All eyes were on the now Ford-owned Michigan Central Station in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood on Tuesday morning, as the automaker formally announced its plan for the derelict building and surrounding neighborhood.
Ford Motor Company recently took the century-old structure, abandoned since 1988, off the hands of its longtime owners, the Moroun family. There’s still no dollar figure attached to that deal, but that’s not what Tuesday was about. Ford’s plan, ambitious and big on vision, breaks down as this: there’ll be 2,500 Ford workers employed in the Corktown neighborhood, tasked with developing autonomous vehicles and related tech. The towering train depot, once restored, will serve as the nerve center.
Joining those employees in Ford-owned buildings scattered around the site will be an equal number of employees working for partners and suppliers, or so Ford hopes. The automaker’s aiming for a miniaturized version of Silicon Valley clustered around Michigan Avenue.
As local (or maybe not so local) talent gravitates towards the site, the train depot’s main concourse will remain open to the public. More accurately, it will reopen to the public, with retail filling the depot’s cavernous ground floor.
If your life lacked speeches about mobility and the future and disruption and rebirth, Tuesday’s media event was just the soothing balm you had in mind. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder joined Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Ford brass to speak eloquently on just such themes, making sure to steep every word with history and cultural context. In their defence, there’s few places where such themes are more warranted.
It’s big news for both the hard-hit local community and for the city’s tax base.
But back to the plan. As Ford’s executive chairman, Bill Ford Jr., said in a pre-announcement interview with Crain’s Detroit Business, the automaker isn’t sure exactly how expansive its new footprint will be. While there’s surely discussions ongoing with some landowners, the automaker pegs the campus as containing “at least” 1.2 million square feet of space. Currently, the automaker owns “the former Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, two acres of vacant land, the site of an old brass factory” and a nearby former factory. Some 300,000 square feet will be set aside for retail, restaurants, and housing.
Bill Ford (seen above looking like he owns the place) hopes to have the train depot renovated and opened for public and office use by 2022, which is in itself ambitious, given the size of the structure and its state of disrepair.
The first Ford employees — 220 members of “Team Edison,” who handle the business side of the company’s electric and autonomous vehicle efforts — moved into the neighborhood in May, setting up their base of operations in a converted former factory called, what else, The Factory.
“I would love for this to be like the Sand Hill Road of Michigan,” Ford’s chairman told Crain’s, referencing the birthplace of Silicon Valley, “where entrepreneurs, startups, (and) partners all want to come and be part of this creative process.”
The chairman admitted his company is “in a war for talent,” and that much of the plan hinges on attracting these partners. Still, he feels the Corktown scene, with Ford at its center, will appeal to those not enamored by the crowded (and expensive) Silicon Valley life. And if it draws local startups into the fold, or encourages them to exist, all the better.
During this morning’s event, Ford CEO Jim Hackett made it clear that Dearborn wasn’t being left behind. The automaker’s headquarters will remain in the Glass House, and the bulk of its workers will remain housed in the soon-to-be-rejuvenated Dearborn campus. Corktown represents just another “node” in its regional and global operations.
“What [the historic Rouge plant] was to Ford in the industrial age, Corktown can be for Ford in the information age,” said Hackett. “It will be the proving ground where Ford and our partners design and test the services and solutions for the way people are going to live and get around tomorrow, creating a Southeast Michigan mobility corridor that spans west from Dearborn to Ann Arbor, and east to Detroit.”
The work performed in Corktown will apparently go beyond the creation of Blue Oval-branded vehicles. The automaker claims it wants to create technology designed to make all road transportation smarter. In other words, it wants vehicles to communicate with each other and with the city they’re driving in, lessening congestion.
With this in mind, Ford’s developing a Transportation Mobility Cloud – “an open platform that manages information flow and transactions between different services to help cities optimize their various modes of transit.”
If that description doesn’t get readers’ hearts racing like the sight of Steve McQueen’s tire-shredding Mustang, we don’t know what will.
[Images: Ford Motor Company]
The tire-shredding Mustang will likely be just about the only non-SUV or truck-based vehicle seen at the new location…
The building is just a shell, so it’s not like they have to do a lot of demo before installing the utilities and starting finish out.
The thing is, will they have round-the-clock lighting and onsite security, to keep the place from being vandalized or looted during renovation? I imagine that if they don’t, things will disappear as soon as they’re installed.
I think Ford Land knows how to handle security.
ED-209 patrols?
So, it was thought, did Fiatsler at Sterling Heights! (Or was that RAM heist an inside job?)
“The building is just a shell”
Our new office in Fremont, CA interior looked just like that – remnant of office building boom during dotcom debacle. After renovation it had fresh ultra modern brand new interior.
Cars are so yesterday—-let Toyota have those. Ford has a train station.
“Rental fleet car sales are so yesterday, let Toyota and Nissan have those.”
There. Fixed it for you.
Let Toyota and Nissan concentrate on quality.
Nissan, really?
Ford has three model at the bottom of Consumer Reports.
Haahaahaa, you said “Nissan” and “quality”!!! LOL!!! Oh, wait, you were serious?
Rental car sales are good.
The mobility corridor will be interesting. Southeast Michigan voters keep shooting down any tax increase to fund a regional transit system. It is on the ballot yet again this year. Amazon rejected Detroit as its next home for this reason (one of a few). Perhaps Ford will foot the bill with the profits from their SUV’s.
The RTA proposal will go down again if on the ballot this year. The current system, SMART, is all about community transit and not MASS transit. Recent ads stress transport of handicapped folks to the doctor and not hordes of working class folks to work. Too many empty buses on the major routes every day. As long as SMART and RTA are treated like patronage jobs, no mass transit will happen.
and as long as SMART and DDOT remain two completely separate, almost entirely immiscible systems.
Agreed. While I would support an actual transportation initiative, the proposals have all looked like jobs programs on 80’s technology
Absolutely. Adding buses will not get anyone to avoid driving. There is no point to spend money on expanding a bus network. Adding light rail into the medians on Woodward and Gratiot would actually be a good idea and likely approved. The Q line is also stupid, because it goes along at street level and is also stuck in traffic with cars.
Last time when there was SUV boom Ford wasted it all on so called overpriced British jewelry. I know Ford does not like invest money in car development. Then investing money in Detroit would have some lasting heritage even when Ford is gone.
The thing that worries me about a Ford building is that it might burst into flames, even if it’s parked and the key isn’t in the ignition.
If the key is on, and the door slams, the building will go into reverse!
Gosh lets hope not. Dont want them to get to the point where they are killing customers because the ignition switch is badly designed yet still used because eff caring about people, amirite?
Darn, and I was hoping they’d call it Delta City.
Ford will soon have only two carlines. Boy, do they suck!
Will end up as a homeless shelter full of rotting Eco-Sport shells and ex-Ford employees.
@FreedMike- “Delta City !” you crack me up !
Kudos to Ford for investing in their workforce. Nice facilities make recruiting and employee retention easier. Those are huge costs. One of the reasons I’m at my current job is that the owners had just built a new administration building and that reinvestment in their company impressed me.
What a bunch of negative people on here.
Until pannkake’s post, mostly every comment was a shot at Ford!
Hey, I live in Canada and no nothing about the geography/politics of this particular area. But when I read someone is going to invest a whole lot of money in an area, I would think someone should have something positive to say about it?
But not on TTAC apparently.
Well I hope this works out and Ford’s investment helps this area prosper again.
the B&B is little more than some curmudgeons and trolls at this point.
I have to agree. A gorgeous building will be restored improving the community, and it’s out of the hands of the Morons. A win win. It will be really awesome if the rumors are true and Ford only paid 8 million for it.