DETROIT — The rumors began flying in March: Ford Motor Co., the business that transformed Detroit into a 20th-century industrial powerhouse, was in talks to buy Michigan Central Station, the city’s most iconic example of 21st-century industrial ruin.
Three months later, on June 19, the automaker made it official. “For 76 years the train station was our Ellis Island … This was the port where we shipped our troops off to war and then welcomed them home,” Bill Ford Jr. declared from a stage beneath the decaying structure’s grand pillar entryway.
“But once the last train pulled out it became a place where hope left,” he continued. “It’s time for that to change.”
Delivering the announcement, Ford Jr., the great-grandson of Henry Ford and the company’s executive chairman, was jubilant — and so was Detroit. The news that the auto company chose the long-abandoned, 500,000-square-foot train depot, located in an industrial area two miles west of downtown, for its new innovation campus was among the biggest feel-good stories of Detroit’s ongoing resurgence. More than 20,000 people signed up for the limited open house tours the company offered, quickly exceeding capacity; 6,000 more joined a waitlist. But as the initial excitement settled, another, more elusive question emerged — whether a revitalized Michigan Central might actually function again as a transportation hub for a region suffering a dire public transit crisis.
“It’s a great irony that Detroit put the world on wheels,” says Joel Batterman, a coordinator for the transportation advocacy group Motor City Freedom Riders and a Wayne County Commission candidate. “But many people in the city and around the metro region continue to find themselves immobilized by the lack of adequate public transit.”
When it opened in 1913, Michigan Central was the tallest train station in the world. Designed by the same architectural firms behind New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, the Beaux-Arts building featured an opulent grand waiting room modeled after the public baths of ancient Rome, with arched ceilings, marble floors and 68-foot Corinthian columns. As the front door to a burgeoning Detroit, on its way to becoming the country’s wealthiest city, the station’s grand design was meant to impress — and it did.
“I just remember how awesome it was,” says Warren Evans, Wayne County executive and a fourth-generation Detroiter who gaped at the construction as a child in the 1950s and thought, “‘We’re in New York City, right?'” Another frequent visitor compared the station to Buckingham Palace.
The station connected to Detroit’s sophisticated early 20th-century electric streetcar system, at the time the largest in the country. As many as 200 long-distance trains departed daily, connecting Detroit to New York and Chicago; the station also served as the Detroit terminus for a commuter link to Ann Arbor, 40 miles to the west. But as the fates of both Detroit and American passenger rail atrophied, what had been a symbol of the city’s opulence transformed into a monument to its downfall. The last train departed Michigan Central in January 1988, and the cavernous building, bought and left vacant for years by Manuel Moroun, a notoriously stingy trucking mogul, fell into decrepitude. Archways and ceilings crumbled. Grand waiting rooms became temples of graffiti. By 2009, when the story of a corpse discovered entombed in a block of ice in an adjacent warehouse went viral, Michigan Central had become perhaps the world’s preeminent ruin tourism destination, and the most visible symbol of Detroit’s decline.
Yet the station’s collapse was also emblematic in another way: for decades Metro Detroit — a sprawling, fragmented region whose modern planning was largely dictated by the automobile — has had what many consider to be the worst public transit service of any major American metro region. Southeast Michigan, home to more than four million people, currently has no light or commuter rail system, and area bus networks, serviced by a patchwork of agencies, are notoriously slow and unreliable. Last year, to much fanfare, Detroit debuted a new, $140 million streetcar, the Q-Line, but the service, which runs only along downtown’s main avenue, has proven to be more of a novelty than a useful mode of transportation.
“Detroit is just lagging way behind,” says Steve Vagnozzi, executive committee chair of the Michigan Association of Railroad Passengers, an advocacy group. “The car is king mentality still exists.”
As Detroit has surged, support has also been building — especially among business leaders — in favor of improved public transportation. But Metro Detroit still spends far less on public transit than any other region — $69 per capita in 2014, compared to $471 in Seattle or $177 in Cleveland — and continues to be hamstrung by political infighting and divisions. In November 2016 a referendum to fund a $4.7 billion, four-county regional transit network, including enhanced bus service and a new commuter rail link, was narrowly defeated by voters. While politicians from Detroit and Ann Arbor praised the plan, leaders in suburban Oakland and Macomb Counties, decrying the cost to taxpayers, condemned it. On Aug. 19, 2017, an effort to land a similar 2018 referendum faced the same resistance, and was officially killed. “But we’ll keep plugging away,” says Evans. “I think we’re no more than a couple years away from a deal.”
Ford plans to open its new campus by 2022, moving in 2,500 employees who will work on projects including electric and autonomous vehicles. The plans also include “a mix of community and retail space” and housing; the idea is for the new campus to serve as an economic and cultural anchor for Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, which has transformed dramatically in recent years but remains far less developed than downtown. “The building needs a lot of repairs, it needs a lot of help,” says Roger Gaudette, Ford’s director of Detroit development. “But what a cool thing for the community that’s been waiting and waiting and waiting.”
Denver’s Union Station, first built in the 1880s, served for decades as a crucial rail hub but had had become mostly obsolete by the 1990s. In 2014, after a massive public-private redevelopment, the station reopened as a cultural and transportation centerpiece, with a hotel, restaurants and shops, an Amtrak and light rail station, and an underground rapid bus center. The project has been celebrated as an urban planning and public transit exemplar. Other cities, including Philadelphia and Buffalo, New York, are also planning extensive train station projects.
“It’s possible,” Vagnozzi says of a Union Station-style transit hub at Michigan Central, “but less likely than Denver.” Union is located in the heart of downtown Denver, he points out; Michigan Central is not as centrally located. “If you moved it to Woodward” — Detroit’s main downtown avenue — “then it would be a whole different discussion.”
Currently Detroit has no functional marquee train station: Amtrak service through the city operates out of a small one-story building two miles north of downtown. A revitalized Michigan Central, Batterman points out, would actually make sense as a link in future high-speed service between Chicago, Detroit and Toronto: the station’s tracks, two of which are still in use for freight, already connect by underwater tunnel to Windsor, Ontario. (Plans for high-speed passenger rail are already underway in Canada, with talk of extending the service to Detroit.)
If Southeast Michigan reestablishes a commuter rail, the station would also be a natural fit along the crucial Detroit-Dearborn-Ann Arbor corridor, potentially linking Ford’s new Corktown campus with its headquarters in Dearborn, the Metro Detroit airport and the University of Michigan. Talk of reestablishing a Detroit-Ann Arbor line has been ongoing for years and has overwhelming political support. It’s possible the automaker’s participation might finally cement it, Vagnozzi says. “Ford may tip the equation on commuter rail — if they embrace it and are willing to put some money at it and use their influence.”
At the moment Ford isn’t making any promises — but it also isn’t closing the door. Last month, Dave Dubensky, the executive overseeing the redesign, told the Free Press the company intended to keep four passenger tracks in place. Gaudette says the company is currently planning a parking deck for the area behind the station that includes the tracks, and will consider options within the next year. “What kind of space do we have left over? We’ll have some conversations with others in the transportation world. Is it even feasible?”
But for a city that for decades was effectively isolated — culturally, politically — from even its own state, the restoration of service, of course, isn’t just about trains. “It would say a lot about the region’s recommitting itself to the future of Detroit,” says Batterman. “And I hope to beginning to break down the many layers of division and segregation that have fractured this region over the past century.”
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Ford Aims to Revive Detroit’s Michigan Central Train Station originally appeared on usnews.com
