Growing up in southwest Detroit, Christian Rubio never really took much interest in the abandoned train station that loomed over his neighborhood, a few miles west of downtown. The building was one of the most visible symbols of the city’s decline, and a go-to for photographers looking to document it.
Rubio’s interest was piqued after he was in high school and saw the 2009 music video “Beautiful,” which showed local rapper Eminem walking through a dilapidated Beaux Arts building with vaulted ceilings, tall columns, broken windows, rainbow graffiti and broken fixtures.
Ever since, “abandoned or not, I’ve wanted to go in,” said Mr. Rubio, 29, a Mexican restaurant manager who moved to southwest Detroit from the central-western Mexican state of Jalisco 20 years ago. “Now I have a chance to make it happen.”
Ford Motor Co. purchased Michigan Central Station from the wealthy Moroun family for $90 million in 2018 and has since spent hundreds of millions of dollars restoring it to its original beauty. Ford’s plan is to create a hub for collaboration and innovation with employees, independent startups, and companies working on mobility and transportation issues. Additionally, the company wants to turn the station into a community gathering place with retail, restaurants, event space, a hotel, and future Amtrak service nearby.
Rubio will celebrate the official reopening on June 6 with an outdoor concert attended by 15,000 people and featuring Eminem and others.
Completed in 1913, the station served more than 4,000 passengers daily at its peak in the 1940s. It closed in 1988, eventually becoming a magnet for scavengers, vandals, graffiti artists, urban explorers and the homeless.
Ford Motor Co. Chairman William Ford now runs the company his great-grandfather founded in 1903. “Our industry is about to undergo fundamental change, and that change has to be created here,” Ford said. “That seemed to me the perfect purpose for Michigan Central Station.”
He added: “We want Detroit to once again be a place where the future is being invented, and to maintain its status as the Motor City for generations to come.”
In all, Ford is investing nearly $1 billion to build a 30-acre campus that will eventually employ thousands of people, with the station at the center of it all, along with other company-owned buildings, including the New Lab, a former book depository next door that opened last year and is now home to 97 startups and about 600 employees.
The company hopes the station’s location in a vibrant urban environment will attract top talent at a challenging time for the fiercely competitive auto industry as it seeks a future with self-driving, electric and hybrid vehicles. The company expects most of the campus to be operational within three to five years, with the first tenants to move into the station in June, with some Ford employees to move in this fall.
But amid excitement over the renovations, openings and opportunities for businesses and investors, longtime residents like Rubio worry about how it will affect the surrounding area.
“A lot of people are worried about gentrification,” he said, especially as property values, taxes and rents have risen since Ford bought the station, and outsiders are looking to buy property. Some residents have complained they’ve received multiple offers from real estate agents and investors to buy their homes, and at least one person near St. Ann Street has put up a “Not for Sale” sign on his property.
The station is in Corktown, an old but now trendy neighborhood on the border with Mexicantown, a working-class neighborhood also known as Southwest.
Corktown was once home to Tiger Stadium and numerous Irish pubs, but in recent years has become a hotbed of new restaurants and bars, maintains traditions such as the St. Patrick’s Day parade, is home to the Detroit Gaelic League, an Irish-American social club, and has added new, modern apartment buildings to its housing stock, which was primarily older single-family and duplex homes.
Mexicantown, just behind the station, is a largely Latino neighborhood with ethnic restaurants, tortilla factories, taco and burrito stands, bakeries, murals, and an annual Cinco de Mayo parade. Over time, people of different ethnicities and races have moved into the community, making it a more diverse demographic.
Susana Villarreal Garza, 63, second-generation owner of TamalerÃa Nuevo Leon, a tamale shop located just around the corner from the station, echoed restaurant manager Rubio’s sentiments.
“My concern is that the people who live here, who have lived here for 30, 40, 50 years, are going to be pushed out because they can’t afford the tax increases,” Villarreal-Garza said. After Ford bought the station, “the first two weeks, I got call after call from real estate agents,” she said, all interested in putting her house on the market.
She also got calls from people as far away as Florida and New Jersey interested in buying her restaurant. “They came knocking at least seven times a week,” she said. One offered $800,000.
“I said, ‘No,’ and they asked, ‘What is the price?’ I said, ‘There is no price. It’s not for sale.'”
A real estate agent told her that her house, valued at about $35,000 a decade ago, could sell for $300,000.
Robert Warfield, 75, who has lived in a townhouse near the station since 2005, sees it differently. He welcomes Ford’s renovation and the resulting increase in property values. He says the station’s deterioration is holding down home prices.
“It was very dilapidated and depressing,” said Warfield, the Bing Youth Institute’s chief operating officer. “It was like an elephant in the room. It was a monster sitting in the middle of the community that had no value.”
Warfield doesn’t foresee a mass exodus of residents selling at the inflated prices: “These residents have roots in the neighborhood,” he said, “and I think they appreciate the fact that the neighborhood is now being recognized for its value.”
Richard Gonzalez, 53, a truck mechanic who grew up in Mexicantown and put up the “Not for Sale” sign, also welcomes the changes, including the new residents who have moved in since Ford’s announcement. “It’s great,” Gonzalez said. “They’re trying to take care of their property, and I like that.”
Joshua Shirreffman, CEO of Michigan Central, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford, said the company is sensitive to the needs of the local community and regularly speaks and works with residents and organizations, saying, “We’re very conscious of the need that our growth needs to foster growth for everyone.”
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan acknowledged that the change “generally makes people uneasy,” but added, “I think most people would consider the fact that property values ​​are going up a good problem to have.”
He continued: “No part of the city has seen real estate values ​​soar more rapidly over the past decade than Southwest Detroit. Home prices have tripled, creating enormous wealth for its residents. To me, this is the best way to prevent a neighborhood from changing.”
Duggan said renters aren’t so lucky, with rents in some parts of the area skyrocketing.
He said the city has received a $30 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to build 550 units of affordable rental housing in the area, and other projects to build affordable housing are in the works.
Bob Roberts, owner of McShanes Irish Pub and president of the Corktown Business Association, said he’s spoken to more than a half-dozen customers who moved out of Corktown in the past two years because of rising rents. And while he welcomes the station’s renovations, he said his own rent has increased 30 percent this year. He worries rents will continue to rise.
Other developments have followed since Ford’s announcement: Boutique hotels and luxury apartments have risen in the neighborhood, and in May, the city’s semi-pro soccer team, Detroit City FC, announced it would move its current home base in Hamtramck and build a stadium in Corktown.
For Ford, the radio station is a proud achievement and will likely become part of his family’s legacy in Detroit.
“I remember coming to this station as a young man and thinking it was the most amazing building I’d ever seen. Over time, it became a symbol of Detroit’s decline,” he said. “Every day I would drive by this station, I’d have these ‘what if’ conversations with myself and think, ‘What if we could find a way to bring this station back to life in the right way?’
