The Wardell (Detroit)

Residential hotel at 15 East Kirby Street, across Woodward Avenue’s art district from the Detroit Institute of Arts, now the Park Shelton. In Hayden Herrera’s Frida it is the Riveras’ Detroit apartment, where Frida’s pregnancy, miscarriage and mourning unfold.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Frida	Hayden Herrera	setting	The couple’s furnished flat in 1932–33: loneliness, the miscarriage’s onset, grief for her mother, and recovery.

Frida — Hayden Herrera (1983)

Source: Frida - A Biography of Frida Kahlo · Original · Readwise highlight

Frida and Diego went directly from the station to their new lodgings, a characterless but convenient one-bedroom furnished apartment in the Wardell, a mammoth residential hotel at 15 Kirby East and Woodward Avenue, just across the street from the Detroit Institute of Arts.

• Role: setting
• In the book: In Chapter 10 the Riveras learn the hotel does not take Jews; Diego threatens to leave until the management drops the restriction and cuts the rent. Frida is lonely and ill here, and in the summer heat the bleeding that precedes her miscarriage begins. After her mother’s death she returns to a bitter winter here with an irritable Diego, cries often, slowly recovers, and paints a small self-portrait on metal; the Detroit News interviews and photographs her at the Wardell in February 1933.
• Why it matters: It is the domestic stage for Frida’s double loss, of her child and her mother, and for the recovery in which her Detroit paintings were made.