The event was followed around the world. On June 6, the reopening ceremony of Detroit’s large Michigan Central train station, which had been closed since 1988, attracted 20,000 residents but also millions of remote spectators: fans of rapper Eminem, the most famous resident of the American city, who produced the show. The artist performed his song Houdini for the first time live, with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. As a hymn to transformation: Michigan Central reopens its doors, not as a train station, but as a center dedicated to the future of mobility. The city of the automobile, “Motor City”, wants to be reborn as a city of mobility.
It was Bill Ford, the president of Ford Motor, who was keen to revive this iconic building, a symbol of the city’s ups and downs. In 2018, the carmaker bought the abandoned and badly damaged station for $90 million (78 million euros at the time) from the family of Manuel Moroun, a Detroit entrepreneur, and injected nearly $900 million into the work.
The resurrection of Michigan Central should make us forget the bankruptcy of Detroit in 2013, a few years after the subprime crisis, which nearly took down the automobile giants. It should also make us forget the dereliction of the neighborhoods surrounding the historic center of the city (“Downtown”, as the Americans say), which have been plagued for decades by drug trafficking and prostitution, and deserted by the middle and wealthy classes.
Six years after buying the place, Bill Ford’s declaration of faith sits enthroned in the magnificently restored great hall: “This building tells the story of our city. This station was our Ellis Island.” It was indeed the arrival point for future employees of his great-great-grandfather’s factories. The first of these, the Ford factory on Piquette Avenue, can still be visited. The second, the one in Highland Park, is immortalized at the Detroit Institute of Arts by a monumental fresco by the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. “Once the last train has pulled out [en 1988], writes the billionaire, [la gare] has become a place without hope, a symbol of difficult times, a monument to the struggles the city has had to endure.” Its reopening is “a bold statement that Detroit’s best days are ahead”.
Corktown is already gentrifying—the Michigan Central neighborhood is named after the Irish town where its first residents, including Henry Ford, came from. But beyond that neighborhood, the entire city is already being transformed. From the seventeenth floor of the old train station, it appears in all its singularity. In the middle of the historic district, cranes frame a new tower under construction: Hudson’s Detroit, the first since the 1970s. This new building will house, in 2025, the new headquarters of General Motors, and will be the flagship of the real estate developer Bedrock, owned by Dan Gilbert.
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