Michigan Central Station: A look back

The train station once was a roaring, mammoth and ornate transportation nexus

The last train left in 1988

Was the co-star of Detroit's notorious era of "ruin porn"

Burton Historical Collection

The Michigan Central Railroad Station in 1927 with Canadian Pacific trains in the foreground.

Michigan Central Station timeline

Here are key dates in the history of Michigan Central Station:

May 16, 1910: Construction begins on what will become Michigan Central Station, financed by the wealthy Vanderbilt family through its Michigan Central Railroad (a subsidiary of the New York Central Railroad). It will replace a depot at Third and Jefferson.

December 1912: The steel building frame is complete.

Dec. 26, 1913: At a cost of $2.5 million ($63 million in 2018 dollars), the station opens and the first train, bound for Saginaw and Bay City, leaves MCS at 5:20 p.m. The first arriving train, from Chicago, pulls in an hour later.

1945: Passenger traffic reaches 4,000 a day.

1956: New York Central System puts MCS up for sale for $5 million, but finds no buyers.

Oct. 3, 2003: Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick announces plans to buy the station and renovate it at a cost of up to $150 million as the city's new police headquarters. The idea fails.

April 7, 2009: Detroit's City Council passes a resolution requesting the emergency demolition of MCS at Moroun's expense. It's placement on the National Register of Historic Places helps prevent its destruction.

May 2009: Moroun announces plans to turn the train station into a federal homeland security complex. It goes nowhere.

April 2015: Moroun agrees to install 1,000-plus new windows in the train station as part of a land swap deal that gives him city park acreage he needs for his proposed second Detroit River bridge in exchange for $5 million worth of improvements to the rest of the expanded waterfront park.

2015-16: Moroun's Warren-based Crown Enterprises Inc. spends $8 million on the station to install a new freight elevator, remove asbestos, replace the roof and add the new windows.

Sept. 13, 2017:Crain's Detroit Business hosts the opening dinner for its fourth annual Detroit Homecoming, with comedian and Detroit native Lily Tomlin talking to about 400 former Detroiters and local business and civic leaders, inside MCS' concourse.

March 19, 2018:Crain's breaks the news that Ford Motor Co. is in talks to buy the train station.

June 11, 2018: Ford officially announces its acquisition of MCS. The price hasn't been disclosed.

June 19, 2018: Ford schedules announcement of its plans for the train station and the Corktown neighborhood.

Compiled by Bill Shea.

Source: HistoricDetroit.org, Crain's research

The 105-year-old Michigan Central Station for years was the co-star of Detroit's notorious era of "ruin porn" — it shared top billing with the sprawling decay of the Packard plant. But the dilapidated train depot is finally ready for a new solo close-up in a career revival.

News that Ford Motor Co. has bought the long-vacant train station for use as office space means a thorough renovation and a second life for a building that came to symbolize, like the Packard plant and thousands of crumbling buildings and homes, a gutted Detroit.

Ford's real estate maneuver, bringing it back to the city where Henry Ford started his eponymous auto company, may also mean that the office tower could be regularly and fully occupied for the first time since the edifice opened in 1913. In its heyday, rail companies used a few floors, but the upper stories were rarely used.

It's worth a quick look back at how we got here before the station's next chapter is written.

Straddling the era between the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, the train station once was a roaring, mammoth and ornate transportation nexus that sent soldiers to fight two world wars and welcomed home millions of passengers. It's how you got to Detroit in an age when horses shared the streets with cars.

"For 75 years, the depot shipped Detroiters off to war, brought them home, took them on vacation and sent them off to visit Grandma. It was Detroit's Ellis Island, where many generations of Detroiters first stepped foot into the city for factory jobs," wrote Dan Austin in the definitive history of the train station for HistoricDetroit.org.

Burton Historical Collection

The steel frame of Michigan Central Station is erected in 1912.

