Why Ford spent $1 billion to transform an abandoned Detroit train station

Bill Ford Jr., the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, is sitting in what was once one of the world’s most glorious drug dens. Michigan Central Station, the grand Beaux Arts terminal and 18-story tower that served as Detroit’s train hub from 1913 to 1988, has spent the decades since its closure in abandonment and abject decrepitude. Left to crumble under the elements and stripped of nearly all removable bits of valuable scrap, the 640,000 square foot building became a free-for-all zone that has over the years held raves, housed encampments, endured graffiti, and seen lots of drug use. From the outside, the station’s hulking ruins became synonymous with the decline of Detroit and the left-behind economies of urban America.



[Photo: Courtesy Ford]



Despite that baggage, or perhaps because of it, Ford was determined to buy the building. In 2018, Ford Motor Company spent $90 million to purchase one of the country’s most notorious vacant eyesores. It was an effort to save an icon and also use it as the centerpiece of what’s grown into a $1 billion effort to create a new innovation hub focused on future mobility. “It was just horrible neglect, and it was used for not great purposes,” Ford says, seated in a club chair in the station’s wood-paneled former waiting room. “I was determined to turn that around. And I think we have.”



The painstaking six-year renovation involved more than 3,000 construction workers, and required removing millions of gallons of flooded rainwater, reopening a long-closed quarry, and 3D printing replicas of pilfered architectural details. Along the way, Ford learned to ignore any internal or external voice that might have dissuaded him from such a daunting and complicated project. The updated Michigan Central Station is set to open to the public June 6 with a big party .



[Photo: Courtesy Ford]



A bigger vision



The station’s rebirth is the marquee feature of a much bigger project that’s become known as Michigan Central . Envisioned by Ford as a Silicon Valley-esque ecosystem of innovation, it’s a 30-acre multi-building mix of established entities like the Ford Motor Company, startups focusing on new forms of mobility, city-sanctioned testing grounds for novel technologies, and public realm improvements intended to create a new civic center for Detroit in its oldest neighborhood, Corktown.



[Photo: Courtesy Ford]



[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



Several pieces of this project are already up and running, notably the early stage startup platform Newlab , which houses nearly 100 manufacturing and mobility startups in a giant former post office building that sits right next to the train station. A longstanding city park in front of the train station got a significant facelift, and another eight-acre public space is taking shape on the other side, atop what were once the station’s train tracks.



Visible from many parts of the city, the train station saw its last passengers in 1988 and spent three decades falling apart and looming as a reminder of the ways Detroit’s fortunes changed. Ford wants the restored train station to exude a new message. “We have an opportunity with this building to really put an exclamation point on all that and to prove to the world that Detroit is not yesterday’s Rust Belt news, but it is really a place of the future,” he says.



[Photo: Courtesy Ford]



A painstaking process



The train station today is probably in the best shape it’s ever been. Michigan Central Station was still under construction when it officially opened in 1913, with a Beaux Arts design by the same architecture team behind New York City’s Grand Central Station. The downtown Detroit train station it was replacing had burned down, and the new grand terminal, a few miles to the west, was opened before it could be finished. A few top floors of the tower were never completed.



Inside the renovated station, the finishing touches are all in place. The shining terrazzo inside the main waiting hall reflects the grand vaulted ceiling above, which was meticulously re-finished with more than 29,000 tiles. Gargantuan chandeliers hang where there were once gaping holes, a few of the many empty spots throughout the building where materials had been looted. “They’d all walked off to live their next life somewhere else,” says Melissa Dittmer, head of place at Michigan Central.



[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



She says that during the renovation process, anonymous callers would reach out about returning pieces of the station they’d saved (or pilfered) over the years; many were 3D scanned in order to be replicated. Some parts of the station, including long-lost carved ram’s head column capitals, wouldn’t have been possible to recreate without them.



A glass-covered steel truss roof pours light into the main concourse, a sharp contrast from the rain and snow that fell inside for decades. Beige Mankato limestone columns climb dozens of feet over the ticketing booth and central arcade, each refurbished with new pieces of stone pulled from a quarry in Indiana that Ford’s team paid to reopen after its own 30-year closure. Centered between them, a grand wooden clock has been rebuilt using historical images and 3D printed parts. The direct view of that clock from one spot in the waiting hall made it such a popular place that decades of foot movements there have left a visible divot in the marble floor that can still be seen.







[Photo: Courtesy Ford]



A renovation long in the making



The renovation of the building is for some generations a remarkable undoing of its long decay, while for others it’s a welcome return of the building’s original splendor. “For anybody who was in Detroit in the ’50s, the ’60s, and even into the ’70s, the train station was a symbol of Detroit’s finest days. It’s psychologically deeply important to longtime Detroiters,” says Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan. Saving the building “was one of my highest goals when I became mayor,” he says. That was in early 2014, barely six months after the city had filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. “The train station had become the symbol of Detroit’s decay. . . . I was very focused on making sure it didn’t get demolished,” Duggan says.



