Abandoned Detroit Boxing Gym With a Pool, a Sauna and a Crash Outside

I did not expect a pool. We were inside a famous boxing gym in Detroit and the first big room had a whole pool in it, under a ceiling worth looking up at, with windows that work like mirrors. Most of the gym is gutted and not much remains. We did find a pool, a sauna and a steam room though.

I couldn’t find much about the history. All I know is that it was an athletic compound with a boxing gym and pools, and I didn’t even know about the pools until I walked in. The other guys went down ahead of me and I followed. Partway through, we ended up watching the aftermath of a car crash from inside. I snuck up to the roof to get a better shot of the scene without being spotted.

What we found

The pool room is dark. Somebody had knocked the first security camera over and left it pointing straight down, and I doubt it even works. Another one was knocked over too. There’s mold, not much else, and then the locker rooms, where somebody had smashed up everything in them. The showers are past that.

There’s a second, smaller pool. One sign says three feet six inches. The deepest the main pool goes looks like four feet six inches, which isn’t that deep, so it was built for laps and conditioning, not diving. There are jets too, which fits the conditioning idea, and a sign that says no diving head first. A sign by the whirlpool lists a max temperature of 104 degrees for the whirlpool and 82 for the main pool. Nearby is a little maintenance room, a closet marked staff only, more showers, a sauna we couldn’t open and a steam room next to it.

The boxing gym itself is on the second floor. It has a skylight, the chairs are still intact, and two fire extinguishers are still up on the wall. I wondered if they still work. A sign asks people to return weights to the rack. The windows work like mirrors, so we get a great view of the outside and nobody out there can see in. A walking track runs around the gym, marked walk, jog and run, with the carpet torn out. The door to the skywalk was locked, but somebody had busted a window, so you can climb out.

That’s when I saw the accident. A car had crashed at the intersection and cops were right there, and they had no idea we were inside. Over the next few minutes the count kept going up. A second cop pulled up, then more, until I counted six. Then an ambulance and a fire truck, then a detective with his lights on, a fire chief and another fire truck. Curtains on the outside of the windows keep us hidden, but they make it harder to see. This accident must have been really bad.

Between checks on the street we kept looking around. There’s a stretching area, a tattered piece of the banister around the boxing gym, another workout area and a run of small rooms that looked like offices. Most of it is gutted. We hunted for roof access and found only stairs that go down, until I found the roof hatch.

Up there you’re pretty exposed, so I had to crawl around. The cops were right where the accident was, and I didn’t want to get too close because they could see me.

Why places like this end up empty

I never found this building’s story, so this is about the type of place it is. Detroit has a lot of large buildings that emptied out and stayed that way. In April 2023, WDIV reported that 300 commercial buildings were on the city’s demolition list, and described them as abandoned and dangerous for anyone who tries to get in.

The Detroit Free Press has traced the pattern for big downtown buildings. Many emptied as the city declined, then sat because renovation was costly and the financial case looked weak, which made demolition seem like the practical choice. Crain’s Detroit Business puts the downtown decline at roughly 60 years. It also reported that about two thirds of the vacant downtown buildings it had highlighted were later bought with redevelopment plans, and that new construction now costs more than renovation.

Whether any of that explains this gym, I can’t say.

By the time I finished crawling around up there, some of the cops had already started to leave.