Here's how a team completed Michigan Central Station's 6-year restoration journey (2024)

Detroit — When Michigan Central Station was constructed in the early 1900s, a dedicated team of workers crafted the iconic structure with intense attention to detail.

Michigan Central Station

More than a century later, a similarly dedicated team, equipped with modern technology, came together to restore that work in the historic building and bring a neglected ruin back to its former glory.

It’s been nearly six years since Ford Motor Co. took on the ambitious restoration of the historic Beaux-Arts building, long a symbol of Detroit’s decline.

As Michigan Central Station prepares to open this week, those involved with the restoration reflected on the meticulous labor and craftsmanship, some calling it the project of a lifetime.

“It's been painstakingly and lovingly restored wherever possible to its original condition,” said Joshua Sirefman, Michigan Central’s CEO, during a recent media tour of the former rail depot. “And before we start activating it with lots of things, probably in its most pristine condition.”

The restoration effort was extensive, involving cleaning and replicating 29,000 Guastavino ceiling tiles for the waiting room's vaulted ceiling, sourcing original limestone from a closed Indiana quarry and hand-carving replicas of ornate exterior capitals and other limestone details. And before all that — removing six feet of water from the building’s basem*nt after decades of exposure to the elements.

The restoration team included architects Quinn Evans, the joint venture construction contractor Christman Brinker, 3,100 construction workers, and other firms charged with various elements of the project.

Getting started

Michigan Central Station opened in 1913 as a train depot with an office tower. The first floor includes a grand waiting room, ticket area, concourse and an arcade that accesses the tower. The upper levels of the tower were never completed, even as the building served as a bustling hub for train travelers over several decades.

“Let's take a moment to celebrate where we are right now as a city, as a building, as Michigan Central, as Ford because this represents a lot to the millions of people who came through the station during its heyday,” said Melissa Dittmer, head of place for Michigan Central, during the recent tour of the refurbished structure.

After the last train rolled away from the station in early 1988, the building fell into disrepair and ultimately sat open to the elements for decades.

The first step in the restoration was to assess if the project was viable and how much it would cost to restore, said Ron Staley, who served as executive director of historic preservation for Detroit-based joint venture Christman-Brinker, construction manager for the project.

Michigan Central has not said how much the restoration work cost for the station alone but has estimated it will cost $950 million for its campus, which also includes the neighboring Newlab in the restored book depository building.

Staley said that he had previously been in the station in 1994 when a prior owner had considered doing something with the building. It was mostly dry at that time, he said. He did notice scrapping activity, however, including missing penthouse elevator motors that had been thrown down to the lower building below, leaving holes in the roof.

“A lot of the finishes were still there, and the building was relatively dry,” Staley said. “Fast forward to 2018, and you're going into the subbasem*nt, and the lower part of the basem*nt had probably about six feet of water in it. There were holes throughout the building. Prior owners or scrappers had taken pipe and steam radiators, stuff like that out to scrap them. It really was over a thousand holes through the floors in the tower. There were safety issues. Very little electricity in it.”

The Moroun family, which bought the station in 1995, installed windows, but Staley said the roof was never repaired.

“The top tower of the roof had holes in it and deteriorated to the point that if it rained, it was just coming into the building and working its way down through the floors,” he said. “The waiting room didn't have any glass in the windows and the concourse in the back that has a skylight on it was wide open to the sky. So it was just a very saturated building and the water is still coming in every time it rained.”

After installing a temporary roof, crews pumped the water from the basem*nt. Debris was also removed. It’s a process that took about a year.

“You've got stone that is upwards of seven foot thick, concrete walls that are three or four foot thick,” Staley said. “All of that was saturated with water with not having roofs or being flooded for so many years. And because it's historic material, there's a way to dry that out that doesn’t damage it.”

That way was to let the building dry naturally, using fans to circulate air but not using heat to speed the process.

Once the building was secured and dried, it was time to stabilize the structure, addressing the steel that had rusted away from water damage or was removed by scrappers. It then took another year to integrate new mechanical electrical systems within the architectural spaces.

“Thinking back to 1913, they had steam heat, but they didn't have a lot of fresh air in the building,” he said. “And they certainly didn't have air conditioning.”

