Ford to renovate Detroit station for $950 million

Detroit – Ford Motor City’s latest project It’s the restoration and reopening of an abandoned train station that for decades was a symbol of Detroit’s decline and is now home to a new tech campus for an automaker.

The $950 million project includes the 18-story former train station called Michigan Central Station, which was once the state’s signature transportation building, as well as an adjacent 270,000-square-foot building and other support facilities.

The 30-acre “Michigan Central” campus and station was first announced in 2018 and was expected to open by 2022. But the coronavirus pandemic and the extensive work needed to renovate the station delayed its reopening. On Thursday, Ford celebrated the restoration of the century-old station.

Following Thursday’s event, the station’s first floor will remain open to the public until June 16, after which the first commercial tenants will begin moving in this fall.

The new campus is Ford Investors The company is continuing to restructure its operations as many companies scale back their office space and look to house employees in their current buildings who have become accustomed to working from home during the pandemic.

A contrast is emerging especially in Detroit. In April, Ford’s rival General Motors The company said it would shrink its headquarters from the Renaissance Center, a high-rise building on the city’s riverside, to two stories in a nearby building under construction.

But Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr. said he sees investing in the historic station as a critical part of the automaker’s future, including in attracting and retaining talent.

“We’re in a battle for talent, an industry and a company,” Ford, who is spearheading the project, told CNBC. “And you need to give your talent two things. First, you need to give them really interesting problems to solve. And you need to give them a great place to work. And at Michigan Central, we’ve got both of those.”

Bill Ford spent years in Silicon Valley working for Fontinalis’ venture capital firm. Ebay He has long argued that the traditional auto industry needs to compete with new technology companies both on products and for talent.

Ford said it is “improving” its ability to attract talent to Detroit, but noted it is “challenging” to persuade workers from California and the East Coast to move to Detroit and work for Ford.

“Being able to show them a place like Michigan Central, not just for its beauty, which is amazing in itself, but what goes on there, I think that’s going to be a really valuable resource for the company going forward,” he said.

The Michigan Central campus is located southwest of Detroit’s main business district, in the trendy neighborhood known as Corktown, about 10 miles from Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.

Michigan Central’s campus includes 1.2 million square feet of commercial space, including retail, restaurants and hospitality venues, and the school has received $300 million in state, local and historic restoration tax incentives, officials said.

Ford officials went to great lengths to restore the station to its former glory after decades of vandalism and disrepair. The project involved 3D scanning of rooms, matching materials and referencing historical photographs to recreate parts of the building.

This is especially true on the station’s first floor, where grand rooms feature huge windows, arcades and wide concourses filled with marble and terrazzo floors, Mankato stone and other unique materials.

The architects and designers chose to leave the graffiti on the walls to represent the station’s demise after it closed in 1988.

As one demonstration of Ford’s determination, officials discovered that the facility’s original limestone came from a quarry in Indiana, only to discover that the quarry had already been closed; Michigan Central worked with the owners to reopen the quarry.

“It’s been meticulously and lovingly restored to its original condition, to the extent that it’s possible,” Michigan Central CEO Josh Shirreffman said during a tour of the project. “It’s probably in the cleanest condition it was before we started revitalizing it with all these different things.”

At a time of difficulty for commercial real estate nationwide, about two-thirds of the tower has prospective tenants or planned uses, officials said, including a restaurant and hotel that have not been named as they await rezoning approval.

The adjacent building, known as the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, already employs more than 600 people from about 100 startup companies.

“This is really the beginning of the ecosystem that I want to create,” Bill Ford said, “where a lot of experimentation will happen.”

Ford plans to house at least 2,500 employees in the building, primarily members of the company’s electric vehicle and connected services teams, with about 1,000 of those employees expected to relocate to Station Tower by the end of the year, Ford said.

The building could potentially house local universities, other businesses and restaurants, but officials declined to release a full list of potential tenants. Googlea founding partner of the project, runs a “Code Next” program in the Book Depository building that teaches students how to write code.

Ford said he hopes employees from the future automaker will be able to collaborate with other tenants in the station tower and startups housed in the Book Depository building.

The revival of the train station and surrounding campus is the latest project in the Motor City being undertaken by Bill Ford, great-grandson of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford.

He was instrumental in moving the Ford family-owned Detroit Lions from suburban Pontiac to a new stadium in downtown Detroit called Ford Field in 2002, and was part of the team that brought the Super Bowl to Detroit in 2006.

And amid calls for its closure, the company redeveloped Ford’s River Rouge Assembly Plant into a “green” manufacturing facility that is now a tourist destination and home to the brand’s full-size F-150 pickup truck.

Mr. Ford, who served as CEO of Ford from 2001 to 2006, described the Michigan Central as a continuation of those projects. He called the effort a “legacy project” for himself and those who worked on it.

“I’m very proud of both. [prior projects]”But I think this puts an exclamation point on it because not only is this going to be a great place to work, but it’s also going to be a great place for the public to visit,” Ford said.