Pink jasper stone wraps the David Whitney House, the grandest surviving mansion of Detroit's Gilded Age. The David Whitney House, completed in 1894, was built for a lumber baron whose fortune came from the great Michigan pine forests. Designed by Gordon Lloyd in the Romanesque Revival style, the fifty-two-room mansion is clad in rare pink jasper stone quarried in South Dakota, and it cost a fortune even by the standards of the era, more than four hundred thousand dollars.
Inside, it boasted Tiffany glass, intricate woodwork, and the first residential elevator in the city. Whitney was among the wealthiest men in Michigan, and his home announced it to all of Woodward Avenue, then a corridor of millionaires' houses. After his death the mansion served as a medical society headquarters before becoming, since 1986, an upscale restaurant.
Look at the warm pink stone, unlike anything else on the street, and the carved arches and turrets, and you can picture the avenue when lumber, not automobiles, built the city's first great fortunes.