Ford plans 3rd building at Detroit train station complex; renovated Book Depository to open by June

DETROIT -- Ford Motor Co. is planning to construct a new office building west of Michigan Central Station that will add more density to the mobility tech hub in Detroit that the automaker is developing.

The building will give Ford three office buildings along with a 1,250-vehicle parking deck under construction within a campus on the west end of the Corktown neighborhood, said Rich Bardelli, Ford's construction manager for the Michigan Central Station project.

Ford will build the third office building on vacant land across Vernor Highway from the train station that is currently being used as a parking lot for construction workers, Bardelli said. The land was part of Ford's $90 million purchase of the long-vacant train station from the Moroun family in 2018.

The third building is still in the construction planning phase and no details are available yet on potential square footage or when construction will begin, Bardelli said.

Ford's plans for an autonomous and EV tech center in Corktown with 5,000 workers — half from Ford, half among partners and vehicle tech companies — originally called for construction of a third building on Rosa Parks Boulevard at the site of a former brass factory that the automaker bought and tore down. But those plans have changed as company officials decided it would be best to concentrate density around Roosevelt Park and the train station, Bardelli said.

"We shifted from (the old brass factory) site to really have the density around the train station. That allowed us to think about (the brass factory) differently," Bardelli said Tuesday during a media tour of Michigan Central Station and the Book Depository building.

Ford's second building to the east of the train station is the former Book Depository building, an Albert Kahn-designed three-story warehouse-style structure constructed in the 1930s as Detroit's main post office.

Renovations of the Book Depository building are slated to be finished by the end of June.

Ford employees and mobility tenants are to begin occupying the Book Depository building this summer.

A block away at the corner of Bagley and Wabash streets, a 1,250-space parking deck is set to be complete by the end of the second quarter. Last fall, Ford sold the parking deck to a joint venture called Corktown Mobility Hub LLC owned by businessmen Howard Luckoff and Jim Ketai and the Rakolta family.

The Book Depository building, a classic Kahn-designed fortress of concrete and steel, has been reimagined as a collaboration space with wide-open floor plates and limited offices for tenants and Ford employees, Bardelli said.

"This building is really meant to be this collaborative space where small startups, incubator type of space where we can bring different companies that have thoughts around mobility — but aren't big enough yet — that can come and collaborate and work in this building," Bardelli told reporters.

Construction crews cut down ground floor walls that will be replaced with windows facing out toward the train station and Roosevelt Park.

In the middle of the building, the roof and second and third floors were cut to create a massive skylight atrium that didn't exist when Kahn designed the building for processing letters.

"It's a gritty building, right?" Bardelli said. "It's not refined like restoring the train station."

The Book Depository had a massive fire in 1987, when it was a textbook warehouse for Detroit Public Schools. After that, it sent largely empty alongside the abandoned train station for three decades.

When Ford gained ownership of the building, it was in "pretty bad" shape, Bardelli said. "The only thing that saved it is it's all concrete."

A joint venture between Dixon Inc. and Barton Malow is the general contractor for the Book Depository renovation project.

Bardelli said the cost of rehabbing the Book Depository building is part of Ford's $740 million investment in the train station and overall $950 million investment in the campus, which includes outdoor plazas and a mobility testing site where the train station's passenger-loading platform once stood.

When the rehab project is complete, the Book Depository building will feature a 250-person event space in the middle of the building, Bardelli said.