Sunday, June 24, 2018

FORD BUYS MICHIGAN CENTRAL TRAIN STATION
















            FORD PURCHASES THE MICHIGAN CENTRAL TRAIN STATION


Fords purchase of the Michigan Central Train Station following the purchase of the “Factory” is brilliant. The factory brought in 125 people working on mobility originally and will grow to 220 soon.  Now with the purchase of the Michigan Train Station known as the Mobility Campus we expect great innovations to be brought to life. Hoping that what they do will make life better for people just as Henry Ford originally envisioned when he brought the $5.00 minimum pay to his workers.

Ford states the Campus will be operational by 2022. After that they hope to bring an estimated 2500 workers to the new Ford Campus to work on future transportation, fuels, Artificial Intelligence, battery powered vehicles and even autonomous vehicles will make the Blue Oval even a bigger player in the future of transportation.  The space will house office, retail, and residential housing space.




What ends up inside the station's public spaces depends, in part, on what Corktown and southwest Detroit residents say they want to see inside the long-blighted building. And the same goes for the outside of a building added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

Twenty minutes to Dearborn. The  Rouge,  American Center for Mobility at Willow Run, and the Ann Arbor technology centers are close to both Dearborn and Corktown. This allows for Ford to move from campus to factories and research centers with ease. Employees at Ford are already asking if they can move to the future Mobility Campus.  The surrounding area is enticing all ages to move back to Detroit and experience the revitalization, which Ford will be playing a major role. Look at what they have done with Ford field! Ford is spending a billion to redesign the Dearborn campus and some of those funds will be used in Corktown. Ford feels Dearborn and Corktown will work together with all the other centers.








The company's goal is to establish its Corktown site at the east end of an evolving mobility corridor evoking Michigan Avenue's earlier road to the Arsenal of Democracy.
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The Train Station was a place to visited years past. It was the Ellis Island for Detroit. It is in Corktown that was vibrant and a beautiful town. Being one of the oldest towns Detroit, Wayne County and Corktown are excited and see the future of the area blossoming again thanks in part to the major investments Ford has made and will make in the future.








The amount Ford paid for the Train Station is not known. Bill Ford Jr. could not give a price on renovations. The renovations will turn the Train Station in to a place where people will want to be and visit.  Look at my aerials I took for the previous owners to determine what could be done with the Train Station.







The tower of the train Station is 500,000 approximately. It was known as the tallest rail depot. During its heyday it had 200 trains a day moving people and goods around. From 1884 until 1913, the Michigan Central Railroad ran out of a depot downtown at Third and Jefferson. The railroad’s business was growing, and the company had started an underwater tunnel in southwest Detroit in 1906. It was decided another, much larger depot should be built near the entrance to the tunnel, and Michigan Central began buying up land in the city’s Corktown neighborhood just outside of downtown in the fall of 1908.

By spring 1910, about fifty acres of property for the depot had been acquired with about three hundred small, wooden-frame homes being bought or condemned.  The city paid more than  $680,619.99 ($14.75 million today, when adjusted for inflation) in condemnation proceedings on Aug. 6, 1915, to acquire the land for the depot and the land in front of it for a park. The idea was part of the City Beautiful movement of the time, which called for grand public buildings at the end of dramatic vistas. The park was named Roosevelt Park in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had died in January 1919, and the landscaping was more or less completed the following year. Construction on the station began after permits were obtained May 16, 1910. The steel framework of the building was in place in December 1912.


Michigan Central Railroad was a subsidiary of the New York Central Railroad, which was owned by rail tycoon William Vanderbilt. For the new station and office building — one fitting for the growing city it served — the railroad turned to the architects Warren & Wetmore of New York and Reed & Stem of St. Paul, Minn. The architectural firms had teamed up on the Grand Central Terminal in New York. Charles A. Reed and Allen Stem were known for their designs of railroad stations, while Whitney Warren and Charles D. Wetmore were considered experts in hotel design, which explains the hotel-like appearance of the building’s office tower.

The depot was to be formally dedicated on Jan. 4, 1914, but a fire that started at 2:10 p.m. on Dec. 26, 1913, rendered the old depot unusable and forced MCS to be rushed into service early to avoid a disruption of service. And rushed into service was an understatement: Newspapers reported at the time that within a half hour after officials were certain the old station was doomed, arrangements were made for trains to start using the new one. At 5:20 p.m., the first train left the new station for Saginaw and Bay City, Mich.; an hour later, the first train arrived, having steamed in from Chicago.

The Michigan Central Railroad saw hard times in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and the Detroit Riot’s led to decay of the Corktown community and the Michigan Central Train Station.  Cars were replacing trains and train transportation fell. 400 Plus train stations were sold in North America and train transportation fell continually. Penn and Amtrak went bankrupt their assets were sold. Billionaire Matty Moroun and his company purchased the bankrupt MCS for expansion of their trucking businesses and the operations of the Ambassador Bridge. Offices for commercial clients could fill the structure.  It never was done so the MCS was vacant and vandalized for 15 years.

On Oct. 3, 2003, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s office announced he had selected the building to be renovated into the city’s new police headquarters. The waiting room was to become a public space with a restaurant and police museum, and the building, now nearly 100 years old, was found to be structurally sound. In his State of the City address on Feb. 24, 2004, Kilpatrick challenged Detroiters to “dare mighty things”.   

The Moroun’s have tried everything to develop the “Historic Designated” Michigan Central Train Station. The Morouns offered to the Federal Government the Jewel for Homeland Security offices.

If Michigan Central Station cannot be the centerpiece of the city’s rebirth, it should not stand solely as a testament to its decline.



The Moroun family has spent a lot of money in recent years cleaning the depot up, doing asbestos remediation and adding landscaping and architectural lighting. Seeing it lit up at night is truly a breathtaking sight. It instills hope for both the city, and for saving this architectural marvel.

If the Michigan Central Train Station were to be restored, it would be making a bold statement about the city’s future and preservation of its past. And it’s not like other grand train stations — such as Union Station Kansas City and the Nashville Union Station in Tennessee — have not been resuscitated from abandoned eyesores to gleaming city treasures. But finding the will and the hundreds of millions of dollars such a resurrection would require are formidable challenges in a city with Detroit’s economic and social challenges. Bill Ford Jr., the Ford family and Ford Motor Company are making this dream come true.

Governor Snyder, Mayor Duggan and Wayne County’s Warren Evans gave great speeches at a rally of nearly 5,000 people. Media, TV, cameras every place we looked. The Mayor even recalls when Detroit City Council voted to tear it down! Fortunately they did not have enough money to go forward.




The success Ford did with the Rouge and other buildings show me that they will do nothing but a first class renovation of the Michigan Central Train Station. It is rumored that Ford will keep the train tracks. If so maybe some trains will be coming to MCS?

Bill Ford Jr. stated at the press conference that "Mobility makes freedom and progress possible," challenging the attendees to imagine new ways of the poor and elderly getting groceries and health care, and people without cars getting to work. "Ford wants to be a leader in reimagining cities … that should be the point of technology, to make the world better." Stated just as Henry Ford would have envisioned.

Ford announced that the History channel would present “revival of Detroit” documentary July 1.  The history channels moderator stated the following. “There's an important symbolic value in restoring the station, because of what it represents and has represented in Detroit's history. I think the goal is to make Detroit once again the Silicon Valley of the 21st Century and have the station be the spark that helps make that possible," said Gillon.

BRUCE HUBBARD
BONNIE LYNCH
AUTO ADVISOR GROUP






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