Ford Brings Life Back to the Historic Michigan Central Station
Ford has been making moves to revive Detroit. They have started their first phase to bring more tech workers to the city with the redevelopment of the historic Michigan Central Station.
Michigan’s Central Station
Ford executives, city government, and community leaders held an opening ceremony for one building at the station’s new campus, a part of a $950 million project referred to as Michigan Central. The new building, the Book Depository, will serve as a creative collaboration space for transportation entrepreneurs and researchers.
In 2018, Ford announced that it had obtained the station and the surrounding area, a monument to the kind of transportation past that the automaker and its manufacturing brethren had once followed. For a long time after it opened in 1913, Michigan’s Central Station turned into a primary stop on the nation’s interurban rail network. Then the private automobile took over the US, and Detroit declined. By the 1970s, auto jobs had begun to leave the state and the country, and local corruption was soaring. At the turn of the century, the train depot and the 18-story workplace towers at the back of it had been deserted for 30 years, the dwindled exterior looming over Detroit’s Corktown and Mexicantown neighborhoods. Ford has been taking steps towards bringing jobs back to Detroit and to the Ford Company.
Bill Ford, executive chair of Ford, says the campus’ redevelopment is a sign. “Michigan Central will go from being a story about Detroit’s decay to the story about Detroit’s rebirth,” he says, a second act that will see the city become home to tech- and auto-centric jobs that will build the next generation of transport. “This will be the first tangible evidence that that vision is coming to life,” says Ford, great-grandson of both company founder Henry Ford and tire magnate Harvey Firestone.
When the Michigan Central project was announced in 2018, “Detroit wasn’t even in the game,” says Ford of the race to infuse autos with tech. “But we are now, and what we provide at the Book Depository building and in the region is the ability to bring together hardware and software in a way that can’t be done elsewhere.” Office employees will start to move into the updated Michigan Central towers at the back of the historic station in 2024, says Sirefman, though precisely who will work out of the renovated area is not yet clear.
Ford introduced in 2018 that 5,000 people, half of the company’s employees, would work out of the up-to-date train station. But the automaker has moved to a hybrid working model since the pandemic. Daniel Barbossa says, “We have opened up our Ford spaces to be focused on flex space and collaboration.” Updated occupancy numbers will come later this year. Ford takes a further step to help out as they have announced that local high school students in a Google-sponsored mentorship program will work out of a lab in the station; 50 students are already enrolled in the program, which is temporarily housed in another building on the campus.
Making a difference with Kenny Ross Ford
Ford is not only making a difference in the lives of students and future employees, and they are bringing back life into a historic building that will once again bring life to the busy Detroit streets. Just like how Ford continues to think of people’s best interests, they also create all their vehicles with that same mindset. Try out all these fantastic automobiles here at Kenny Ross Ford.