Walking through the restored Michigan Central station in Detroit

all right let's take a walk around ground floor of the newly restored Michigan Central Station uh Ford bought this building in 2017 and has been working ever since to bring this back from a derel hall of a building uh that had sat vacant for 36 years uh and it really deteriorated badly uh but now it's back it's going to be opening up soon uh we going to start here with the East entrance so I can get back in So coming in off the east entrance which is where most of the people used to come in through here apparently in the the Heyday at the station about 4,000 people a day would come through this entrance and this is the elevator Lobby going up to the tower and the historic arcade where eventually there will be some various types of shops and events retail spaces uh maybe some dining let's take a walk through here you go down this hallway you come up to the ticket Windows which of course is where people would come in to get their tickets for the trains the clock up above the ticket Windows had to be completely reconstructed uh from archival images they had some bits and pieces of it but most of it was gone uh so they built a new clock based on all the research there were hundreds of researchers that worked on this building worked on parts of this building over the course of the last s years about 3,100 construction workers plus several hundred more people doing various other work these were the ticket windows and you can see the the massive columns in here and one of the one of the challenges with this building of course was that you know mo all the windows were gone much of the roof was gone and there was a lot of water there was about 3 and a half million gallons of water inside this building took about 18 months to pump it all out of the building and with that water coming in over the course of three and a half decades it caused a fair bit of erosion on some of the things like these these columns you can see the pits they left the pits on many of these panels of the columns to show the history of this building and what happened to it over the the course of the last 36 or four last four decades or so and as we continue on through here we come into the grand hall and this was the main waiting area where passengers would come in and wait wait for their trains and like many other classic train stations this is a massive space and again a lot of restoration work that had to happen in here the uh the large ceramic panels up there up above the windows those had most of those had to be recreated they were the what was left of The Originals was scanned and then recreated and the the floors these rectangular areas on the floors they've got the rose marble tile but then you have these rectangular areas in here that's where the benches were so if you you ever been someplace like Chicago's Union Station the central Hall the Great Hall there you'll find you know for a waiting area of a typical train station lots of benches and this is where the where the people sat as they were waiting for the trains and they did a lot of preservation work on these tile floors and these massive windows in the front here of the the Great Hall um originally these rosettes the framework around the windows were cast iron well most of them most of the originals were gone they were they had been removed over the decades that this building was vacant uh but they managed to recover some uh they managed to recover samples of each of the the various styles of the rosettes that were here and they scanned them they laser scann them and then working with uh with Ford manufacturing they recreated 29 different patterns of rosettes around these windows 3D printing them based on the scans of The Originals that they were able to recover and originally this building was not heated or well it didn't have cooling didn't have air conditioning and so in order to keep this this room uh you know at a reasonable temperature in the summertime in the hot hot weather months there was actually a mechanism inside between the panes of the window it could be used to open up these windows well that mechanism no longer works but they they cleaned it up restored it it's it's still there for historical reasons but the building is now air conditioned so they don't need to open these windows anymore so all these light fixtures in the Great Hall here were of course gone after three and a half Decades of being vacant they had all been removed uh but they were again using the original plans the or and archival photographs uh of the place they they were able to recreate these uh so they're in the same style as the originals but of course you know as a mo you know making modernizing the building they these are all LED lights now instead of the incandescent Lights of the originals but they're in the they look just like the originals and the tile the the tiles in the ceiling in the AR the arch ceiling those tiles there's 29,000 of these tiles in the ceiling of this great hall and they most of them actually remained they they survived and were able to recover most of them but they had to after you know after they fixed it all up they had to regrout it there's about 8 miles of grout around all of these tiles and then at either end of the main grand hall there's another waiting room as well over on this side is the women's waiting room uh and then on the the opposite side is the men's waiting room so uh for those that were traveling alone uh they could wait in in those rooms if they weren't traveling with a whole family or group uh so let's take a go over here and take a look at the men's waiting room and continue on our little tour of the the ground floor of Michigan Central Terminal it's magnificent old building this building opened in 1913 closed in 1988 and then sat vacant until 2017 when Ford acquired it and they have spent all in on this building the neighboring uh Book Depository building uh and some other stuff around here the parks and everything about $945 million this is the men's waiting room this was the men's waiting room area these these rooms will all be used as event spaces and public spaces the uh the capitals on top of these columns here were gone by 2017 uh but again the the researchers managed to find somebody who had an example of one of these Rams Head capitals and they it was brought in they scanned it and they 3D printed new ones to replace the originals then of course there's all new wood here Walnut and the the wood floor this beautiful wood floor and the the rose marble and this is what this room looked like when they first moved in and started uh started work on it all the rosettes in the ceiling almost all the rosettes were gone as well by 2017 but those are all back here now again the ones that they were able to recover examples they were