Detroiters Have a Newly Restored Michigan Central Station to Be Thankful for This Holiday Season

On the second Monday of December, a holiday party was thrown in Detroit the likes of which hasn’t been seen in close to a century. A jazz band crooned seasonal tunes—and, since it was cold outside, also took the gathering to the month of May with “My Girl”—as stylish guests ate from a charcuterie table the size of a Mustang Cobra hood.

“Detroit is having a moment,” Jim Farley, Ford Motor Company’s president and CEO (also, the cousin of the late great Tommy Boy himself), proudly announced, raising a glass.

The moment certainly wasn’t lost on the attendees inside Michigan Central Station, the former Motor City masterpiece-turned-American-ruin that was on the brink of demolition until 2018, when Ford committed to a billion-dollar restoration project returning MCS, as it is often called, to its Gilded Age grandeur, now as a technology and innovation hub. It was a coming-out Christmas party 111 years in the making.

The train station originally opened December 26, 1913. It saw its final Amtrak pull out on January 5, 1988, and then spent the better part of 40 years in an ever-worsening state of putrescence, albeit one that became a living canvas for photographers, graffiti artists, cinematographers and local hip-hop icon Eminem, who found the decay “Beautiful” enough for his song’s video shoot.

As Jamon Jordan, Detroit’s first official historian, succinctly puts it: “The great thing about the restoration of Michigan Central Station is that it is no longer a national symbol of our failure.”

The swanky soiree offered more than just an opportunity for partygoers to gaze in awe at intricately restored historical details, such as the 29,000 interlocking Guastavino tiles—only 1,300 were replaced—that make up the Grand Hall’s vaulted ceiling. It was also the launch event for The Station: The Fall and Rise of Michigan Central, a collaborative photo-driven book (of which I was on the team of writers). It covers Michigan Central Station’s history from day one—an early rushed opening due to a fire at Detroit’s main railyard—through the heyday, downfall and rebirth, highlighted by a raucous concert last June featuring hometown stars Diana Ross, Jack White, Big Sean and Eminem.

Stephen McGee, the book’s primary photographer, moved to Detroit 20 years ago and fell in love with Michigan Central to the point of taking upwards of three million photos capturing it literally and figuratively in darkness and light. In 2017, McGee and his family moved into a home they bought for a dollar and renovated over a number of years sitting directly across from MCS. He’d already spent countless hours shooting inside, so when Ford bought the building and announced the revival plans, McGee began officially photographing the up-from-the-ashes process. All these years later, he found himself dressed to the nines proudly signing copies of The Station, the powerful documentation of the MCS transformation.

“When I moved to Detroit, I realized trying to understand the complex fabric of the city meant exploring all of its abandoned buildings, and Michigan Central remained the city’s soul. To me, it was an American version of the Acropolis of Athens or the Colosseum in Rome, so I felt an immediate need to start documenting. Structures were falling every day, and it was possible the powers-that-be would take a wrecking ball to it because they saw MCS as an eyesore, not an icon,” says McGee, whose story is told in the forthcoming documentary Resurgo Detroit: The Rise From Within. “Sometimes it was a melancholy project because there was real beauty in the dying building that would never return, so I was glad I captured that side of it before the reclamation as well. The honesty and openness in the struggle speaks to me.”

Even amid the fancy holiday revelry in the shiny new temple, the station’s history was always present. Partiers dancing to D.J. Stretch Armstrong on the original marble floors may not have noticed, but preservation meant keeping the worn-down divots of 75 years of passengers taking a load off before their train arrives, to honor the footsteps of Detroiters who walked before. Folks like the grandparents and great-aunts and uncles of Jamon Jordan, who at 53, has fond fleeting memories of the station he encountered as a young boy.

“My family was well acquainted with the train station, and when I was a kid, it felt to me like there was always hustle and bustle—even though, by the late 1970s, all the shops were closed and it was starting to fall apart, except for the one lobby popcorn vendor, a smell I associate with the original Michigan Central,” says Jordan. “But we knew it wasn’t the magnificent place we’d heard about from older family members who, like so many African Americans, headed north to work in the auto industry. My family came up from Alabama and Georgia, and the first place they set foot was Michigan Central, a truly grand entrance to a new life in Detroit.”