The three-story train depot and eighteen-story tower (intended to be offices and a hotel) were designed in the Beaux-Arts style by New York City-based Warren & Wetmore and St. Paul, Minn.-based Reed and Stem firms, the architects that jointly designed New York City's famed Grand Central Terminal, according to Austin. Featuring a sprawling concourse, marble walls, vaulted ceilings, ornate columns and an arcade of shops and dining, the building opened at a cost of $2.5 million (or $63 million in 2018 dollars), financed by the wealthy Vanderbilt family of railroad barons through its Michigan Central Railroad.

The first train left the station on Dec. 26, 1913. That was weeks ahead of schedule because the depot it intended to replace caught fire that day.

Michigan Central Station opened little more than a year after the Titanic sank and eight months before World War I broke out in Europe.

Henry Ford was 50 years old in 1913, but his Ford Motor Co. was just a decade old. The Model T had been on the road for only five years, and in 1913 Ford sold 170,000 of them, competing against brands like Willys-Overland, Studebaker, Maxwell and Brush, that are now ghosts. In 1913, airplanes were still an exotic wonder.

Detroit's population was about 500,000 in 1913. It would peak at 1.8 million in 1950, and today is about 666,000 — or closer to what it was when the Michigan Central Station opened.

Burton Historical Collection

Travelers wait in line at gates to the tracks inside Michigan Central.

Over the years, the train station would see passengers such as Presidents Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt, comedian Charlie Chaplin magician Harry Houdini, and inventor Thomas Edison, according to Austin and others' research. In 1953, a train delivered 18-year-old rookie Al Kaline just down the road from Tiger Stadium.

By the time the future Mr. Tiger stepped onto the Michigan Central Station platform, the building was already facing obsolescence.

Construction of the nation's vast system of highways — filled with cars produced in Detroit factories not far from the train station — and rise of domestic air travel doomed the terminal to eventual abandonment and ruin. The last train left in 1988.

The building came to be owned by local trucking magnate and Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel "Matty" Moroun when be bought the prior owner's construction liens for an undisclosed price in 1995. Critics blasted him for allowing the station to fall further into ruin; although he and his family lamented that much of the building was already stripped by 1995, and it was a costly albatross too expensive to fully renovate or demolish.

So it sat. At times, Hollywood came calling to use it in movies such as "Transformers," "Four Brothers" and "The Island."

Annalise Frank/Crain's Detroit Business

An interior view of the train station in 2017.

But mainly, it sat. Decaying.

A generation of vandals, scrappers, graffiti artists, blight enthusiasts keen to take elegant dystopian photos of the decay for Instagram and anyone looking to make a statement on post-industrial American decline found their ideal symbol in the Corktown train station. It served as a metaphor instead of serving passengers.

A litany of ideas, ranging from realistic to silly, for the station's future were floated over the years and each collapsed because of the gargantuan cost required to make the train station habitable for any commercial or even basic human use. A police station. A casino. A homeland security complex. An international trade center. Offices and retail and residences, to finally spark gentrification of the Corktown neighborhood.

None of it left the drawing board. Too expensive. Too risky for investors. Too bureaucratic after 9/11. And gentrification came to Corktown anyway despite the ruined train station, in the form of a popular barbecue joint.

Moroun spent millions to stabilize the train station, most notably with a new roof and more than a thousand new windows. Security was stepped up. Decay was halted. Crain's in 2017 hosted a dinner to mark its fourth Detroit Homecoming inside the station's 110,000-square-foot concourse.

Aaron Eckels for Crain's

In 2017, Detroit Homecoming kicked off at the Michigan Central Station and treated attendees and neighbors to a light show.

As money and people began to return to Detroit, in a renaissance that's been a boon to some places but remains theoretical in others across the city, executives at Ford began to eye the station.

Henry Ford, who used the train station in his travels aboard his own private railcar, was once interested in Corktown land, but nothing came of it. Today, the Blue Oval has come to the station's rescue.

In a bit of irony almost as grand as the train station, the building constructed to serve steam and electric trains will become Ford's new campus for its autonomous and electric-car divisions.

The mode of transportation that birthed the Motor City but killed Michigan Central Station will end up saving the building.