Michigan Central Station
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Designed by the renowned architects that also designed the Grand Central Station in New York City, Michigan Central Station opened Dec. 26, 1913. Its final price tag was $2.5 million ($54.2 million today, when adjusted for inflation).
The station was to be formally dedicated Jan. 4, 1914, but a fire that destroyed the previous station, the Michigan Central Railroad Depot on Third Street and Jefferson Avenue, forced MCS into service early to avoid a disruption of service. Because of this, the dedication was canceled.
It consisted of a three-story train station and an 18-story office tower. The building contains 7,000 tons of structural steel, 125,000 cubic feet of stone and 7 million bricks.
As one would enter off Roosevelt Park, they would walk into the building's centerpiece, the main waiting room. The 54.5-foot tall waiting room was modeled after a Roman bath and stretches the length of the building. It is decorated with Guastavino arches, columns, and three arched 21-by-40 feet windows flanked by four smaller windows.
Beyond the waiting room, you could buy your ticket from one of the many ornate ticket counters, or walk down the 28-foot-tall arcade to visit a newsstand, drugstore, cigar shop, or barbershop.
In addition to the arcade and waiting room, the station featured a restaurant with vaulted ceilings, a main concourse with copper skylights, and a lunch counter.
Passengers arrived at the main waiting room, the street car terminal at the east side of the building, or the carriage entrance at the west end of the building. The only parking the building contained was an underground parking garage, which was not a problem since most people took a streetcar. But by 1938, the streetcars were gone, and the MCS seemed to be isolated from the central business district. The location of the station was chosen because owners thought downtown would expand toward Corktown, but the city sprawled northward instead.
The station was seeing a daily rush of people, but automobiles soon phased out trains to Chicago. The MCS was being used less and less because it was do dependent on passenger travel. In an attempt to modernize the station, the restaurant had its vaulted ceilings covered with a drop ceiling and was renamed the Mercury Room.
Since the MCS was being used less often, an attempt to sell the station for $5 million in 1956 failed, as did another attempt in 1963. A decision was made in 1967 to close the main waiting room entrance. Soon after, the restaurant and the businesses in the arcade closed. The station was hanging on by a thread at that point.
The building seemed to have a temporary revival when Amtrak took over passenger travel in 1971. In 1975, the main waiting room entrance was reopened and three years later, a $1.25-million renovation began that replaced track, cleaned the building and added a bus terminal. Known at the time as Penn Central Station, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 16, 1975.
The building was sold in 1984 to create a transportation center that never materialized. Passenger travel by train had declined to a point where it was simply not feasible to continue working out of a building the MCS' size. On Jan. 5, 1988, the last train departed and the doors closed.
Throughout the 1990s, the building remained wide open to trespass, and during that time, vandals stole items of value, such as brass fixtures, plaster and copper wiring. In the late 1990s, the building owner erected a razor wire fence and proposed an international trade processing center that never materialized.
City building inspectors have recommended that it be demolished since at least 1994, but such threats stopped in 2001 after its owner said it would be restored, planning to turn it into an international trade and customs center. That, of course, never happened. MCS' owner - Matty Maroun, who also owns the Ambassador Bridge - has said until there is a tenant and a deal lined up to develop the property, he will not spend any significant money on preserving it or cleaning the landmark up. For that reason, this once majestic landmark sits as a monument to Detroit's decline and decay.
In 2004, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick announced plans to renovate the building as Detroit's police headquarters, but that plan was called off the following year.
In January 2005, the station was used as a cameo in a futuristic movie titled "The Island." Its director, Michael Bay, also gave MCS a starring role in the climatic final battle of his movie "Transformers."
A video look at the Michigan Central Station:
