For almost two decades after it opened in 1913, Michigan’s Central Station was a major stop on the nation’s interurban rail network. Then the private car took over the US, and Detroit declined. By the 1970’s, auto jobs were leaving the state and the country and local corruption was soaring. At the turn of the century, the train depot and the 18-story office towers behind it had been abandoned for 30 years, the faded exterior looming over Detroit’s Corktown and Mexicantown neighborhoods, a sign that things were going very poorly in Detroit.
By 2018, the city and Ford Motor Company were ready to tell another story. That year, Ford announced that it had acquired the station and the area surrounding it, a monument to the kind of transportation past that the automaker and its manufacturing brethren had all but killed.
Today, Ford executives and city government and community leaders will hold an opening ceremony for one building on the station’s new campus, part of a $950 million project it is calling Michigan Central. (The state of Michigan contributed some additional $126 million in new and existing financing to the project.) The new building, called the Book Depository, will serve as an innovation collaboration space for transportation entrepreneurs and researchers.
Bill Ford, executive chair of Ford, says the campus’ redevelopment is a sign. “Michigan Central will go from being a story about Detroit’s decay to the story about Detroit’s rebirth,” he says, a second act that will see the city become home to tech- and auto-centric jobs that will build the next generation of transport. “This will be the first tangible evidence that that vision is coming to life,” says Ford, who is also a great-grandson of both company founder Henry Ford and tire magnate Harvey Firestone.
Ford is part of a broader movement to revitalize downtown Detroit, though its effects are not yet clear. Detroit lost almost half of its population between 1950 and 2000. Though new downtown sports stadiums, restaurants, and housing developments have strengthened the case of local optimists who see a resurgence underway, recent US censuses suggest that the region continued to bleed residents in the past decade, perhaps due in part to the Covid-19 pandemic. (The city has sued the US Census Bureau over the results, alleging that feds undercounted minority residents, which affects government funding.)
Ford expects many other businesses to move onto the 30-acre Michigan Central campus, which includes 14 acres of park space open to the public. Today’s opening focuses on the Book Depository, a nearly 100-year-old building across the street from the Central Station that once played host to the Detroit public schools’ store of books, records, and supplies. Now, it will serve as a 270,000-square-foot maker and startup space focused on mobility, a potential spawning ground for future Ford partners. Even before the building’s official opening today, more than 25 companies representing 150 employees have taken up residence at the Book Depository, Michigan Central officials say, representing firms working on autonomous and electric vehicles, roadways built just for robot cars, and air pollution. They are all associated with an organization called Newlab, a manufacturing incubator that has already launched an innovation space in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard.
The Book Depository’s space is designed to encourage collaboration, says Joshua Sirefman, who as CEO of Michigan Central has led the project’s development and programming. Although the building’s general structure has been preserved, changes have been made to bring it in line with contemporary expectations of premium office space. One example: A series of small skylights that collapsed during the 35 years the structure was vacant were replaced by one large skylight, creating what Sirefman calls a “really extraordinary, naturally lit central space, which I think gives us an incredible communal energy.”
The campus’ opening represents Ford doubling down on its side of a long-simmering conflict between Detroit and Silicon Valley. One origin of the dispute is the moment in 2003 when a bunch of guys got together in San Carlos, California, in Silicon Valley, to found a company called Tesla Motors. Since then, Tesla has used its software chops and a move-fast-and-break-things approach to auto manufacturing to become the most valuable car company in the world. Ford wants to prove that it can do the tech stuff too.
When the Michigan Central project was announced in 2018, “Detroit wasn’t even in the game,” says Ford of the race to infuse autos with tech. “But we are now, and what we provide at the Book Depository building and in the region is the ability to bring together hardware and software in a way that can’t be done elsewhere.”
Office workers will begin to move into the updated Michigan Central towers behind the historic station in 2024, says Sirefman, though exactly who will work out of the renovated space isn’t yet clear.
Ford announced in 2018 that 5,000 people, half of them the company’s own employees, would work out of the updated train station. But the automaker has moved to a hybrid working model since the pandemic, spokesperson Daniel Barbossa says, so “we have opened up our Ford spaces to be focused on flex space and collaboration.” Updated occupancy numbers will come later this year, he says. Ford has announced that local high school students in a Google-sponsored mentorship program will work out of a lab in the station; 50 students are already enrolled in the program, which is temporarily housed in another building on the campus.
Corktown, the neighborhood to the east of Michigan Central, is a trendy district that was once home to Tiger Stadium but has since become a nightlife destination. Housing and rental prices there have jumped since the announcement of the Ford project. But Ford, the company’s executive chair, believes the project will be beneficial even to those who don’t work on the campus. “In some ways, a rising tide lifts all boats,” he says.
Rohani Foulke, owner of Folk, a cafe and wine shop that has for almost a decade sat a 10-minute walk from the Central Station, is hopeful the project can boost local businesses that have suffered during the pandemic. “We’re very excited about the project, really in the hopes that it helps bring some regular foot traffic into the neighborhood,” she says. Foulke will also be glad to see the constant construction abate—not only of the Michigan Central campus, but of other developments in the area. “There are insane amounts of noise and dust,” she says. “I can’t tell you how much dust we have to deal with.”
All that dust is a reminder that there is plenty of other work left to do in Detroit, where nearly a third of residents still live in poverty. Brian Boyer, who directs a new degree program in urban technology at the University of Michigan, finds Ford’s ambition—making Detroit the center for transportation innovation—a good one, but insufficient. The city’s future must be broader than cars, trains, and wheels, says Boyer, who is a consultant on one part of Ford’s Michigan Central project. “No matter how successful we are with mobility, the apex for that was the beginning of the 20th century,” he says. “The region needs to have a bigger purpose—a bigger story that we’re asking people to be part of.”
