Michigan Central Station reopens after thirty-six years

The last Amtrak train pulled out of Michigan Central Station in early January 1988, bound for Chicago. Thirty-six years later the doors are open again, and on June 6 Ford Motor Company began a ten-day public celebration to mark the return of one of Detroit's most recognizable buildings.

Ford put the restoration at more than $900 million across the train station and its surrounding 30-acre campus in Corktown. The work ran about six years, beginning in late 2018 after Ford bought the long-abandoned Beaux-Arts depot from the Moroun family for $90 million, a figure later confirmed in Detroit property records and reported by Crain's Detroit Business.

The reopening is built around a ten-day program called Michigan Central OPEN, running June 6 through 16. It starts with a free outdoor concert series on the lawn of Newlab, the tech hub in the former Book Depository next door, and continues with ticketed tours of the restored ground floor. Michigan Central said it expected more than 60,000 people to take part across the run.

Inside, visitors get their first look in decades at the restored Grand Hall, the ticket lobby and the concourse. The numbers behind that work are large. Per Michigan Central, the ceiling alone holds about 29,000 Guastavino tiles, all but roughly 1,300 of them original, set with the equivalent of 8.7 miles of grout. Crews pumped about 3.5 million gallons of water out of the basement and logged more than 1.7 million hours on the building.

Some of the damage was kept on purpose. Sections of marble gouged and tagged during the abandoned years were preserved rather than erased, a deliberate nod to the decades the station spent as a ruin.

The replacement stone carries its own story. To match the original exterior, Ford reopened a long-shuttered Indiana limestone quarry and pulled more than 600 tons from it, returning to the same source that supplied the building a century ago.

The station opened in 1913, designed by Warren and Wetmore and Reed and Stem, the firms behind Grand Central Terminal in New York. It was briefly the tallest railroad station in the world, and in its busiest years in the 1940s, more than 4,000 passengers a day moved through it.

Bill Ford, the company's executive chair, framed the project as a civic one. "Michigan Central means a great deal to us all," he said in the company's announcement. "In many ways, this building tells the story of our city."

The campus now anchors a working district rather than a museum. Newlab houses close to 100 companies, Ford plans to seat about 1,000 of its own employees there by the end of 2024 and roughly 2,500 by 2028, and a NoMad hotel is slated for the upper floors of the tower. The first floor is opening to the public, with restaurant and retail tenants moving in over the year.

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