A little less than a mile from downtown Detroit, Michigan, there is a towering, tattered, Beaux Arts masterpiece of a building that was once the largest train station on Earth — Michigan Central Station. The station opened on January 4, 1914, and at its peak from the nineteen teens through World War II, over 200 trains a day came and went from the depot.
The station was incredibly opulent. The cavernous lobby was faced and floored in marble and supported by Roman-style columns, and the front of the building consisted of soaring arches surrounding beautiful multi-pane windows. It resembles some of the grand public buildings in Rome that date from the Imperial Period.
The fortunes of Michigan Central Station reflected the rise and fall of the city of Detroit itself.
Detroit spent the first half of the twentieth century occupying roughly the same place in the American imagination that Silicon Valley does now. The “start-ups” of the early years of the last century were the machine shops and tiny factories where Henry Ford and others were working out the rudiments of mass production – the standardization of parts, the moving assembly line, using electric power to light the factory floors 24 hours a day, and so on.
Once the methods were worked out, the city fairly exploded with manufacturing facilities. Within 20 years, Ford Motors grew from a small factory – roughly the size of the old Tannery Building here in town – to running the largest factory of any kind in the world, their legendary River Rouge Complex.
The Rouge River Complex was a wonder of its day. According to the Wikipedia article describing it, the complex “…measures 1.5 miles (2.4 km) wide by 1 mile (1.6 km) long, including 93 buildings with nearly 16 million square feet (1.5 km²) of factory floor space. With its own docks in the dredged Rouge River, 100 miles (160 km) of interior railroad track, its own electricity plant, and integrated steel mill, the titanic Rouge was able to turn raw materials into running vehicles within this single complex, a prime example of vertical-integration production. Over 100,000 workers were employed there in the 1930s.”
General Motors and Chrysler followed similar trajectories, and many other manufacturing concerns crowded into the industrial areas of the city – appliance makers, a maker of clothes irons, glass companies, and so on.
Within 50 years, Detroit’s population surged from just under 300,000 in 1900 to almost 2 million by the middle of the 20th Century.
Those thriving automobile factories were sowing the seeds of the decline in rail travel that ultimately doomed Michigan Central Terminal. After a last surge of rail travel during the Second World War, the Interstate Highway System and the advent of jet air travel led to a precipitous decline in passenger rail travel, and by the late 1980s the enormous terminal was too expensive for Amtrak to maintain, and a smaller station (one of those “Amshacks” that are notoriously tinny and bland when compared to the great stations built during passenger rails golden age) now serves as Detroit’s rail passenger depot.
After the last Amtrak train left the old station in January 1988, the shuttered building became a target for scrappers and vandals, and for decades winter snows blew unimpeded through the shattered windows and drifted in the magnificent lobby. Rain and melting snow filled the building’s basement.
The rest of Detroit fared little better. After 50 years of deindustrialization, racial strife and white flight to the suburbs, the population has declined to under a million residents.
The old train terminal has long been a favorite destination of Ruins Photographers, for understandable reasons — the spectacle of such a grand and impressive building turned to graffiti-covered ruin is irresistible as a metaphor for lots of things — for the way our country discards its past as it searches for the Next Big Thing; for the way our industrial working class seems to have been all but discarded as People Who Don’t Matter; even for the impermanence of life itself.
I first saw images of the station a few years ago at a website called The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit and I had a powerful reaction to those photos. It seemed inconceivable – almost scandalous – that such a beautiful building could simply be abandoned to vandals and the elements. It seemed to be a (literally) monumental waste.
Detroiters seem to have agreed with me. The station has recently undergone the beginnings of restoration — the installation of new windows to make the building weather-tight, the basement has now been pumped dry, and so on. Estimates of the cost of a complete restoration run into the many millions of dollars — $80 million seems to be a consensus figure, and some estimates run to as high as $300 million.
Our broader economy is in need of a parallel restoration.
As the United States has de-industrialized, a large majority of the workforce — the portion of the population that will never get a college degree — has increasingly had difficulty finding adequately-paying work, and unless something changes, they will find themselves consigned to a life where a significant fraction of them will be living lives that are a constant, low-grade economic emergency.
We need a national economy that provides a middle-class living to two groups: the kind of people that go to college, and the kind of people that are Good With Tools.
Public policy needs to address this.
I’ve mentioned before that one possibility is to build out a high-speed rail network nationwide. That is not as pie-in-the-sky as it may sound at first.
Having been to some fraction of the rest of the developed world, I say the following as a disappointed American patriot: our passenger rail system is a national embarrassment.
Mainland China’s rail network a few short years ago was a hodge-podge of ancient, creaking trains on worn-out tracks, tracks that in many cases were laid down prior to the communist takeover in 1949. In perhaps 5 years, they went from that relic to a high-speed rail system that is arguably the most advanced and extensive in the world – fast and extensive enough that many Chinese citizens prefer it to taking jet airliners to get around their country, which is roughly the size of the United States. In the years 2011 through 2013, China used more cement than the United States did in the entire twentieth century, and a non-trivial fraction was used in the upgrading of their entire transportation infrastructure.
If China – until very recently a country far poorer in every respect than the United States – could accomplish this, then the United States could put together a high-speed rail system that could exceed it.
I read recently that Japanese and European companies are bidding to build the cars for California’s high speed rail system. There is no reason we can’t build high-speed rail cars here in the United States.
Making national high speed rail a government program would make it possible to require than every bit of it be built by American workers — the steel for the rails and copper for the overhead wires, all the design work, the design and production of the cars and control equipment, down to the last screw and nail, could be required to be done by American workers.
That’s the advantage of government taking on all parts of a project – they can fund the construction as both a way to make the trains and as a jobs program. Paying Americans to make train cars might cost more than importing them, but you’d get people off unemployment benefits and you’d get some of their salary back in income taxes. Their salaries would also end up in local businesses like diners and places that sell work clothes, whose workers would in turn pay more in taxes, and so on. The benefits would ripple through the entire economy.
Brad Delong is a UC Berkeley professor and economist who published a paper coauthored by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in 2009. They made a persuasive case that we could do a certain amount of transportation infrastructure upgrading at virtually no cost to the taxpayer if you took those previously-mentioned “ripple effects” into account.
The sentimental part of me likes to imagine Michigan Central Station finding new life re-purposed as the headquarters of that system.