[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



The city council had actually approved an emergency order to have the building torn down in 2009, amid long-simmering frustration over the building’s condition and image, though that order was later lifted. At the time, a dozen trees were growing out of its roof, and it was a favored spot for urban explorers and graffiti writers. Needles littered its floors. In winter, some would play ice hockey on the millions of gallons of frozen water in its basement.



Duggan forged a deal with the building’s owner to secure the site and replace its windows by 2016 in an effort to make it more appealing to potential developers. Around this time, Duggan heard that Ford was looking into the possibility of opening a new facility outside his company’s base in Detroit-adjacent Dearborn with a focus on emerging transportation technologies. On the table were places in Silicon Valley, or maybe something close to the engineering talent coming out of the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor. So Duggan called Ford and made the case that the talent he sought for these potential high-tech jobs were people who wanted to live in exciting urban areas. Ford’s team started looking at real estate in Detroit. “Probably two months later, he called me late one night and said I’ve got the location,” Duggan says. “And it was just so brilliant when I heard it. It never occurred to me, but he had this vision.”







[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



Building a new legacy



Ford, an energetic 67, is tied to Detroit and the auto industry by virtue of his DNA. He’s the great grandson of both Henry Ford and the tire magnate Harvey S. Firestone, and he started working for the family business in 1979 when he was in his early 20s and a self-avowed environmentalist. In 2001 he became CEO of the Ford Motor Company, and shepherded the redevelopment of the company’s historic and heavily polluted Rouge plant in Dearborn with a sustainability-focused design . Since 2006 he’s served as executive chair. Ford is the company’s ultimate insider, but he’s also able to see the faults in his industry and the ways his hometown has struggled to stay competitive in the modern tech-oriented economy.



His itch for culture change in the car industry dates back to 2005, when he joined the board of Ebay and found himself spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley. He started rubbing shoulders with venture capitalists and visiting the offices of startups exploring bold new concepts, from biotechnology to entertainment. One field trip was to the offices of a two-year-old electric vehicle company called Tesla. The scrappy entrepreneurial scene in the Valley was worlds away from his life as one of the world’s leading industrialists.



[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



“I was really taken with the creativity, the energy, and the whole ecosystem around startups and creating the future,” he says. “And then I was struck when I would come back to Detroit at the lack of vitality, if you will, in inventing the future. And this was in a city and in an industry that had once done that.” Compared to tech-centric companies in Silicon Valley, Detroit’s auto industry seemed to Ford to be mired in an old business model and an old way of doing business.



The contrast stuck in his mind, and Ford launched his own venture capital fund, Fontinalis , in the Detroit area in 2009. He hoped to replicate some of that Silicon Valley excitement back home, focusing on companies at the forefront of his own experiential wheelhouse in mobility and industrial processes. Local talent, though, was hard to find. “There was virtually nothing to invest in,”  he says. “It really reinforced my thought that unless this area had a dramatic change, we were going to cede the future to other places, even in the mobility space. And I didn’t want that to happen.”



This was a time when transportation and mobility were undergoing major changes. Uber was founded the same year as Fontinalis, hybrid and electric vehicles were moving from the fringe closer to the mainstream, and technologists were forecasting a coming transition to autonomous vehicles. Ford, from his perch, saw an American automotive industry unprepared for this evolution.



[Photo: Courtesy Ford]



A way forward



In 2011, Ford spoke at the TED conference, where he delivered a speech that embraced this coming change, while also challenging the long held business model of automakers. Through most of his career, he said, “I worried about how am I going to sell more cars and trucks? But today I worry about what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks? What happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles, triples, or even quadruples?”



In a growing, urbanizing world facing harsh impacts from climate change, Ford told the crowd, the future of mobility couldn’t hinge on simply building more cars. Rather, the world needed to apply smart new technologies and approaches to transportation that could meet people’s mobility needs while reducing their impact. The face of one of the leading carmakers was essentially telling people—and his competitors—that cars alone were not the answer of the future. “It was met with great skepticism,” Ford recalls.



[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



“He’s really always looking around corners,” says Ford’s former chief of staff Mary Culler, who is now president of Ford Philanthropy and chair of the Michigan Central Station project.



A half a decade passed and a lot of what Ford spoke about in that TED Talk started to materialize. Uber and Lyft became ubiquitous. Tesla became the dominant EV maker. Cars started to be able to autonomously park, and in some circumstances, drive. Like its major competitors, Ford has shifted towards being both a hardware and a software company, and computers have steadily become more integrated into the ways cars function. The ability to develop new and better technology has grown into as much of a competitive advantage for a car company as the latest flashy design.



But Ford still saw his industry lagging behind the innovations happening out West. “And then I would drive by this building,” he says, gesturing to Michigan Central Station, symbol of a once-prosperous city’s decline. “I started to put all of this together in my mind… What if we could actually invent the future of mobility here?”



