The Phoenix Club was a Jewish social organization that counted many prominent Detroiters among its members.
The club was organized on Sept. 15, 1872, and was “composed of some of our best citizens,” the Detroit Free Press reported on the front page of the Sept. 24, 1872, edition. Its purpose was “to promote social and intellectual intercourse among its members.”
It would go on to become the “scene of many an important event in which Jews of Detroit and surrounding territory took part,” the Detroit Free Press wrote June 28, 1934. “Within its confines, Jewish world celebrities have been entertained and honored. Many an important decision involving the welfare of Detroit and Michigan Jews has been made within its walls. More than one Jewish leader, visiting the city for an urgent cause, has met with an enthusiastic response on the part of Phoenix Club members.”
The club initially moved into the Kanter Block, but on Sept. 11, 1875, took over a new three-story building erected on the southwest corner of Woodward Avenue and Duffield Street built by Henry M. Duffield and designed by the firm Lloyd & Pearce. The club hired Louis Mendelson to design its quarters inside the building, where it would stay for the next three decades.
By 1897, the organization had about 200 members, and was considered one of the city’s foremost Jewish clubs. At its peak, it would count 300 Detroiters among its ranks.
A home of their own
With the club’s lease on the Kanter Building expiring in November 1905, the club announced in February 1904 that it would erect a clubhouse of its own. Initially, the club bought a piece of land on Rowena Street (today known as Mack Avenue) for its new home. However, “a storm of protests went up from those who built their residences in the neighborhood,” the Free Press wrote March 2, 1905, “as it was the desire to have the street devoted entirely to residences, making the thoroughfare a strictly home street, and they brought suit to restrain the building of the clubhouse.”
The club acquiesced and instead bought a site on the southwest corner of Erskine and John R streets in the Brush Park neighborhood. Architect Albert Kahn, himself a Jew, was tapped for the project. It’s possible but unclear whether Kahn was a member of the club himself.
The clubhouse’s cornerstone was laid July 11, 1905, in a simple ceremony featuring remarks by building committee Chairman Leopold Freud and President Henry M. Fechheimer, the latter of whom “spoke of the influence of the club on the home life of its members and said that no reproachful word had ever been spoken against the organization,” the Free Press wrote the following morning. The cornerstone was laid by Henry Binswanger and Samuel Heavenrich, two of the four surviving original members of the club. Inside were placed Detroit newspapers, a copy of the club’s constitution and a list of members and officers.
The building would open March 15, 1906, with “a program of appropriate exercises,” the Detroit Free Press wrote the day before the event. A reception followed in the evening that was attended by members and guests. Besides letting the city come explore the new clubhouse, there was dancing in the ballroom and a banquet. The program featured an introduction by Emil Heyn, the club’s vice president, and the presentation of the key by Freud to Fechheimer. Rabbi Leo M. Franklin also gave remarks.
“The new clubhouse is a distinct addition to the class of buildings which it represents in this city, and is finely suited to the needs of its builders,” the Detroit Free Press wrote March 16, 1906.
The structure is of paving brick with Bedford limestone trimmings, and originally featured a red tiled roof. The first floor was finished in dark oak and held the entrance hall, a library and reading room with black leather seating; ladies reception room; the main and two private dining rooms, and a serving room. There were also three rooms for playing cards that featured wall coverings of red and green burlap. The main dining room was finished in blue with brown draperies.
The grand staircase led to the foyer on the second floor. To the right were the men’s and women’s parlors; to the left was the grand ballroom, which the Free Press called “the piece de resistance of the building,” and “one of the handsomest apartments in the city.” The ballroom featured a color scheme of light gray and gold, with old rose draperies. At one end of the room was a large stage for giving theatrical performances, complete with dressing rooms to the side for the entertainers.
The basement featured the kitchen and a bowling alley, as well as a billiards and pool room and stein room. The rooms down here were finished in oak, and the furniture was made of the same.
Fore!
By the end of 1913, the Phoenix Club had 150 members, and some of the younger men among its ranks wanted to expand the club’s athletic offerings. That December, it purchased more than 100 acres in what was then Redford Township at Berg Road between Grand River Avenue and Seven Mile Road. There, it established the Phoenix Country Club, making the organization the first social club in Detroit to support a country club to boot. Tom Bendelow of Chicago designed a nine-hole golf course called Red Run for the site - with plans to enlarge it over time - and a clubhouse designed by Kahn were ready for use by the following summer. David Kay was hired as the first professional for the course.
But things would hit a bit of a rough patch for the Phoenix Club, as it had overextended itself. Walter E. Flanders, head of the Flanders Motor Co. and later president and general manager of the U.S. Motor Co. had to bail the company out of financial turmoil.
“The club has undergone many turbulent times, due first to lack of sufficient funds to fulfill its high aspirations,” the Free Press wrote Dec. 23, 1917. “A holding company was formed by E.M. Rothman, one of the Phoenix Club’s most prominent members; A.B. Porter, and the writer, who took over the property. The following year, Walter E. Flanders came to the rescue of the club and proved himself its good angel, by financing not only the property, but the clubhouse and furnishings as well.”
With help of these individuals, an 18-hole golf course, designed by Donald Ross - a renowned architect in the golfing world at the time - was opened Sept. 28, 1918. “Woods, gullies, rolling land and a winding river (the Rouge River) make up the deceptiveness of the course,” the Free Press wrote Sept. 26, 1918. Because of World War I, there was no special celebration held to inaugurate the course.