After the building was dry, cleared out and the mechanical systems were put in place, it was time to focus on restoring the various architectural finishes that people notice — the tile, the plaster, the brickwork. Staley calls it the icing on the cake.

A stone-cold success

When Ford purchased the building, decades of dirt from train soot and biological growth had darkened the station’s limestone and the brick tower. The exterior was power-washed and cleaned with a mild detergent, brightening its appearance.

“If you take all of the brick, all of the stone and all the terracotta, which is the masonry product at the very top of the tower, there's eight acres of surface area on the outside of Michigan Central Station,” Staley said. “And every square inch was touched in some way by masonry workers.”

In addition to cleaning, some of the limestone needed to be replaced both outside and inside the building.

Ford called on Bridgeport-based Capital Stoneworks to secure limestone original to Michigan Central Station. The company faced an immediate challenge: The source of that stone, Dark Hollow Quarry in Bedford, Indiana, had been closed since the 1980s, said Brandon Hornung, owner of Capital Stoneworks. They called the owner and asked if the quarry could be reopened to retrieve the needed limestone.

“We went in there, and there was a lot of blocks lying on the ground — enough to do the entire job,” Hornung said. “So then we had to get permission to purchase material from them. But it came with an investment of building the roads to get down into the quarry. And that's the really interesting part of the story. Things like that don't happen very often. But the great achievement was it was very important to Ford for the integrity of the project to be as exact as possible with all the materials that were being used there. Not to substitute it. That's what we were able to accomplish.”

Crews cut down trees, cleared overgrowth and laid down a gravel path to access the quarry. They retrieved 600 blocks of limestone for various parts of the project, including the exterior capitals, the ornamental décor at the top of the columns on the building. Each block weighed 15,000 to 20,000 pounds.

Hornung said the limestone from the quarry is unique in that it has a grain that runs diagonally across the stone. They initially retrieved one weathered piece of limestone and cut it to confirm they had the right stone. It was a match.

“It had this very unique characteristic that is not present in any — in many — other limestones from that region,” he said.

The crew wanted to 3D-scan the “good sides” of numerous capitals to replicate them with a computerized cutting machine. The technology couldn’t handle all the data.

Crews removed one of the capitals from the station, transported it to Capital Stonework’s workshop where longtime carver John Goodrow Sr. created a replica capital by hand.

Goodrow said it took 427 hours over six weeks to complete it. He said he felt confident he could do it, though some areas of the capital were more challenging to carve than others.

“The scrollwork that was back behind the flowers was most difficult just because it was so hard to get back in there,” he said. “And under the scrolls. Just certain areas because it was just tight quarters.”

Inside the building, Capital Stoneworks were charged with replicating the headers over the doors in the grand waiting room. They located one of the original headers on a home in Maine, Hornung said. The owner had purchased it in an auction. He wouldn’t allow the crew to remove the header, so they 3D-scanned it to replicate it.

Goodrow said he considers his work at Michigan Central Station the ultimate job of his 40-year career.

“As long as I've been doing this, this is the largest job I've ever worked on and largest pieces of stone,” he said. “It was very satisfying. I’m proud to have been involved in the job, that’s for sure.”

Replicating tile, plasterwork

Moving inside of the train station, one can’t help but look up to marvel at the tilework. Called Gustavino tile, it’s a self-supporting terracotta tile that makes up three vaults in the grand waiting room.

Detroit-based Grunwell-Cashero worked with Pittsburgh-based Graciano Corporation to complete the tile restoration.

Jelane Raycraft, president of Grunwell-Cashero, said the ceiling tile project was done in three phases, with each vault sectioned into quadrants. Christman Brinker built a raised-floor platform, and then rolling scaffolding towers of varying heights were placed on top so workers could access the ceiling, which, in some points, reaches 65 feet.

The extensive process involved cutting out mortar joints, removing salvageable tiles and resetting them, and washing the area with mild detergent.

“One kind of cool thing that we did was when a tile was deemed debonded, and it had to be removed, we noted the tile location and number on the backside of the tile,” Raycraft said. “And then also on the backup of the ceiling, so that when the salvaged tiles were reset, they were set in the exact location that they were originally laid.”