[Photos: Courtesy Ford]



The future of mobility



The grand reopening of the train station is the focal point of the past six years of work, but Ford’s broader mobility project, Michigan Central, has been building up momentum for the past year with the opening of Newlab. It’s a membership-based venture platform for startups with a focus on mobility, and the facility they’re in has a mix of offices, fabrication labs, and shared collaboration spaces where serendipitous collisions and idea sharing among entrepreneurs can spark new business ideas. Venture capitalists have offices on site to help these companies take form. As of June, 97 startups are operating out of Newlab, up from about 15 last spring, including many from out of state. 



One is embedding infrastructure in roads that can charge electric vehicles while they drive . Another is framing itself as air traffic control for drones . Compared to Michigan Central Station next door, which will house a few floors of Ford Motor Company offices and other formal office space geared toward more established companies, Newlab’s building will be where companies break stuff and fail fast, Silicon Valley style.



[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



The startup incubation happening there is central to Ford’s goals for the Michigan Central project. The new ideas bubbling up at Newlab benefit from having access to investors in the building, and big players like the Ford Motor Company moving in next door. Loosened city regulations and Federal Aviation Administration-approved experimental airspace in the 30-acre area open the door for testing and prototyping that might otherwise be impossible.



“We have a lot of debate about how to refer to ourselves,” says Michigan Central CEO Josh Sirefman. “We don’t really use the term innovation district, because everybody’s got one and what does it mean? Campus implies some kind of isolation, and we want to achieve the opposite.”



The term they seem to have landed on is “open platform,” says Sirefman, who previously worked for Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs on its effort to develop a new neighborhood in Toronto . The Michigan Central project isn’t a wholecloth invention like Toronto’s ultimately failed effort to “ reimagine cities from the internet up .”  Instead, it’s trying to use existing buildings and their surrounding neighborhood to foster an atypical blend of businesses, investors, civic institutions, and emerging technology. “I don’t mean this to sound hyperbolic, but I don’t see a lot of models out there for us to follow as a playbook,” Sirefman says.



[Photo: Courtesy Ford]



What’s next for Ford



What exactly is being created at Michigan Central may be hard to define, but the necessity of it is clear to Ford. “We’re in a war for talent. And some companies feel they have to leave Michigan to go get that talent,” he says. “Silicon Valley will always be vibrant and always have its fans. But I think there’s also been a level of, I don’t want to say cynicism that exists there now, but it doesn’t have the same spirit and vitality that it did. Everything was possible, it seemed. And I think today that same spirit is here in the city.”



Walking through the train station’s monumental waiting hall a few weeks before its public opening, the building’s scale and ornament seem to match that optimism. Ford intends to make this a space of civic engagement and activity, with pop up retailers, restaurants, and cafes populating Michigan Central Station’s ground floor spaces, and weekly events following the free June 6 grand reopening concert and 10-day-long open house, both of which quickly sold out. (When online registration opened for the 15,000-person capacity concert, overwhelming demand crashed Michigan Central’s website.)



[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



What happens after the ceremonies is less certain. Sirefman says about two-thirds of the building has been “programmed,” and some of the office space will go to the Ford Motor Company and to Google’s Code Next , a free computer science education program for Black, Latinx, and indigenous high school students. The top floors are expected to be used for a hotel, but no partner has been selected. The rest of the space is waiting for companies interested in tapping into the future-minded, startup-fueled open platform Ford is creating.



Lifelong Detroiter Sheila Cockrel is president of the Train Station Neighbors Block Club , a neighborhood association that was involved in the community outreach Ford Motor Company conducted during the development process. She also served as a Detroit City Council member from 1994 to 2009, and she also remembers walking with her father to buy the New York Times inside the train station when she was growing up in the Corktown neighborhood. Cockrel says the community benefits provided by the company to the neighborhood and the city will be a long-term positive impact of the project, including $11 million of funds for neighborhood projects and affordable housing. “Ford’s people have been really diligent in following up and delivering on these elements,” she says.



But she’s also cautious about getting too excited about the roughly 5,000 jobs the Michigan Central project estimates it will spur in the area by 2028, especially when much of the station is not yet leased. “It’s going to be important to see those jobs start to show up at the train station,” Cockrel says.



[Photo: Brittany Greeson for Fast Company]



In metro Detroit, home to three dominant automakers that are beginning to embrace the role of software in their business, as well as countless automotive industry suppliers, there would seem to be plenty of potential tenants. But now may be a tough moment to open this kind of space. Even in such an impressive setting the office tower at the train station is still just an office building, and one opening in a post-pandemic environment where offices are no longer hot commodities .



Ford is confident that companies small and big—perhaps even his two major competitors—will see the benefits built into what he’s building with Michigan Central. With a concentrated and critical mass of companies, entrepreneurs, and technologies, the train station and the 30-acre district around it are poised to become a force in shaping the way the world moves. “My hope is, over time, people are going to be fighting for space here,” Ford says. He wants to be among them. He’s already planning to take his own office space in the train station after it officially opens.