Unfortunately, therein lies the major irony at the heart of Michigan Central’s life cycle. The countless number of men who came via rail to work on Henry Ford’s $5-a-day assembly lines, which debuted the same month as MCS, were planting the seeds for the station’s ultimate neglect and demise. But car domination would come later, so for the first few decades, MCS was a thriving elegant engine of everyday life. Designed by Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stern, the architecture firms that created New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, the $2.5 million Beaux Arts station saw its first train leave at 5:20 p.m., before the embers of the old depot had cooled. The day after Christmas must have been a chaotic opening day, but the staff was ready to go. They even helped locate the first lost passenger, a poodle named Tessie, who ran off and was found playing with the taxi drivers.

Michigan Central Station’s heyday

The centerpiece of Michigan Central’s 18 stories—making it the tallest train station in the world at the time—was the Grand Hall, a waiting room modeled after the public baths of ancient Rome, with Corinthian columns, bronze chandeliers and the Guastavino tile ceiling soaring 54 feet high. It offered everything a traveler could want, including a pharmacy, a barbershop, a men’s smoking room, a ladies’ parlor, a white-tablecloth-and-fine-china restaurant and a corned-beef-and-eggs lunch counter, a florist, a newsstand, and bathing facilities for both sexes complete with attendants. It offered 500 offices in its tower for the railroad industry, while below, a three-story depot featured ten operational gates. By 1915, Michigan Central was serving some 200 trains every day, just as American train travel hit an all-time high. In 1916, the national rail network peaked at 254,000 miles, and in 1920, opulent trains delivered 1.2 billion well-dressed passengers to their destinations.

Word quickly got out that Michigan Central itself was such a magnificent source of Motor City pride that the rich, powerful and famous came to walk its hallowed halls. The dignitaries and luminaries who visited Michigan Central over the years included Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman; actors Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball; inventor Thomas Edison; slugger Babe Ruth; and artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who disembarked in 1932 to begin work on his masterful industry murals for the Detroit Institute of Art.

It wasn’t just the well-heeled who rode the rails, of course. Millions of European immigrants, as well as 200,000 Black Southerners throughout the Great Migration, entered the city through Michigan Central, earning it the nickname “Detroit’s Ellis Island” and playing a pivotal role in the city’s peak population of 1.85 million residents in 1950. Michigan Central was Detroit’s crown jewel, but the good times slowed during the Great Depression. Those bleak years devastated the American rail industry, as revenue fell by 50 percent from 1928 to 1933, and a third of the country’s railroads went into bankruptcy. Closer to home, the Depression thwarted Henry Ford’s elaborate development plans in Corktown, the neighborhood around the station. Michigan Central would remain a lone skyscraper standing two miles from downtown.

As America entered World War II, the daily beehive of activity at Michigan Central rebounded as Detroit’s automotive plants shifted on a dime from making cars to whatever Uncle Sam desired. Countless people passed through Michigan Central on their way to help the cause, including unprecedented numbers of women, symbolized by Rosie the Riveter. Workers at Ford famously mass-produced the lightweight Army Jeep, the Pygmy, and, at an apex of one per hour, the B-24 Liberator.

The end of World War II happened to coincide with Michigan Central Station’s greatest year, 1945. More than 3,000 people worked in the office towers, ensuring smooth trips for the 4,000 passengers coming through every day, including troops returning from the battlefields of Europe and Asia. On May 22, three soldiers who witnessed the Mount Suribachi flag-raising on the island of Iwo Jima were greeted by 1,000 schoolchildren. An even bigger gathering took place in mid-October, when 8,000 fans packed the depot to welcome their hometown Tigers, fresh off a 4-3 World Series triumph over the Chicago Cubs. The future looked so bright for Michigan Central in 1945 that a baby nursery was added to its many amenities. Just the second of its kind in the United States, it offered traveling mothers beds, playthings, bottle warmers and other necessities in a cheerful blue room.

The station falls into disrepair

The post-World War II boom would be short-lived for Michigan Central and railroad stations throughout the country. The growth in automobile sales, airline and bus travel, subsidized highways, civil unrest in ’67 and ’68, and white flight to the suburbs all took a toll on national and local rail demand. Parts of the station’s restaurant were partitioned off, and a drop ceiling was added, covering up the vaulted ceiling. Other stores shuttered, and by the mid-1970s, nearly everything was closed or boarded up, the inside desolate and spooky. In 1975, the station was added to the National Register of Historic Places, but the designation didn’t bring the terminal back to life—that would take another half a century of stops, starts and Ford largesse, just in the nick of time.