About 1,700 damaged or missing tiles had to be replaced, Raycraft said. Those tiles were pre-ordered and fabricated by Boston Valley Terra Cotta in White Plains, New York.

In all, the ceiling features 29,000 tiles and 8.7 miles of grout. Raycraft said they used the old-school method of mixing and tinting mortar to match the original color. She estimates a thousand buckets were transported to the job site. She said they also had to fabricate a tool to spread the mortar.

About 12 workers did the tile work from start to finish, including a Detroiter who trained on the job, Raycraft said.

"I'm very proud to be involved in a unique project, but also just the train station itself to be involved in that restoration, as a historic restoration contractor, that is a dream ..." she said. "This really was the project of a lifetime for a restoration contractor."

Jeff Greene, owner of EverGreene Architectural Arts Inc., conducted the preliminary assessment of the plaster work needed in the station and then was brought on to conduct the restoration. He said that during his assessment, he found that when the station was built, tradesmen used numerous methods.

"The whole project is kind of like an encyclopedia of every plaster technique ever used anywhere," he said. "All in one building. As we discovered, this was information that really helped determine the course of how to restore things. ... There must have been multiple crews. ... An army of workers, all who had the skills, which no longer exists."

The lower walls, which were destroyed, went back in as sheetrock, Greene said. To make the new walls look like stone, workers created a paint with ground-up tires.

"It's kind of interesting in an automotive building to use ground-up tires as part of the pigment to get the little black specks in the paint to make it look like stone," he said. "There's real stone in there, obviously, Mankato stone columns and all that. But we use it on the walls. So there's real stone, there's plaster with pigment that looks like stone. There's painted plaster, and it looks like stone. And then there's just plain paint that looks like stone. So those are just a few of the many kinds of finishes all meant to look the same.

"And I think our job was to first understand how things were done historically ... this plethora of techniques .... and then find some way to preserve and unify all those finishes and how they've aged and bring the whole thing back into this sort of harmonious whole. That's what we did."

The building’s arcade is one area that had the most intact plaster, said Dittmer, Michigan Central's head of place.

“This is one of the few parts of the station due to roof lines and other architectural engineering that the arcade is mostly existing materials because it received the least amount of water damage,” she said. “It was the most protected and so while there's, of course, a significant amount of restoration that went into the restoring of some of this plasterwork — trades folks up on scaffolding for days, if not weeks trying to make the plaster patching, etc. — this does represent sort of one of the best sort of existing states of the 1913 building."

Ford engineers Beverly Chudo, Theresa Pinkerton and Sheryl Rohrbacher Quan were among the teams involved in 3D-scanning and printing window elements and floral portions of the square 6.5-inch ceiling tiles in the former tea and reading rooms.

“Additive is so perfect for this because these things have disappeared,” said Pinkerton, an additive manufacturing engineer. “They could never go back and find all of those pieces that basically got stolen over the years, and they would have never been able to reproduce that original look of the building without doing something like additive.”

Initially, the teams sought to create replicas of the window fixtures based on images, but after some of the originals were donated to Ford, the engineers scanned the pieces with blue light scanners to create 3D models. The fixtures, two-and-a-half-feet long, were bigger and more ornate than most of the engine components the engineers typically print for quick-to-adjust prototypes, bridging parts when a supplier is behind on a delivery for production of a new vehicle, and other needs.

The pieces the engineers scanned for the window elements included 12-inch-wide rosettes and 20 variants of filigrees depicting flowers, laurel and oak leaves, and berries.

“They were actually heavy iron pieces that were rusted quite a bit,” Quan said. “They actually kept the pieces that you see in the window kind of with that patina, that sort of roughness. It wasn’t what you would call perfect. It kind of ages it, and back then, that’s how it would have been made.”

The engineers had to fill in and re-create parts in the digital model, which took the most time — about a week to turn a scan into a functional model, said Chudo, a senior engineer.

They used some of the largest 3D printers, called selective laser sintering printers, at the Advanced Manufacturing Center in Redford Township to print the 550 pieces. It took a day to 36 hours to print each, placing one 0.1 millimeter layer of nylon down at a time. The parts were printed in six batches, each taking about three weeks. They are Ford’s first use of polymer additive manufacturing for architectural construction.

