If there is one thing reverberating through the thousands of tons of restored Mankato limestone, marble, Guastavino tile and oak in Michigan Central Station, it’s memory.
When the train depot reopens to the public this week after a six-year renovation to fix 30-plus years of decay, Detroiters — by birth, by choice, or by chance — will not only have a chance to see the city’s future, but its collective memory.
They could never have imagined what was to be made of the depot — or the city — more than three decades later.
Regardless, Detroiters also left something else in the Beaux-Arts style, 500,000-square-foot building — their marks, physical or otherwise.
The feet swinging like pendula from benches in the grand waiting room, admiring its nearly 55-foot ceilings, scuffing up floors waiting for trains. Then there were those years later in the abandoned station, leaving graffiti that still remains in coves, in an intentional nod to its not-so-distant past.
The elements also left their mark, with trespassing water that pockmarked columns after the building had essentially been left to nature. The columns, as Melissa Dittmer, head of place for Michigan Central, put it, show “all the different chapters of the station’s history.”
In the oak-paneled northwest corner of the train station, you hear echoes of what Detroit used to be — before the building rotted, serving as the city’s de facto tombstone for 30 years.
“It would always bother me,” Bill Ford Jr., executive chairman of Ford, said in an interview in that oaken room. “Whenever there was a story about the decay of Detroit, this was often the visual. I hated that. I hated our national reputation. I hated the fact that this was used as that visual. I always said to myself if I could find a reason one day to change it, to restore it and change the narrative … then I found the business reason.”
For Ford Motor Co., the restoration of Michigan Central Station straddles Detroit’s past and its future, as the company pursues electric and autonomous vehicles. Ford purchased the Warren & Wetmore- and Reed and Stem-designed building for $90 million in 2018 from the Moroun family.
By the end of this year, Ford says, some 1,000 of its employees should be working out of the building, with a total of 2,500 in Corktown by the end of 2028. There’s another 2,500 non-Ford jobs anticipated.
Josh Sirefman, CEO of Michigan Central, the nonprofit entity that runs the campus with the restored Book Depository building and train station as its heartbeats, said the goal is to create a “world-leading epicenter of talent and innovation.”
There are already nearly 100 Newlab-affiliated startup companies with approximately 600 people working out of the Albert Kahn-designed Book Depository building, which opened a year ago next to the train station. More than half are led by women or people of color, Sirefman said.
“The growth rate has been really astronomical,” he said, noting that three of every five companies there have founders with Michigan roots.
That, in essence, is the business case for Michigan Central’s existence.
“We’re now attracting new talent to this area and they’re getting funding as well, which is really important,” Ford said, noting that some $700 million in outside funding has gone to companies in the Book Depository. “All of a sudden we’re going to have an ecosystem here that really will propel this region forward in terms of allowing it to be the Motor City for the next 100 years.”
For Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration, the train station’s redevelopment is a testament to how far the city has come, from the nadir of what was in July 2013 — what at the time was the largest municipal bankruptcy in history — to today. In the last 20 years, long-abandoned relics of Detroit’s past have either been painstakingly restored — think the Book Tower, the David Whitney Building, the Westin Book Cadillac — or wiped from the map via the wrecking ball. Michigan Central Station itself was almost demolished in 2009, but plans fell through.
For the Corktown neighborhood, this week is a milestone in its many years of change, and the years that will come.
Attempting to capitalize on Ford’s investment in Michigan Central Station, the former Detroit Public Schools Book Depository next door and other nearby properties, developers have built hotels and condos, apartments and new retail, all as the Dearborn-based automaker and its contractors worked for years in the background restoring the depot.
While there had been some progress prior to Ford’s ownership — windows were installed under an agreement between the Morouns and Duggan, for example — the train station was generally viewed in the real estate industry as too expensive, too rundown for a viable redevelopment project.
Case in point: After Ford’s acquisition, some 3.5 million gallons of water had to be pumped out — 2.5 million initially, and then an estimated 1 million after a 2021 flooding event. The initial water removal alone took 18 months, Dittmer said. An Indiana limestone quarry, closed for decades, had to be reopened to get the materials for the restoration just right.
Ford has not disclosed precisely how much has been spent on the train station itself, but more than 20 building permits list construction costs of at least $217 million — and it’s almost certainly much higher than that. The total cost of the Michigan Central campus, between the train station, Book Depository and other work, is nearly $950 million.
In the years since Ford revealed its intentions for Corktown, real estate developers have pounced in that neighborhood and the surrounding area.
Clifford Brown of Detroit-based Woodborn Partners LLC, which is about to open a new apartment building called The Brooke nearby, said his project would not have happened without Ford’s investment in Corktown. But he stressed that the projects that he and Ford and others are taking on build upon what was already happening in an already vibrant collection of neighborhoods that make up southwest Detroit.
He called Michigan Central Station’s redevelopment “an adrenaline shot” for the area.
“Michigan Central was the initial impetus behind us going there (with The Brooke) and after we got there, we found something that was amazing that already existed,” Brown said.
The new Godfrey Hotel on Michigan Avenue opened, as did a sister multifamily project called the Perennial Corktown. More restaurants have come. Townhouses and condos have been built.
In nearby Hubbard Farms, rowhouses have been renovated. Affordable housing complexes are being overhauled, thanks to a massive federal grant through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded after Ford’s project began.
Most recently, the Detroit City FC organization announced it was building a new soccer stadium for its men’s and women’s teams, with plans to clear an abandoned hospital property just a few blocks west of Michigan Central Station that has sat rotting for decades.
Bill Ford, a soccer fan, said he plans on going to matches when the stadium opens in 2027, although you may be hard-pressed to find him doing the Tetris cheer. He also said Ford worked on helping the team find a site.
“We’re thrilled,” Ford said. “It’s going to be great. I think it’s great for this neighborhood and the bars and the restaurants.”
Despite all that’s new in Corktown and around that neighborhood, the gravitational pull remains the train station.
In the grand waiting room, performances, events and concerts will be held. There will be retail and restaurants accessible to the public, although none have been announced; Sirefman said some of that will start opening in the fall.
Ford is planning a hotel to take some of the space in the upper floors of the 18-story tower, but it’s not yet been made public who the operator will be. Google will have a STEM training course for 150 or so high school students that starts in June. Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan, which moved its headquarters from Farmington Hills to Newlab in the Book Depository building, is also expected to take space on the fifth floor of the station. The 10 children’s charities that will benefit from a $10 million endowment fund Bill and Lisa Ford are leading with the Children’s Foundation will take shared collaborative space in the historic building. And Ford will begin occupying three floors of the tower starting this fall, Sirefman said.
All of that will be in a building many believed impossible to save.
But much of it was.
Dittmer said many of the 29,000 Guastavino tiles in the building are original, and much of the rose marble flooring in the waiting room was saved.
Although there were no lighting fixtures left from its decades of vacancy, Ford worked with specialists to re-create those that were there before it closed. Ditto the herringbone wooden floor in the western portion of the building.
And while much of the filigree around the windows had either fallen off or otherwise “walked away,” Dittmer said, Ford specialists re-created 22 different combinations of flowers and rosettes to mimic the original design.
A 22,000-pound block of limestone was harvested from a long-closed quarry called Dark Hollow in Indiana and a mason spent more than 400 hours hand-carving it to re-create an exterior column.
For Bill Ford, all of that attention to detail has paid off. When asked what, after what will end up being over six years of work, he would change about the project, he was to the point. “Nothing,” he said.
“There’s nothing that I would do differently or ask the team to do differently,” he said.
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