“We will probably be judged not for the monuments we build, but by those which we’ve destroyed.”

Ada Louise Huxtable
Architecture Critic
(on the demolition of Penn Station)

It must have been quite a sight emerging from the clattering darkness of the rail tunnel.  Before your eyes could readjust to the light of day the train started to slow to a crawl, preparing to stop.  The train’s large wheels cutting a ribbon across a cold steel track, finally stopping until the hiss of the breaks told you it was time to leave.

In front of you a labyrinth of train sheds in a cauldron of people going to different points all over the continent.  Some soldiers shipping off to basic for the first time trying to shake off tearful goodbyes.  On other parts of the platform you see a family with several suitcases, the father checking his watch impatiently.

You file past this crowd and find yourself in another tunnel, this one lined with white tiles, newsstands and souvenir shops.  Your footsteps echo against the tiled walls and the hundred conversations you walk through seem to be louder than normal.  Before your ears start to ring you emerge into Valhalla.

Marble, steel and leaded windows take your breath away.  The ceiling stares down at you from an impossible height.  Nothing in your Midwestern world could ever prepare you for a sight like this.  The columns that help hold up the ceiling look as large as California redwoods.  The three immense vaulted windows above the front entrances give you the feel that you are in a Gothic cathedral. 

To your left people go though the entrance originally built for carriages but now serves as an opulent taxi cab stand.  To your right people enter from the streetcar entrance in their trench coats and fedoras, a crisp copy of the Free Press under their arm.  On a far wall people cue up from the entrances to the ticket windows to claim their admission onto the same Pullman you just left, back there in the forest of steam and conversations.

The same architects who designed New York’s Grand Central Station designed Michigan Central Station.  Grandeur was something sought after in 1913 and no expense was spared in its construction.  The station came complete with a barber shop and two first class restaurants.  To the dismay of the people who remember this station in its heyday, it fell a mere 74 years after it was born, a victim of automobiles, poor location and broken promises.

At one time, coming into Detroit by rail was an event.  You emerged from the dark confines of your Pullman to find yourself in a beautiful gateway to the fourth largest city in North America.  Sadly, the cracks began to show almost immediately. 

The designers did not plan for the emergence of the automobile as the preferred mode of transportation.  These designers were from New York, where mass transit was already fully ingrained in the lives of every New Yorker, and no rich man’s toy such as the automobile would encroach on their station.  Therefore they duly provided a dedicated entrance just for streetcars, where most of the customers were supposed to come from. 

Detroit was slowly beginning its metamorphosis into the “Motor City” and just twenty five years after the station opened its streetcar entrance was made obsolete.  The designers also didn’t plan for parking space as well, so the old streetcar entrance served as a sort of makeshift parking lot, cheapening the appearance of this landmark by sheer necessity. 

The station was located too far away from downtown Detroit, at that time a booming metropolis of one million people, so as a result, the station only became used when absolutely necessary.  It was helped along by World War II by all the young men leaving, some for the last time.  The plan was to have downtown Detroit come to the station, with business development creeping up Michigan Avenue that never happened.  Having to navigate through Corktown, a rough Irish neighbourhood was enough to deter a great many customers and business development. 

Then, on a hot Sunday afternoon in 1967 on Twelfth Street outside of a blind pig the world came to a shattering, burning halt for four hellish days.  The riots did more than burn down buildings and cause martial law on American streets; it killed the spirit of old Detroit, a Detroit of luxury hotels, massive car factories and even grander train stations.  The city has truly never been the same.  No one really felt safe after seeing their own army in the streets.

The city finally put the fires out, finally learned how to live again but the station was rarely used anymore.  A decade earlier, cross country jet voyages made many train stations underused and forgotten.  Taking the train was no longer a daily necessity, it was a sort of novelty, and gigantic places cannot survive on novelty alone.  By the 1970s and early 80s, the station was falling into disrepair, the victim of sheer neglect.

By 1987 the end was close at hand.  Amtrak bought the station a few years earlier and tried to restore the place a bit, but it was far too little and much too late as the last train pulled away in January of 1988.  A succession of owners held the property for a while, even keeping the heat, water and electricity running for the security guards and off duty Detroit police officers who patrolled the place for extra pocket money.

After repeatedly getting stiffed by the developers who owned the building, the DPD finally put a lien on the property and the Maroun family bought it, locked the doors and walked away, leaving the building to its fate of being cannibalized by the poachers and vagrants that couldn’t wait for this place to go unchecked.

Now coming up close to the building you feel a different feeling.  You feel sad, uneasy and you feel like you are being watched even though not a soul lingers near you.  The building is largely a shell of its former self, completely covered in areas by scribbles of graffiti and shards of glass.  A large chain link fence and razor wire greet you at the front entrance where thousands of people a day streamed through on their way to their lives.  Around this old station now it seems to be cloudy all the time, even on warm sunny summer days. 

The Michigan Central Station means many things to me.  It shows me what neglect can do to a city.  It shows me what a lack of foresight and a lack of thinking laterally can do to a building.  It was like putting St. Peter’s Basilica in the middle of the Gobi Desert and expecting Rome to sprout up around it. 

I think it was much more than poor planning, poor economics, riots, the car, the airplane and lack of foresight that killed this behemoth.  Another poison in the cocktail was lack of education.  Too often we neglect to teach our children about local history and local landmarks and their importance to our cities.  An entire generation of people have grown up not knowing about what I am talking about, and that there ever was a “Michigan Central Station” and that it was truly a masterpiece of architecture.  We get generation after generation of people who look the other way and who don’t care when the souls of their cities are robbed from them and allowed to die a slow and pathetic death. 

Recently ideas have been floated around to save the old place.  Police Headquarters, a casino, Homeland Security Headquarters, and many other schemes have been suggested and shot down due to budget constraints.  It would cost at least 80 million dollars in a cash strapped city to restore this building even nominally.  Demolishing the station is out of the question, due to the sheer cost.  What do we do with our ruins?

Tags: culture, local economic development, public service, Urban Design, wasted resources