In a Detroit Train Station, Ford Looks for the Future
citylab.com
citylab.com
'Thief: "I only have the clock. No other material. I left it leaning against a burned-out building on Lawton. It is between Warren and Buchanan. The building is between the train tracks and 4470 Lawton. Please send two men and a truck immediately. It has been missing for over 20 years and is ready to go home. Thank you so much."'
Honestly, the changes that Detroit has made in the last 5 years are amazing. The amount of construction in the city has been growing and it's nice to see people actually enjoying themselves in the city. Although there might be some problems with the continuing development of the city, I think for everyday people and the economy, it's going to get a lot better.
The growing diversification of the city's economy is also a high note, with Shinola, Quicken, and many other companies moving to Detroit from the surrounding suburbs, it's good to have your economy not based solely upon the auto industry.
[1]https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2018/06/18/thief...
Being born in Detroit and always living in the area, the train station was more than a burned-out building to me. It was a temple of majestic architecture every bit as beautiful as the still-occupied Penobscot or Guardian buildings. Just, one which was off-limits. Forbidden fruit. Bring your own flashlight to admire the inlay tile work, but admire it just the same. It also tickled a young engineer's sense of technology, just like the famous museum a few miles away.
Sneaking in there (no breaking necessary back then, it was just a quick trot across the tracks from Mexicantown, then the doors were just open caverns) late one October night was both exhilarating because we might get caught, and sad because there was nobody who cared to catch us. It felt like a shame that it was so easy, that this splendid building and all it symbolized should be so neglected by its owners. Didn't we, as residents, have some stake in this? Wasn't the rail system a public good? Well, yes and no, for reasons of ownership that I don't fully comprehend even now. At the time I certainly didn't understand the motivations its owners had for letting it go to ruin.
Once inside, we found all the architecture and graffiti we expected, and so much more. There's no need to explain the tile, the columns, even the perfect echoes as we walked. Others have done that and more. And I'm sure the spraypainted modifications have been well documented too. But what fascinated me the most was the elevator equipment in the lower levels. Anything of value, any copper, any brass, had long since been stripped and scrapped. But the slate and steel weren't worth hauling away, and rows of Westinghouse control panels, pedestals and shafts and bearing journals, were aligned in rows beneath each hoistway. They told the story of an era when elevators were just becoming commonplace, tall buildings made practical by this new technology.
There were pumps and what I can only presume were the remains of a water softener tank, a pile of pellets on a raised pedestal, the tank that once contained them long since having been dissolved by its contents. Which makes no sense; Detroit water doesn't need softening. This mystery wanders through my head every once in a while, for the past 20 years.
A sub-basement further down offered only hints of what lay below; the level was flooded even with the floor on which we walked, such that the ladders down were scarcely distinguishable from the floor itself. Only a keen eye and abundant flashlights kept us from discovering that the hard way! Elsewhere, entire rooms held glassy lakes, mirror-smooth and surreal to inspect until a tossed pebble made some ripples to resolve the ambiguity. A keen lesson in water tables and sump pumps, for anyone tuned in to such ideas.
I was also struck by a few oddly-modern elements: Telephone wiring blocks and fire alarm panels, which I noticed appeared to be of 1980s vintage, while everything else that remained was original stone and tile from 70 years earlier. A 3-prong outlet caught my eye. It was a glaring reminder that this building hadn't been in ruins forever, and was in fact in active use, well into my childhood, until the plug was simply pulled in 1988. So recent. So hard to reconcile...
On the upper levels, a few pieces of graffiti stuck out then, and still do in my mind. One, in particular, scrawled on a marble panel, read:
"SHAME ON YOU,* DETROIT, FOR LETTING THIS BEAUTIFUL BUILDING GO TO RACK AND RUIN".
It then had "^ OLD WHITE" added at the marked point.
That vandal's anger rings true. It was spectacular but it wasn't a "spectacle", it was ruined but it wasn't "ruins". It was a shame. A crying shame. A beautiful thing forsaken for bad reasons, an embarrassment cast on an entire city that didn't deserve and certainly didn't need another embarrassment.
I can't tell you how happy I am that the next time I visit, my flashlight will likely remain in my pocket.
(I realized I should go get the photos from this trip. I just uploaded them to imgur and reworked some of this post as captions. Here you go: https://imgur.com/gallery/b9GkefT )
I have seen Detroit through decades of changes and have worked and played down there since I was a kid. I remember when Charlie LeDuff "played a round of golf" from one border of the city (8 Mile) all the way to the other border (the river) to illustrate how vacant it was.
When you are a Detroiter in another city, and people ask you where you are from, you get some sideways looks. Detroit has always been synonymous with crime, corruption and murder. Our ex-Mayer is in a federal penitentiary.
When I saw Louis CK at Joe Louis a couple years back and his opening joke was something like "I've never been to Detroit so I came in early and walked around downtown on a Tuesday. Was there some type of nuclear accident recently?"
The city, in the last few years, has made massive improvements but honestly nothing gives me goosebumps more than thinking about that train station being renovated and open to the public.
Its such a beautiful building on the outside and my family has relayed stories of how beautiful it was on the inside when it was operational.
I never vandalized the city when I was a kid but I always wanted to break into that building and just look around.
Hopefully soon I can go there and see it with my own two eyes. I plan to bring my son.
Part of the reason it has such a high profile around here is just how far it fell. It's been popular in "ruin porn" profiles of Detroit. Ford will need to do an enormous amount of work restoring it, as it's been left without even window panes (or boards!) for a long time.
I've always liked this building, so to me it feels like the Empire State Building being owned by a slumlord who ignored it for 20 years.
The press is going to have to go out further into the East side neighborhoods for their ruin porn and that's a place that is a wee bit dangerous. Not as scary as the South side of Chicago but scary just the same.
It really was quite an event today. Employees and media were able to enter for a look around, some wonderful performances from city students and even Big Sean showed up for a few songs. The company certainly has a long way to go especially in a changing industry, but this is a really cool and bold statement for the company and for the city.
What surprises me though is how Ford can see that the future is Urban while also not stumbling into the niche of building railcars. In the decades since the streetcar conspiracy, all the US based manufactures of railcars have died. Bombardier to the North is in dire straits for airplane related reasons. The Japanese (I forget which company) have had difficulty fulfilling an AmTrack contract because a requirement that everything be American Made means they need to reinvent their entire supply line. Also they are having difficulty meeting the (overly stringent) FRA requirements. Ford has both the US logistics to pull it off and perhaps even the lobbying clout to make the FRA more reasonable. They are already in the vehicle business, how hard can it be to transition from tires to steel? I mean FFS they literally just bought a train station.
I don't think it cannibalizes their car division to do what I'm suggesting. In terms of people moved per hour, a city cannot live on personal vehicles alone. Subways, cars and bikeshares can and should all co-exist.
I took my wife to Slow's BBQ and to see the train station a couple years back, and it's so great to see some movement here after all these years. Thanks for the link on the clock as well, really cool to see that getting restored.
I was pulling for Amazon HQ2 to be in Detroit as well, but alas...
With the amount of tax breaks on the table from the bids in competition, there's no way Detroit would break even. The last thing the city needs is a marketing stunt that creates a tax sinkhole.
This is the biggest thing to happen since Quicken moved its offices to the city.