Entering the Great Hall of Detroit’s iconic Michigan Central Station is one of those goosebump-inducing moments. From its complex legacy to its significance to the community and the breathtaking grandeur of its rejuvenized Beaux-Arts design, visitors experience an almost otherworldly feeling among its halls and corridors.
“Michigan Central has lived many lives, many chapters — and throughout each of those chapters, it meant something to everyone,” says Melissa Dittmer, Michigan Central’s head of place. “Everyone who comes has an emotion for the train station that’s specific, for them, to a moment in time.”
Dittmer, a trained architect who has led many design-forward developments, says seeing people’s emotional reaction to the building has been overwhelming. “And that isn’t specific to architecture,” she notes. “It’s specific to what this building represents to all Detroiters. I’ve never experienced anything like it with any of my other projects.”
Built in 1913, Michigan Central Station welcomed more than 4,000 guests a day at its peak. Closed in 1988, the building sat crumbling until Ford Motor Co. purchased the property in 2018. Today, Dittmer says, it’s once again welcoming visitors, albeit with a new purpose: to become a catalyst for thinking about the future of innovation. The station is part of Bill Ford Jr.’s revolutionary plan to transform the 18-floor depot and its surrounding 30-acre campus into a mobility and technology hub.
The scope of the building’s renovation is mind-blowing: It took 3,100 skilled trade workers six years and 1.7 million work hours to complete. Ford worked with the teams at Quinn Evans Architects and Christman-Brinker to make the 640,000-square-foot vision a reality.
“The research phase was (both) academic in nature and a bit like historic detective work. We hired one of the best historic restoration architecture groups and then we did a call-out for objects that could help inform our restoration process,” Dittmer shares. “We needed both because many of the original drawings and photos didn’t get down to the level of finite detail that we needed to inform our restoration process.”
One such object was the Carriage House’s 750-pound clock. An anonymous donor who had salvaged the timepiece after the building was closed returned it, so it could hang as it once did. Re-creating a ram’s head ornament was another piece of the puzzle that required the help of a collector. Original drawings depicted the building’s ornate accents (the replicas can be found in Michigan Central’s Historic Reading Room), but didn’t provide enough detail to re-create them. Thanks to an individual who happened to have one, the team was able to make a digital scan to create a prototype and mold, which was then cast in plaster and hand-painted to look just like the original.
Assessing the building’s extensive damage was also a key part of the restoration process. “Much of the stone had worn away due to water continually flowing, and there had been a lot of vandalism,” Dittmer notes. More than 3.5 million gallons of water in total were pumped from the basement, 3,990 cubic yards of debris was removed, and 102,000 square feet of windows were replaced or restored. Ironically, some areas of the building were still in pristine condition. In the South Concourse, where the glass of the 31,600-square-foot skylight had to be entirely replaced (the steel is original!), the brick walls, while needing a thorough cleaning, looked to be in their 1913 condition, Dittmer says.
To restore the exterior, 600 tons of limestone were sourced from the same Indiana quarry that provided the building’s materials 100 years ago. The quarry, long closed, was reopened to ensure an exact match. In the Waiting Room and Grand Hall, 29,000 Guastavino ceiling tiles were individually sounded (tested for structural stability), hand-cleaned, and secured with 8.7 miles of grout. Of those, only 1,700 had to be replaced.
A quarter-mile of cornice was also restored, 4,200 new light fixtures were added, original chandeliers were replaced and replicated, 5.6 miles of new plumbing was installed, and 300 miles of new cables and wires were added. And that’s only a partial list of the work that was done.
To pay homage to the station’s more recent past, some graffiti was also salvaged and preserved — most notably in a hallway off the Concourse. “You can think that the years of vacancy represents something negative, but for a lot of people, it represented a cultural or creative inspiration,” Dittmer says. “The station, during the vacancy stage, was a very positive thing for Detroit’s creative side. It was important for us to represent that and remember that this building has gone through a lot of different chapters and narratives, and it will continue to do so. We’re just building upon that.”
That’s what’s so remarkable about this renovation — it’s upholding the past while also catapulting the city forward. Within Michigan Central Station, the ground floor is to be activated with public art, live programming, restaurants, and retail, while the tower will be home to offices, startups, a hotel, and non-profit organizations. “What was and what is extremely exciting about this project is that it’s built upon Detroit’s legacy as a city that designs things and makes things. If we think about Detroit’s designation as a UNESCO City of Design, we come from a legacy of people who design and make beautiful things. Michigan Central is one example of that legacy,” Dittmer explains.
“It was important for us to think about how we’re going to use this building, and then build upon it for the next generation of designers and makers,” she adds. “The ways in which we’re moving the building forward will be done in a contemporary way. If you think about our programming, and it being this focal point for folks thinking about the future of mobility and innovation and the ways in which they’re thinking about objects and the ways people move around, we’ve done that for the past 100 years — and we’re going to do that, in this building, for the next 100. It becomes quite poetic in the way it represents all that is Detroit.”
MORE INFORMATION: michigancentral.com
Text by Giuseppa Nadrowski. Photography by Jason Keen.
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