They cool for about two days, and then, like paleontologists digging for dinosaur bones, the engineers excavate the parts from powder, after which they are cleaned with a vacuum and shot blast machine. Color-matched to the original elements, they get a coat of Austere Gray.

“They're a lot lighter than the original,” Chudo said. “And then they painted them the exact same color that they were originally, and then they mount them up and you would never be able to tell the difference between the two, in my opinion.”

Fixing the flooring

The station features flooring including terrazzo and marble. Those walking through the grand waiting room will see much of that original flooring, Dittmer said. Some of it had to be patched for the restoration, including the spaces where benches used to sit.

“This room was filled with wooden benches,” said Dittmer, standing on a piece of terrazzo flooring integrated with the marble flooring. “And in fact, what I'm standing in — every square here represents a wooden bench that was not here when we purchased the station. So what we did is we filled this portion of flooring with new terrazzo, which is right here next to the existing marble. But what you’ll see is a sort of grove and wearing away of the actual marble stone here because this was one of the preferred places for travelers to sit, look back at the sort of visual beacon of the clock, swinging their legs impatiently or patiently, and wait for the train.”

To the south, the concourse needed a complete flooring replacement. Because this space receives a lot of sunlight through its glass ceiling, technology was installed to cool the floor, Staley said.

“There's literally miles and miles of 3/4-inch plastic pipe that will cool that floor to act as the air conditioner so that the floor doesn’t get cold, but it will be cooler and cool the air around that area to keep people cool back in that space,” he said.

Homage to history

The layout is much as it was when the train station was in operation.

The restoration pays homage to the site’s history in various spaces within the building, including remnants of colorful graffiti along a walkway on the east side of the building. On the west side, a white-tiled corridor has a patch of original tile with graffiti tucked in the corner of an unfinished staircase that once led to an employee dining room.

“People always ask me, what are your favorite parts of the station?” Dittmer said. “It really is when you have these moments like this where we have all of the chapters of the station's history come together.”

The building's history includes the 36 years it was vacant and served as a cultural center point with performances, raves and graffiti, Sirefman said.

"There are moments throughout the building in its original condition where we chose to keep it part of the building's future," Sirefman said.

Architects and preservationists are rejoicing about the restoration.

"Detroit has taken down so many abandoned buildings, and there often have been good reasons for that," said Jonathan Massey, dean and professor of architecture at the University of Michigan. "But for me as an architect and a historian, to have an incredible, very monumental, gorgeous building like Michigan Central (Station) on the chopping block, that always hurts. So I'm really thrilled that it's finally finding a new life."

Massey said Ford took a "public-spirited gamble" with the project that he hopes will pay off.

"If they put effort and investment into restoring that incredible building and the neighborhood around it, that there is enough interest in the mobility innovation and enough interest in Detroit having thriving neighborhoods, that other investment will surround them and make it a smart bid long term," he said.

What's still to be done

Michigan Central officials say their work is not done to restore the building and the campus.

Construction on an eight-acre public space just south of the concourse is expected to begin next year, Dittmer said.

There are rooms in the tower that will be white-boxed for future uses. And Michigan Central is seeking a zoning change that will allow a hotel on the upper floors.

"Whether it's from the ground floor to the tower, we need to do it right," Sirefman said. "This is not a building to rush with false urgency into decisions that we'll regret. While in some ways, it seems like a massive building, it's also actually not at once. We have these vast spaces on the ground spaces, but as a singular building, there's a finite amount of space."

A carriage house, a steel structure outside on the west side of the building, still needs restoration.

"We're still underway on that portion of the building, in some of the southwestern pieces of the building," Sirefman said. "We are working with the city to meet our zoning to allow for hospitality, and we anticipate that the carriage house will play a significant role, as will other pieces of the building, in that hospitality."

cwilliams@detroitnews.com

@CWilliams_DN

Staff Writer Breana Noble contributed.

Published10:27 am UTC Jun. 3, 2024Updated10:27 am UTC Jun. 3, 2024