design of the 22-story was a hybrid of steel frame with concrete-encased steel beams. "We're dealing with a good, solid structure," Simko said.

According to the Michigan Center for Geographic Information, the Fort Shelby was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The center provided the following information:

"The Fort Shelby Hotel is significant as a fine example of early twentieth century hotel architecture in Detroit displaying the Georgian and Classical Revival styles and as an example of the work of two prominent architectural firms - Schmidt, Garden and Martin of Chicago (the ten-story building) and Albert Kahn and Associates of Detroit (which designed the tower).

"Built in 1916, the ten-story hotel quickly became one of Detroit's busiest, so much so that a twenty (two) -story addition was built in 1927 which included club rooms, extensive public space, and catering facilities. For over 60 years the hotel was a popular institution in Detroit and famous for its catering and banquet services. The hotel is representative of a general building type constructed during a relatively short but active period (1915-1935) in Detroit's construction history. This boom period gave rise to numerous brick and stone high-rise office buildings and hotels that to this day give Detroit its distinctive masonry towered skyline."

Elisabeth Knibbe, the project's preservation architect for Quinn Evans Architects, said the building "structurally, is in amazingly good shape." However, she said the vast majority of the building's interior finishes were ruined, "so we were pretty much left with a blank slate."

Knibbe said the hotel's second-floor ballroom had some highly decorative plaster features, "but it just crumbled away." The ceiling plaster will be replicated in a cost-saving measure with a painted canvas, in a form called Trompe L'Oeil. The first-floor lobby's architectural features will be replicated in a "simplified version" of the original, she added.

A grand marble staircase is in fairly good shape and will be repaired and retained. "The decorative features are going to be very nice," Knibbe said, adding: "It was pretty depressing to walk into this building after it had been empty all those years. It was standing dead. So to be able to bring the Fort Shelby back is an incredible feeling."

Said Simko: "There's a lot of nice work going on here. I have to say the people here are working well together, it's been a pleasant experience. There's good morale, and good focus by our trades people and subs on a day-by-day basis with the goal of getting this done by November."

THE FORT-SHELBY Hotel on Lafayette Street in Detroit was constructed in two phases: the 10-story came first in 1917, and the 22-story followed in 1927.

LABORERS Jebree Thomas and Jimmy Thomas of Local 1191 work on a compressor in the shelled-out lobby of the Fort Shelby Hotel in Detroit. The entire hotel was stripped down to its steel and concrete frame, but the building trades are beginning to make it look like a hotel again.