from “le détroit” · the strait
A piece of Temple Bar's facade came down in May 2024. Seven months and a community fundraiser later, the Cass Corridor institution reopened.
Part of Temple Bar came down in May 2024. The Cass Corridor bar reopened seven months later.
On Friday, May 24, 2024, a section of the limestone facade on the nearly century-old building at 2906 Cass Ave. gave way. No one was hurt, and officials did not pin down a cause, but the damage was enough to close the bar and pull its liquor license into escrow. For an old building in this part of town, that is often where the story ends.
It did not end there. Temple Bar's father-and-son lineage runs deep: per local reporting, Gus Boukas opened the bar at this address in 1927, and his son George has run it ever since. After the collapse, the staff turned to the people who drink there. A GoFundMe campaign, started by a longtime manager, set a $30,000 goal and pulled in close to $24,000 from a few hundred donors, according to the campaign and contemporaneous coverage. That money, plus the owner's own work, funded the repairs.
The rebuild was not simple. Temple Bar sits in the Cass Park Historic District, so the work had to clear the Detroit Historic District Commission, and the commission required the facade be rebuilt to match the original 1920s construction down to the heavy limestone. "They wanted everything to be replicated, not only in the exact form, but the exact materials," Boukas told the Metro Times. The process stretched across roughly seven months.
The bar passed its final state inspection and got its liquor license released from escrow, then reopened on Tuesday, December 17, 2024. Temple Bar marked the moment on its own Instagram with a line that fit the place: "We are back baby! OPEN TONIGHT and EVERY NIGHT AFTER THAT!"
Detroit has lost plenty of buildings that mattered because no one had the money or the patience to fix them. Temple Bar getting put back together by its own regulars, rather than sold off and reinvented, is the kind of outcome that does not happen often enough. The repair list was not glamorous and the reopening was not a spectacle. The bar is just open again, at 2906 Cass Avenue.
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