"I couldn't give up on the Michigan Central Station."

Bill Ford, executive chair of Ford Motor Co.

.. great grandson of founder, Henry Ford ..

Bill Ford was the visionary behind the resurrection of the train station at 2001 15th Street in an area of Detroit known as Corktown, abandoned since 1988.  The site is seared into the memories of soldiers and their families who went off to war and came home on the those trains. The grand reopening was June 6 and drew tens of thousands of onlookers.

Ford spent $950 million to develop the 30-acre campus, transforming and redeveloping multiple properties in Corktown.  Despite the costly and overwhelming obstacles, Ford said he never could have given up and shut down the effort begun after the company purchased the train station back in 2018.  The difficult restoration work began with millions of gallons of water in the basement.

Bill Ford looked around at the historic waiting room of Michigan Central Station, now called the Grand Hall, a once-crumbling building restored to its 1913 grandeur.  The floor is polished marble, the columns stone.  This is what Ford's mother saw when she took the train to see her sister in New York so many years ago.

The restoration of Michigan Central Station preserved select pieces of graffiti from its decades of vacancy alongside the historic structure.  Ford Motor Company worked with local artists to identify and save significant, high-quality art pieces to honor the building's history which are now on display during public tours.

Graffiti Preservation:  While much of the building was cleaned, specific, notable graffiti art was curated and protected rathr than painted over.

Balancing History:  The project aimed to balance the Beaux-Arts splendor with the "ruin" era, making the graffiti a part of the building's story.

Restoration Effort:  The restoration project took over six years to complete. The station closed in 1988 and stood open to the elements for nearly three decades.  This is why the multimillion-dollar restoration of the 1913 historic depot includes spray-painted images and messages left inside the building when it had no roof, no windows, no heat and no locked doors to keep people from trespassing. 

Ford "wanted to acknowledge the past" so it curated and kept graffiti from the train  station's decades of dereliction. 

Why was the Michigan Central Station abandoned?

During WWII,  the station was used heavily by military troops.  After the war, with a growth in automobile ownership people used trains less frequently for vacation or other travel. Today, under a new partnership involving the State of Michigan, the city of Detroit and the operators of Michigan Central, a new transportation hub could begin operating by 2029.  This would include Amtrak service. 

Michigan Central Station