Building blocks are laid for Detroit’s architectural renaissance

The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago

Some buildings are more than just marble and masonry. That’s certainly true in Detroit, a city brought to its knees by rust-belt decline, which is resurrecting two of its most important architectural landmarks to build on the ashes of its former glory.  

Detroit’s two most powerful automakers, Ford and General Motors, will anchor the iconic new properties: the meticulously renovated 18-storey Beaux Arts Michigan Central Station, and Hudson’s Detroit, on the site of what was once the world’s tallest department store. 

GM will move its global headquarters next year to Hudson’s, a 12-storey office building next to a 45-floor hotel and residential skyscraper on the demolition site of the elegant emporium I used to visit with my grandmother in the 1960s.

And by 2028, Ford will move 2,500 employees to a 30-acre innovation campus centred on the station, where my late father worked as a baggage handler in the 1940s. It was built in 1913 and designed by the architects of New York’s Grand Central Station. Buying the abandoned building in 2018, renovating it and developing the campus has cost Ford $950mn.

For decades after it closed in 1988, Michigan Central Station was a post-apocalyptic symbol of urban decline, a magnet for “ruin porn” tourists. Bill Ford, the company’s executive chair and great-grandson of the founder, called it the “place where hope left”. 

Fel3000ft, an artist who grew up painting graffiti in the gutted station, remembers saplings growing out of the floor: “It was like life after people, the light was perfect because all the windows were blown out,” he told me.

Ford pumped 3.5mn gallons of water out of the basement and reopened a decades-closed quarry to obtain the right shade of limestone for the restoration. The result is an elegant, ornate monument to Detroit’s glory days — and may eventually have a restored rail service. But Ford also tried to preserve some of “the scars that tell us where we’ve been”, including a bullet hole in one pillar and some of the graffiti, Ford’s Dan Austin, a local architectural historian, told me during a tour.

Urban planning and real estate experts ask whether post-pandemic Detroit can fill the two new landmarks. Perhaps ominously, the top five floors of Michigan Central were never completed even during Detroit’s heyday, Josh Sirefman, Michigan Central chief executive, tells me. Ironically, Ford’s last big bid to revive Detroit, the futuristic 1976 Renaissance Centre, is the same building now being vacated by GM. GM bought it in 1996. No one knows what will happen to it now.

Detroit is still suffering a post-pandemic work-from-home crisis: in May, daily downtown workers averaged only 33,464, half the 66,589 in February 2020, says the Downtown Detroit Partnership. When I visited on a recent Friday, I was able to jaywalk at every red light due to lack of traffic. Pavements were empty and free parking was ample. 

But Mary Culler, chair of Ford’s Michigan Central Station project, tells me it is “not a traditional real estate development, it’s a much bigger vision”. Bill Ford hopes it will be a “talent magnet”. Ford aims to attract 2,500 outside jobs as well, to make the 30-acre campus an innovation hub for new mobility and other technologies.

Kofi Bonner, CEO of Bedrock, the Hudson’s developer, believes the tide has begun to turn for Detroit, telling me that “for the first time in recent history Detroit has gained population downtown”, with a year-on-year gain in July 2023, the first since 1957. Hudson’s and Michigan Central are helping rebrand Detroit, he says. Buildings create civic pride and make people want to live there. 

This has been a good year for Detroit: its football team nearly won a championship spot; then it broke attendance records for hosting the National Football League draft. But those aren’t things Detroiters can point to out of their window. Nothing beats a glittering skyscraper, or a Beaux Arts gem, to drive by every day. Will Hudson’s and Michigan Central catalyse a wider Detroit recovery? It’s too soon to say. But both have been brought back from the dead. This Detroiter never thought I’d live long enough to see that happen.