DETROIT — The top three floors of Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Central Station will be dedicated to a luxury hotel and restaurants when a massive five-year renovation project is complete by mid-2023.
The sprawling 100,000 square feet on the ground floor of the one-time cross-continental gateway to Detroit will be a combination of public gathering space, a coffee shop, food court and events space large enough to seat 1,000 people.
In between, there will be 10 floors of office space in the train station tower for employees of Ford and its partners in the mobility and autonomous vehicle sector — and possibly other automakers.
The vision Ford company leaders had in 2018 when it bought the shell of a building that was long thought to be a bullseye for a wrecking ball is starting to come together.
During a media tour Tuesday of the old depot, Ford’s construction managers showed off the progress hundreds of skilled trades workers have been making in the more than three years since the automaker paid the Moroun family $90 million for the hulking train station and adjacent properties in Corktown.
The train station, shuttered in 1988, was the symbol of Detroit’s late 20th century decline. Like many of the city’s abandoned buildings, the old depot had been stripped bare of its precious metals.
Rain, ice, sleet and snow deteriorated the plaster and terracotta tile over time — parts of the original building that are slowly being restored with painstaking detail, said Rich Bardelli, Ford’s construction manager for the Michigan Central Station project.
