In Trains News Wire, Kevin P. Keefe rounds up the news from last week about the purchase of Detroit’s imposing former Michigan Central Station:
The abandoned Michigan Central Train Station, as seen from Roosevelt Park in Detroit.
Photo by Albert Duce, via Wikimedia Commons
The news this week that the Ford Motor Co. has purchased Detroit’s crumbling but historic Michigan Central Station indicates a happy ending for one of America’s most notoriously neglected big-city train stations.
Ford purchased the building from the Manuel Moroun family, billionaire owners of a trucking and logistics empire, which includes the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit with Windsor, Canada. A purchase price for the station has not been disclosed.
A Ford spokesman said the company would announce detailed plans for the site at a June 19 press conference and open house. It is presumed the project will include renovation of the passenger terminal and its 18-story office building. At a press conference Monday, Matthew Moroun, heir to the Moroun fortune, said Ford’s “blue oval will adorn the building.”
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In Michigan Central Station, Ford is acquiring one of railroading’s great architectural monuments. Two firms designed the 1913 station: St. Paul, Minn.-based Reed & Stem, of New York’s Grand Central Terminal fame; and New York-based Warren & Wetmore, known for such hotels as the Biltmore and Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan.
When the station opened, the Michigan Central was already a subsidiary of the New York Central, but a proud and independent one. With its 19th century roots in Boston’s financial aristocracy, the Michigan Central wanted to build monuments of its own. In a sprawling two-part series in the August and September 1978 issues of Trains Magazine, authors Garnet R. Cousins and Paul Maximuke called it “the proud symbol of a mighty railroad.”
The station was also unusual by virtue of its connection to the Detroit River Tunnel Co., which carried the Michigan Central main line beneath the Detroit River just a mile east of the station, linking the railroad with its Canada Southern affiliate. The tunnel opened in October 1910. The long grade necessary for the tunnel necessitated Michigan Central Station’s location more than a mile west of downtown Detroit at the corner of Vernor Highway and Michigan Avenue.
In its heyday, Michigan Central Station was as vital as any in the Midwest. In 1929, the station saw more than 90 arrivals and departures each day. Ultimately the depot could boast a number of famous NYC trains, including the Mercury, Wolverine, and, at the top, the daily Twilight Limited, originally an all-Pullman parlor-car train to Chicago. The station thrived through the postwar streamliner era.
