This is a sad story but it is real life as time moves on past the Michigan Central Srarion. Pictures can be seen at this link http://www.battlecreekenquirer...on-s-last-stop-limbo
The massive abandoned and vacant Michigan Central Railroad depot rises above the landscape of southwest Detroit with the Ambassador Bridge at the back left. / J. Kyle Keener/Detroit Free Press
Exactly 100 years ago today, the first train pulled into Detroit’s Michigan Central Station — the tallest train station in the world at the time and a proud, towering symbol of the city’s progress.
When travelers stepped off the train, they entered a building covered in fancy marble and hand-carved wood, soaring ceilings, intricate wrought-iron railings, gargantuan columns and famous Guastavino tile arches.
Now, 25 years after the last train left, the still-standing station may be more recognizable than it was in its heyday. But old age has been brutal and downright cruel. Today, the station’s fame is not of luxury, but of notoriety.
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The station exists in a purgatory-like state as its owner, billionaire Manuel (Matty) Moroun, resists calls to demolish it, but has no immediate plans to reopen it. Moroun has taken steps to prevent any further structural decay in case an opportunity for redevelopment presents itself.
Everyone seems to have an affinity for this place, but not a lot of people know much more than the fact that it’s this giant building and has been in a couple movies,” said Ashton Parsons of the Michigan Central Station Preservation Society. “We’re trying to raise awareness ... to help people understand the building and see where it came from and what it could be again.”
Michigan Central consists of an ornate, three-story depot and an 18-story office tower and stands just south of Michigan Avenue, about a mile west of downtown. The station itselfcost $2.5 million, in 1913 dollars, to build, and was designed by the same architectural firms responsible for New York’s Grand Central Terminal.
The station’s formal opening had been set for Jan. 4, 1914, but a fire at the railroad’s old depot downtown the day after Christmas rushed its replacement into service early. A mere three hours after the blaze began, the first train left the new station for Saginaw and Bay City at 5:20 p.m. Dec. 26, 1913. An hour later, the first train arrived from Chicago.
The station contained its own restaurants, barbershop, newsstand and other amenities, and as many as 200 trains once departed from there each day in the years before interstate highways and commercial air travel. The centerpiece of the building was the waiting room, which with its marble floors and soaring 54½-foot ceilings echoed with the sound of a bustling city on the move.
“To a small child it was a very, very big space, probably the biggest space I’d ever been in,” recalled William Worden, Detroit’s retired director of historic designation, who visited the station as a boy in the 1950s. “Those stations were meant to elicit a reaction. Something a whole lot less expensive would have done the job. But there was a desire to make travel a very special experience that’s probably missing now.”
Vandals and thieves
For 75 years, the depot shipped Detroiters off to war, brought them home, took them on vacation and sent them off to visit Grandma. It was Detroit’s Ellis Island, where many generations of Detroiters first stepped foot into the city for factory jobs. It was filled with the sounds of hellos and goodbyes, panting locomotives and screeching wheeled steel.
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“Having known it in its heyday, it’s pretty depressing to see it now,” Worden said.
That’s because for the last 25 years, it has been home to nothing but vandals, scrappers and thrill-seekers.
The station’s fortunes declined with those of the railroads. The grand waiting room was eventually closed, and the station was taken over by Amtrak in 1971. The grandiose landmark continued to limp along until Jan. 5, 1988, when the last train left the station. Amtrak now operates out of a small depot on Woodward in New Center.
A Downriver real estate investor, Mark Longton Jr., bought the building for an undisclosed sum in 1989 and, with his pistol and German shepherd Whitey, vigilantly guarded the property from trespassers. Longton envisioned filling the cavernous space with a casino, hotel, upscale restaurants and even a nightclub, but lost the property to foreclosure in 1991 — five years before voters approved casino gambling in the city.
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The abandoned station quickly fell prey to vandals and thieves, and its dearest features were yanked out, including the chandeliers, brass fixtures, decorative balcony railings, elevator ornaments and the great clock once mounted over the ticket windows. Urban explorers poured in to venture through the massive interior.
“It was senseless — smashing out windows, smashing marble paneling, that sort of thing,” said Lucas McGrail, a local architect and architectural historian who visited the station many times.
The building lost nearly all of its windows, its copper roofing was stripped and the stone facade was splashed with graffiti and smashed with sledgehammers. Water ate away much of the fine interior plaster work, and until recently, the tunnels between the depot and train platforms were flooded.
“The biggest disappointment is the ticket counter,” Parsons said. “It used to be gorgeous and just as ornate as the exterior. Now it’s toast. A lot of the molding was made of plaster and has all melted away.”
Yet engineers have deemed the station’s underlying structure to be intact.
“It’s really a tough building,” said Garnet Cousins, a metro Detroit architect who has studied the building since the 1970s and starred in a 1987 “Sunday Times” news segment. “The bones, as they say, are still good.”
Grand ideas, little action
The station has been owned by Moroun, a trucking mogul and owner of the Ambassador Bridge, since 1995.
Many ideas have been floated on what to do with the depot, including a 2001 proposal by Moroun to make the station an international trade and customs center and a 2003 plan by then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for the building to become the new Detroit police headquarters.
None of the ideas panned out. The sticking point is always the estimated price for such a massive redevelopment — $100 million to $300 million.
City building inspectors recommended as early as 1994 that the building be leveled. The Detroit City Council passed a resolution in 2009 requesting demolition at Moroun’s expense. Then-Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr. sought federal stimulus dollars for the task, but the plan faced many challenges — including the station’s 1975 listing on the National Register of Historic Places, a designation that makes it harder to use federal money for demolition.
Moroun, whose Detroit International Bridge company declined to comment or provide access to the train station for this report, is said to be open to redeveloping the property if the Detroit real estate market recovers to the point where a renovation project is feasible.
The market currently won’t support the high rents that would be required to recoup the renovation costs. Even in the building’s glory years, there were not enough tenants to completely fill the office tower.
Moroun’s representatives did provide a report showing progress made over the past four years in cleaning up the station, making some repairs and securing it from trespassers. The goal of the spruce-up work is to protect what’s left of the station for the day when redevelopment is possible.
Work crews have removed asbestos from several floors, added landscaping, restored electric service and installed a sump-pump system. The property is surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire and is now under video surveillance.
Five windows were installed in the office tower this year, test samples for the planned installation of more than 1,000 more that is set to begin next year. A new service elevator is in the works.
The station is decorated for the holidays this year with 22 giant snowflake lights fixed to the exterior.
“The station’s still not gone yet,” Cousins said. “It’s like a flame ready to go, but there’s still a few hot coals there that could fire up again.”
