To restore Michigan Central Station, Ford and its crews reopened a closed Indiana limestone quarry to supply stone like the original, according to NBC News. They also 3D-scanned the rooms and left some graffiti on the walls to reflect the building’s years sitting empty.
The station opened on Dec. 26, 1913, earlier than planned, after a fire made the old depot at Third and Jefferson avenues unusable, per ClickOnDetroit. It closed in 1988 and sat empty for about three decades while vandals, scrappers and the weather did their work.
The Moroun family bought the building in 1995 with restoration plans that never materialized, according to The Detroit News. Vandals destroyed the windows, adding to the deterioration of a building that trespassers and squatters were also damaging. In 2009, the city ordered the family to demolish the heavily deteriorated building, per Michigan Public and Wayne State University researchers. The family refused, then replaced the windows, drained a flooded basement level and secured the building.
Ford bought the station from the Moroun family on May 22, 2018, for $90 million, according to public records reported by The Detroit News and Crain’s Detroit Business. That works out to about $150 a square foot for a building of roughly 600,000 square feet.
Ford said it wanted the station and nearby buildings to anchor a 1.2 million-square-foot Corktown campus for its work on autonomous and electric vehicles and urban mobility, according to its June 19, 2018, announcement. “What Rouge was to Ford in the industrial age, Corktown can be for Ford in the information age,” CEO Jim Hackett said in the release.
Executive Chairman Bill Ford cited “our need to integrate into the city streets and services for testing and learning,” per Fortune, which also reported that the Ford family’s roots are in Corktown and that the company wanted urban space to attract engineering talent. When the station reopened in 2024, Bill Ford put it more bluntly. “We’re in a war for talent, our industry and our company,” he said, per NBC News.
The restoration took about six years, and the station reopened to the public in June 2024, according to Crain’s. The price tag grew along the way. When work began in 2018, Ford planned to spend $740 million on the wider Corktown campus, including about $350 million on the station itself, Crain’s reported at the time.
By the reopening, multiple outlets put the total at $950 million. That figure covers the whole Michigan Central campus, which includes the station, an adjacent 270,000-square-foot former book depository and supporting facilities on 30 acres, per NBC News. It is not clear whether it includes the $90 million purchase price. Ford has not disclosed what it spent on the station alone, Crain’s reported, though building permits list construction costs of at least $217 million. Public money helped. REBusiness Online, citing CNBC, reported $300 million in state, local and historic rehabilitation tax incentives.
“It has been painstakingly and lovingly restored to, wherever possible, to its original condition,” Josh Sirefman, CEO of Michigan Central, said, per NBC News.
Ford’s price tag stood out in a region where big buildings have sometimes sold for far less. In 2009, Pontiac’s Silverdome stadium sold at auction for $583,000.