In January 1920, the Phoenix Club and the golf course separated and became two distinct organizations. At this time, the Phoenix Country Club was renamed the Redford Country Club. Members of the former still automatically got membership in the latter, but by opening up the golf club to anyone, it was deemed to be in the best financial interest of both organizations. It also removed the upkeep and maintenance of the course from the Phoenix Club’s ledgers. In 1926, the City of Detroit annexed the chunk of Redford Township that included the Redford Country Club, but did not take ownership of the golf course.
The City of Detroit eventually acquired it in 1946 for use as a public golf course. In 1979, it was renamed the William G. Rogell Golf Course in honor of longtime councilmember Billy Rogell, who also had played for the Detroit Tigers. Rogell was closed in early 2013 as the cash-strapped City careened toward bankruptcy, and was sold. The City of Detroit reacquired the property in 2018, and in June 2026, reopened it as a 98-acre public park with boardwalks, walking paths and scenic overlooks.
The Phoenix gives way to Knights and boxers
Separating the club from the golf course in 1920 proved to be a wise financial move, but an insufficient one. That’s because the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 caused a number of the Phoenix Club’s members to resign because they were unable to pay their dues. The organization started off the 1930s bleeding money.
On May 31, 1934, the club’s board of directors voted to ask the court to dissolve the club, citing growing pressure from creditors and three years of operating at a loss. The board said that, with its membership of 125 members, it was impossible to operate the club without losing money. With no economic turnaround in sight, the board looked to pull the plug on what was then called one of Detroit’s oldest clubs.
A month later, the board of directors petitioned Circuit Court Judge Allan Campbell to appoint a receiver and dissolve the club that August, providing time to allow members a chance to reorganize the organization. The members couldn’t make it happen, and the Phoenix Club was unable to rise from the ashes.
In 1935, the Phoenix Club’s old headquarters on Erskine and John R streets became the new home of the Detroit Lodge No. 55 of the Knights of Pythias. The decision to lease the building was announced July 27 of that year, and the Knights were to start moving in by the end of the month. The order - which had been chartered in 1884 and once was the largest Pythian lodge in the country - had previously been located at Woodrow Wilson and Leslie avenues but conducted its social affairs and ritualistic programming on Cass Avenue near Peterboro Street. Now, the larger confines would enable the organization to have all its facilities under one roof. On Sept. 17, 1938, the Detroit Lodge No. 55 of the Knights of Pythias bought the building.
In October 1937, Jack Kearns opened a gym inside the old Phoenix Club building to provide training facilities for boxers. There were two training rings, two handball courts and all the necessary equipment a pugilist might need when it opened around the first of November. The move was crucial as the Recreation Gym had closed that September, leaving the city without a centrally located place for boxers to work out.
The building on Erskine continued to be referred to as the Phoenix Club, and would host a number of functions, banquets and other events, as well as the Cosmopolitan Art Center, the Civic Center Baths (featuring “reducing body contouring specialists”).
For reasons that weren’t clear, the Pythian order didn’t hang onto the building for long. Indeed, in the fall of 1943, the building would be sold and soon become a major center for Black life in Detroit.
A heart of the community
The Pythians sold the former Phoenix Club to an association of 10 Black organizations, led by the Twelve Horsemen’s Club, for $52,000 (about $1 million in 2026). The groups planned to operate the former Phoenix Club as a nonprofit community center “dedicated to better community relationship.”
The building - renamed the Twelve Horsemen’s Civic Center - was re-dedicated Nov. 8, 1943, with speaker Louis C. Blount, president of the Booker T. Washington Trade Association, urging that “the doors be thrown open to all people, at least offering them the invitation to participate, so that we, as a race, may not be guilty of the pattern which has victimized us,” the Detroit Free Press reported the following morning. A week of events was held to celebrate the opening.
The building would also be known, seemingly interchangeably, as the Twelve Horsemen’s Lodge, the Masons Hall and the Masonic Civic Center. It was home to a number of African-American masonic orders and lodges and other social clubs, including the Twelve Horsemen Lodge of Elks No. 1112, Improved Benevolent and Protective Order Elks of the World, the Heroines of Queen of Roses Court No. 1, the Detroit Consistory No. 1 Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Free Masonry, and many more. All the while, it would hold dances, banquets, meetings and social events.
On Jan. 17, 1944, the Detroit Council of the National Negro Congress opened its new offices in the building. The organization sought to "win for the Negro people of our community and of the nation complete economic, cultural and political equality and full citizenship rights," the Detroit Tribune reported Jan. 29, 1944. The building also would house the Community Action Committee.
The structure would also hold prayer tabernacles and be home to the Emanuel Temple and Church of Our Prayers. In 1946, The Rathskellar - operated by manager “Foots” Greene - opened in the building’s basement. Its ads proclaimed, “We have what you want here - come and get it.”
The King David Grand Lodge, an African-American Masonic organization, acquired the building in 1963. The order continues to occupy and preserve the historic structure.
In 2020 and 2021, the lodge embarked on a major restoration effort to repair the decorative plaster inside the building at a cost of some $40,000. However, the building’s original dormers leaked, damaging much of the work that was performed. In March 2025, the lodge sought Historic District Commission approval to remove the dormers, but was denied because the dormers were considered integral to the building’s historic integrity. Repairs and restoration to the building continued on this historic Black and Jewish landmark.