able to find they scanned those and they 3D printed new ones and put them in there the wonderful thing about this is the huge Windows lots of lots of daylight coming in which is fantastic when I first saw the this building in the mid 1980s when I was I I grew up in Canada and I went to school in Flint Michigan I went to GMI now ketering University this is the uh the service hallway here the dumb waiters were here in this wall uh but I I used to regularly come over the Ambassador Bridge uh from Windsor to Detroit and this building is you know quite visible as you're coming over the bridge this is really the first thing that you people would see of Detroit and for decades this building was like a almost like a bombed out Hall uh there were no windows the 15-story tower up above that's not open to us yet we're just going through the ground floor right now but um you know seeing this this building decaying for decades was really sad but you know now seeing what what Ford has done to bring this building back to life I think is really it's a fantastic symbol of you know Detroit the city of Detroit starting to come back to life and out here on the side on the end of the building is what was the Carriage House so most people entered the uh the station through the uh East entrance where we came in uh which is where the the trolley station was uh but but over on this side was the carriage house where you know maybe the little more affluent or people who are arriving by carriage or later by car would come in and get dropped off here and come through the entrance on this side this room here was the the restaurant the historic restaurant and they're still working out exactly what they're going to do here this may eventually become a restaurant again uh and uh you a lot of work you know still still work to be done here and still no floor tiles in here yet but they've restored the walls and the ceiling and it's pretty pretty phenomenal what they've done here and then coming through this doorway here back into the the ticketing area so this was the ticket room so the ticket windows that we saw earlier are this is coming in from the back side of that so when passengers would come in they would come up to these windows here and byy their train tickets and then they would go over and wait in the grand hall or in one the men's or women's waiting room and then over here is the South Concourse another remarkable space and this is they they're considering this kind of the The Hub of the station and where a lot of people come into again this is going to be a public space and uh um because you know again you know this it's such a large space in the old days this was not you know air conditioned uh but because of the the volume of the space the very high ceiling uh there was a lot of damage done in here because all the glass in the atrium here was gone for decades so there was a lot of water damage here uh and um they when they rebuilt the floor in here and stabilized everything they actually install a cooling system under the floor so it's going this room is going to be cooled From Below which is kind of interesting and so from this Concourse here passengers that were coming into the building and going to their train would come through this Concourse and they would go through one of these entrances here and then walk down the ramp and go through the tunnel over here underneath the train tracks and come up on the platform on the the south side of the building on the back side of the building uh to catch the trains and arriving passengers coming into Detroit for the first time would come through that tunnel and come up here come into this Concourse this amazing Concourse it would be kind of their first their first steps into Detroit we done such a wonderful job of restoring this and preserving as much as they could if the original building were possible recreating what couldn't be preserved and at the same time also modernizing the building and bringing it up to code you know over the course of those Decades of vacancy uh you scavengers had ripped out all the plumbing all the wiring a lot of the fixtures and so you all of that had to be redone that's the the cost but throughout you various places in the building they've also preserved some of some of the aspects of the period when it was vacant including this hallway here where you've got some of the graffiti some of the early graffiti and upstairs in the tower we we haven't been up there yet but up in the tower there's also some elements of this you know connecting the the the origins of the building throughout and all the aspects all the chapters throughout its history so that is Michigan Central Station and in a minute we will step outside and get a look at the front of the building this is the amazing frontend front entrance of Michigan Central Station which was vacant for so many years so derel and the the uh Limestone encased out here uh that cases the building much of it was deteriorated and needed to be replaced and they people working on the building tried to find matching Limestone uh and uh had a hard time doing that they found the original Quarry where the original Limestone came from which had been closed for three more than 30 years and they found the owner convinced the owner to reopen the Quarry for a time so that they could actually Quarry new Limestone to repair parts of the this building with Limestone from the original quy uh so that it would all match and which just looks fantastic uh it's great to see this building coming back to life uh starting June 6th for a period of 10 days uh June 6 2024 for 10 days there's going to be an open house here open to the public so you can come and explore the ground floor of the building and then uh throughout then after that throughout the summer it'll be open house on weekends Friday Saturday and Sunday till the end of summer and then uh over the next several months and year or more uh tenants will be moving into the into the tower up above and some of the businesses moving in down below here uh and this will be a hub for the uh the Corktown area of Detroit so got Parkland outside here as well they've restored Roosevelt Park there's going to be more Park land in the in the on the other side of the building on the south side of the building and the uh uh management of the building hoping to someday even restore train service track uh back to this so that's nothing's confirmed yet it'll probably be quite a few more years before that happened but they've they've allocated space for that so could be could be great so that's our tour of Michigan Central hope you come down and check it out

Channel: Wheel Bearings

Views: 110,970

Keywords: ford, detroit, corktown, michigan central, michigan central station

Id: 0SUqq82Kg2o

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2024