Three decades of water damage nearly did Michigan Central in, as consensus seems to be the structural integrity was nearing the point of no return when Ford purchased it in May 2018. Some parts of the building, like the arcade on the east side, were in decent shape, but many other parts were a disaster. The basement was filled with 3.5 million gallons of water that had to be pumped out. Over time, Michigan Central sprouted its own cycle of life. During the winter, the building filled with snow, and the basement became a frozen lake. Then, in spring, the trees that sprouted through the roof bloomed, until the leaves inevitably fell in autumn. In the low light, mushrooms flourished, and a bat colony made themselves a home. So did the fearless taggers with their spray paint cans.

Restoring the station to its former glory

One of the brilliant decisions in the MCS restoration was paying respect to every part of its history, including the illegal museum within. Alongside traditional fixtures like the 2,700-pound cast iron chandeliers recreated from original construction drawings and photos with 21st-century energy-efficient lighting, graffiti has been preserved with every effort to find, credit and showcase the artists.

“These abandoned buildings were my playground where I could work on my art and get better. Michigan Central Station is where I honed my craft,” says the street artist known as Fel3000ft, who first started throwing up paintings in MCS as a teen in the 1980s. “One pandemic winter, driving on I-75, I could see a huge projection of one of my pieces on the front of the building. I nearly crashed my car! I cried my eyes out, because all that time, work and effort I put in all those years and then to see something like that? It really moved me.”

Tooling about Michigan Central Station, it was hard not to feel almost out of place and time because it’s the kind of large-scale project the country doesn’t seem to take on anymore. Yes, we build lightly used stadiums and glass towers galore, but MCS harkens back to an age of colossal grandiosity for the masses. And it raises the question: Could this spark a revolution nationwide?

“Symbolically, Michigan Central has the potential to spur on these large-scale urban renewal and restoration projects, but it’s also a unique circumstance because of Ford’s deep pockets,” says Daniel Campo, an urbanist at Morgan State University and author of the 2023 book Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rust Belt Icons, which features a lengthy chapter on MCS. “I give them credit in their sincere desire to recapture a piece of Detroit’s glorious history, while also reclaiming a world-famous cool counter-cultural icon, to get hip street cred magic the company could never capture on its own.”

Campo adds, “When we tear down pieces of our past, we lose the cultural impact of what these places can be. American ruins, be it an old barn, manufacturing plant, or a train station, are places of possibility and wonder. In Detroit, techno music evolved out of underground dance parties at the long-abandoned crumbling Packard Plant that wasn’t saved. Obviously, few restoration projects will have the financial backing of a company like Ford, but I hope it helps open civic eyes to what can be. Once these important pieces of our past are demolished, they’re never coming back. It’s an American tragedy.”

Only time will tell if Michigan Central is successful as an enterprise unto itself, because the planned entrepreneurial community is in its nascent phase. In addition to the station, Ford purchased the 270,000-square-foot Book Depository next door, which opened in 2023 with the Newlab incubator. The long-term goal is to turn the 30-acre campus into a humming technology and innovation hub for students, startups, the company’s electric vehicle program and old-fashioned brick-and-mortar ventures like anchor tenant Yellow Light, the station’s first indoor eatery since 1988. By all accounts, since MCS opened to the public last summer, it has drawn a steady stream of visitors taking guided tours of the station, visiting the artisan market and picnicking on the grounds. It’s a slow and steady retail rollout, but artistic and cultural happenings are set to ramp up in the coming year.

As the last of the peppermint bark cannoli were devoured and the party wound down, my wife and I walked out to see Michigan Central Station and its surrounding Roosevelt Park all lit up in white. It’s a picture worth a thousand words, or, better yet, a few words from the man who took thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pictures here: Stephen McGee.

“Since Michigan Central Station opened, every generation has seen it change, including myself over 20 years,” says McGee. “As I’ve gone from single man to married man to family man, the station has been reborn, and I feel connected to it as we’ve changed together. It’s been an honor being part of this six-year restoration, but we’re far from done. Detroit’s time is now.”