'Behind-the-scenes work is done' as Ford puts Detroit railroad station back together

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.

After Ford took ownership of the train station in mid-2018, the company's construction contractors spent a year stopping the leaks and building an HVAC system to dry out the water-logged structure.

Aside from a service elevator and some roof improvements the Morouns did during their final years of ownership, Ford bought a 650,000-square-foot mid-rise tower constructed in 1912 and 1913 missing everything imaginable, Bardelli said.

In three years time, Bardelli said, construction workers have installed:

• 300 miles of electric wire
• 20 miles of heating and cooling duct work and piping
• 6 miles of plumbing pipes
• 8.6 miles of grout in between 29,000 terracotta tiles along the arching ceiling of the front waiting room

"All of the really behind-the-scenes work is done," Bardelli said.

More than 1,700 of the Guastavino terracotta ceiling tiles had to be replaced, said Ron Staley, senior vice president of Southeast Michigan operations for Christman Co., a general contractor on the project. Together with co-contractor Detroit-based L.S. Brinker Co., they are rehabbing the structure through a joint venture called Christman Brinker. And to get to those ceiling tiles some 65 feet in the air, workers constructed 252 tons of scaffolding inside the Beaux-Arts landmark, Staley said.

Construction crews recently revealed three fully-restored large front windows facing Roosevelt Park. The street view doesn't do justice to the work that went into restoring each window.

Inside the building, the windows were originally decorated in ornate floral rosettes and leafs made of cast iron — all ripped out by scrappers over the years. But after Ford bought the building, some of the rosettes began being dropped off at the train station by individuals who came into possession of the original pieces.

Engineers in Ford's additive manufacturing unit used the original cast iron rosettes to reproduce them using 3-D printers and resin. Some 560 new lightweight rosettes made by 3-D printers now border each interior window frame.

At the outset, Ford said it would cost $740 million to restore the train station and the former Book Depository building to the east of the old depot. The project remains within that budget, Bardelli said.

The total cost of Ford's investment in the Corktown campus has risen to $950 million to include outside improvements, like a plaza and mobility testing site on the backside of the building where trains once departed and arrived around the clock. That area will continue to be called "the platform," Bardelli said.

Christman Brinker and its scores of subcontractors have pegged the end of the second quarter in 2023 as their construction complete deadline.

Ford has committed to having 2,500 of its employees in autonomous and EV development working at the train station and surrounding buildings. The automaker is making space for another 2,500 workers from suppliers and partners in the mobility sector to be occupying space in there as well as in the Book Depository building and a third office building in the planning stages.

Ford is already in talks with potential retail, hospitality and hotel vendors, Bardelli said. They could be announced by the end of this year, he said.

Bardelli said there would be dining options throughout the building: The top floors of the tower; the former carriage house on the west end of the building along Vernor Highway; and a food court in the concourse, where workers have completed the installation of a new all-window roof that faces south toward the river.

Over the next 18 months, carpenters will focus on the more ornate details to restore the building to its historical grandeur: wood wainscoting panels, crown modeling, marble borders and laying wood floors in the one-time waiting rooms designated for women and men on the eastern and western ends of the building, respectively.

"We're in the midst right now of just starting to put all of that back," Bardelli said.

Walls have been reconstructed to separate the waiting rooms from the front entrance so they can be used for events space. Bardelli said Ford is already getting inquiries from couples who want to get married at Michigan Central Station.

Washington, D.C.-based Quinn Evans Architects is the lead architectural firm on the project. Detroit-based Ideal Contracting and Ideal Steel were steel construction sub-contractors on the train station project.