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Control Terminals Inc., which has owned the building since the
mid-1990s, believes the station is structurally sound. But in the
ticketing area (above), there are holes in the roof and puddles of water
on the floor.
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Though the top five stories were never in use, the first floor once
included a commercial pavilion (above) with a drugstore and reading room.
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Detroit's magnificent Michigan Central Depot, located downtown off
Michigan Avenue behind Roosevelt Park, now stands vacant and vandalized.
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Which is not to say that Detroit--a city once referred to on national television
as "the first urban domino to fall"--is not in serious trouble.
While we all bristle at that notorious newswoman's assessment, the fact
remains that our population has been halved in the last 50 years. And when
the residents fled, the businesses followed, leaving in their wake
mile upon endless mile of once majestic remains.
But in searching for solutions to what is often called the "problem"
of Detroit, I am time and again drawn to an intriguing premise raised by
one of my professors: What if we were to approach the city as if there were
no problem? A radical notion, especially here, but by no means an irrelevant
one. The idea forces us to rethink not only our solutions for the city but
the problems we perceive here. What if, for example, we were to stop seeing
the train station as a building that has ceased to function? For the last
14 years Michigan Central Depot has been considered for use as a monastery,
a casino, a shopping mall, an athletic club, and a fish hatchery. While
each deal was debated, negotiated, and ultimately discarded, the building
continued to serve as shelter, studio, film set, drug den, observation
deck, and inspiration to countless numbers of locals and tourists--no haggling
necessary.
Pick up any paper, pump any politician, query any developer, and of course
you'll hear that refurbishing the old train station symbolizes "progress."
After all, creating order (real or imagined) is what planners and politicians
and developers do. And if the media is to be believed, there is no city
more chaotic, more in need of order, than Detroit.
So overpowering is the urge to control our desperately desired revival that
the city council has informed the owner of the train station, a shady mogul
by the name of Matty Maroun, that if he does not transform the building
soon, the city will tear it down. This, it must be understood, is the modus
operandi in Detroit, a way of erasing our painful past (and present)--whether
or not there is an imaginable future to rise up in its place.
I recently discovered that the latest proposal for the train station--conversion
to an international trade center--had been considered once before, in the
late 1980s. I found it especially instructive, and slightly unsettling,
to learn that the model for the original project was a complex of "gleaming
towers" on the banks of the Hudson River. Certainly no one could have
planned for what happened there.
How is it, then, that when we talk of progress in our cities we consistently
fail to acknowledge the attendant concept of progression, an inherently
organic act? No matter how much we negotiate and finagle and brainstorm
and build up, the truth of the matter is, a city is as natural as a forest
or a desert or an ocean. Its structures will ebb and flow and cycle
much as the trees and the sand and the waves will. And like any sacred spot
in the Hiawatha or the Mojave or the Pacific, under just the right
circumstances--say a mild midwinter day with late-afternoon sunlight turning
the sandstone a gloriously warm gold--one empty building among them all
might be the most perfect place on earth.
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