Ford restores Detroit train station for $950 million

DETROIT – ford latest Motor City project is the restoration and reopening of an abandoned train station, for decades a symbol of Detroit's decline and now the automaker's new technology campus.

The $950 million project encompasses the 18-story former train station called Michigan Central Station, once the state's largest transit building, an adjacent 270,000-square-foot building and other support facilities.

The 30-acre “Michigan Central” campus and station were initially announced in 2018 and planned to open in 2022. However, the coronavirus pandemic and the extensive work needed to renovate the station delayed its reopening. Ford celebrates the restoration of the century-old train station on Thursday.

Following Thursday's event, the ground floor of the train station building will be open to the public until June 16, before the first commercial occupants begin moving in this fall.

The new campus comes at a precarious time for ford inverters as the company continues to restructure its business. It also comes as many companies try to reduce office space and fill their current buildings with employees who have become accustomed to working from home during the pandemic.

In Detroit specifically, a stark juxtaposition has emerged: In April, Ford's crosstown rival General Motors announced that it would shrink its towering Renaissance Center headquarters along the city's riverfront to two stories in a nearby building that is under construction.

However, Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr. said he believes the investment made in the historic train station is a crucial part of the automaker's future, including in aspects of talent acquisition and retention.

“We are in a war for talent, our industry and our company,” Ford, who spearheaded the project, told CNBC. “And you have to give talent two things: You have to give them, first, really interesting problems to solve, and then you have to give them a great place to work. With Michigan Central, we checked both boxes.”

Bill Ford decided to purchase the dilapidated building after years of trips to Silicon Valley for his venture capital firm Fontinalis and during his tenure as a member of the eBay Board of Directors. He has long spoken openly about the need for the traditional auto industry to compete with newer technology companies, both in acquiring products and talent.

Ford said attracting top talent to Detroit is “improving,” but noted that “it's a tall order” to convince workers from California or the East Coast to move to Detroit and work for Ford.

“If you can show them a place like Central Michigan, not only because of its beauty, which alone is incredible, but also talk about the types of things that will happen there, then I think it becomes a really valuable resource for the company in the future,” he said.

Central Michigan's campus is located southwest of Detroit's main business district, in a trendy neighborhood known as Corktown. It's about 10 miles from Ford's world headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.

The Central Michigan campus in total encompasses 1.2 million square feet of commercial space, including retail, restaurants and hospitality. According to officials, it was awarded $300 million in state, local and historic rehabilitation tax incentives.

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

This was especially true on the train station's first floor, where a great room features huge windows, a gallery, and a grand lobby filled with marble and terrazzo floors, Mankato stone, and other unique materials.

The architects and designers chose to leave some graffiti on the walls to represent the years of inactivity of the station after its closure in 1988.

As a measure of Ford's determination, officials traced the facility's original limestone to a quarry in Indiana only to discover that it had already closed. Michigan Central worked with the owners to reopen the quarry.

“It has been lovingly and painstakingly restored, wherever possible, to its original condition,” Josh Sirefman, executive director of Michigan Central, said during a tour of the project. “Before we start activating it with a lot of things, it's probably in its most pristine condition.”

Amid nationwide commercial real estate challenges, about two-thirds of the tower have tenants scheduled or use cases planned, officials said. That includes an unnamed restaurant and hotel, pending rezoning approval.

The adjacent building, known as the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, already houses more than 600 employees from nearly 100 startups.

“It's really the beginning of the ecosystem I want to create,” Bill Ford said. “There will be a lot of experimentation down there.”

Ford plans to house at least 2,500 employees in the building, primarily members of the company's electric vehicle and connected services teams. About 1,000 of those employees are expected to move into the station tower later this year, Ford said.

Other occupants of the building could include local universities, other businesses and a restaurant. However, officials declined to release a full list of expected tenants. Googlefounding partner of the project, runs its “Code Next” program, which teaches students to code, from the Book Depository building.

Ford said he hopes the automaker's future employees will be able to collaborate with other occupants of the station tower, as well as new companies occupying the Book Depository building.

Resurrecting the train station and surrounding campus is the latest project that Bill Ford, great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford, has undertaken in the Motor City.

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

And he rebuilt the company's River Rouge assembly plant into a “green” production facility amid calls to close it. It is now a tourist destination for the production of the Ford F-150 full-size pickup truck.

Ford, who was CEO of the automaker from 2001 to 2006, described Central Michigan as a continuation of such projects. He called the effort a “legacy project” for him and those who have been able to work on it.

“I am very proud of both of them [prior projects]but I think this will put an exclamation point on it because it will be a wonderful place to work but it will also be a wonderful place for the public to come,” Ford said.