Michigan Central Station: How secret basement, flooding nightmare led to renovation delays

Imagine buying a house with a flooded basement, drying it out and then discovering a secret passage to another basement below that basement, and it's flooded too. Then you realize standing water has so corroded the steel beams that support the building that they resemble Swiss cheese. And as you plug holes leaking water, you discover more leaks. Then, after everything, a massive storm floods the building again.

This is what Bill Ford and his team encountered after Ford Motor Co. purchased the Michigan Central Station in Corktown in 2018. The past six years have been filled with behind-the-scenes challenges largely untold until now. The interior was so damaged that project directors say restoration would have been impossible if work had begun just two or three years later. It was just that close to being lost forever.

Despite setbacks that included a global pandemic and running years behind schedule, Ford refused to give up.

"Bill Ford never wavered," Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan told the Free Press. "Once Bill Ford starts on something, he doesn’t get deterred. And there were many obstacles."

Now Michigan Central Station is scheduled to reopen on June 6 with a huge celebration that's expected to attract tens of thousands, along with superstar singers from Detroit. Names circulating in music industry circles in recent weeks as potential performers have included Eminem, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Jack White and Big Sean.

After that, Ford is expecting up to 60,000 visitors over 10 days of public tours of the restored main floor.

"For 76 years, the train station was our Ellis Island," Bill Ford said in June 2018 when assessing the importance of the depot to Detroit. "Once the last train pulled out, it became the symbol that hope left. ... It's time to remake the station into a place of possibility again."

Michigan Central Station, built in 1913 and designed by the same firms that did New York’s Grand Central Terminal, served Detroit during its glory days. For decades, it operated as a hub of Detroit life, the place where new immigrants arrived in the city and where soldiers left for World War II. But America’s transportation network changed, and the 18-story station closed in 1988. Scavengers and vandals turned the site into a symbol of urban ruin and the decline of Detroit. Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel (Matty) Moroun bought the old train station out of tax foreclosure in 1995, leaving it vacant and largely exposed to the elements, vandals and urban explorers.

The expertise required to resurrect the Beaux Arts-style building may end up as a case study for preservationists —and being a tourist attraction that already has been compared to the Empire State Building in New York.

Huge storm destroys progress, crushes morale

It took more than a year to dry out an interior that had been exposed to rain, snow and ice for decades. And that doesn't include the time needed to drain millions of gallons of water from the basement and sub-basement. Or the extraordinary flood on June 26, 2021, after everything was dry. President Joe Biden approved a disaster declaration for the "rainfall event" that dumped more than 2 feet of stormwater into the basement after the local drainage system was overwhelmed.

"We'd made so much progress. It was a morale hit. Ultimately, power's off. It's dark. It's wet. You're defeated," said Austin Giesey, ground floor project manager from Christman/Brinker. "You're exhausted from being here from 4 a.m. till 4 p.m. the next day straight without eating. ... It was beyond something that our typical water removal measures could handle."

Giesey was part of the team that oversaw 3,100 union plumbers, pipefitters, sheet metal workers, insulators, electricians, carpenters, masons, ironworkers, plasterers and laborers who poured 1.7 million hours into the restoration. At its peak, Giesey oversaw 550 workers a day.

"When I first came in, it was August 2018, in the basement," Giesey said. "We took out 2.5 million gallons over the course of the project, not counting flood activity. It took about six months to even get it down to walking level. Between the fall in 2018 and spring of 2019, when we finally removed enough water, we were able to explore. I got my muck boots, got the highest-power flashlight I could, because temporary light had yet to be installed in the flooded areas. I found two man-size openings ... Harry Potter style ... I found a boot down there."

That's when he found the secret basement below the basement. The basement itself is below the water table of the Detroit River, so water infiltration remains a challenge. Giesey listed a series of strategies designed for the station, including an option for continued use of sump pumps.

The building, first opened in 1913, can handle any kind of water event now, he said.

Nearly $1 billion in total spending

A list of costly and overwhelming obstacles to a renovation rarely makes headlines, but the expertise required to resurrect the building will become a case study for preservationists.

Bill Ford, great-grandson of Henry Ford, who founded Ford Motor Co. in 1903, wanted this to be a gift to the city.

"Just as Henry Ford’s father left Ireland, William Ford, whom I’m named after, left during the potato famine, so many Irish emigrated from (County) Cork and ended up here in Corktown. So, there’s also some real personal symmetry for me, as well, to be here," Bill Ford told the Free Press after the building purchase in 2018.

He initially predicted the project would be done by 2022.

Behind the scenes, obstacles took years to conquer.

Ford spokesman Dan Barbossa told the Free Press that Ford spent $950 million to develop the 30-acre campus, transforming and redeveloping multiple properties in Corktown.

Ford declined to reveal the cost of restoring Michigan Central Station alone, instead bundling costs that include the Albert Kahn-designed Book Depository next door at 2050 15th St. The three-story, 270,000-square-foot building first opened in 1936 as a U.S. Post Office and later was a warehouse for Detroit Public Schools. After sitting unused for about three decades, it opened last year with workspaces and studios for mobility-focused companies and technologies. So far, 97 startups are based at what's now called Newlab at Michigan Central , with more than 600 employees unrelated to Ford as of mid-May, spokesman Dan Austin told the Free Press.

By every measure, the Michigan Central Station project hasn't been easy. Construction leaders with more than 30 years in the industry told the Free Press that challenges faced were unlike anything they'd ever encountered.

Desperately fighting leaks that delayed everything

"Getting the building dried out and structurally stable, that was our larger challenge," Ron Staley, vice president of the Christman Co. and executive director of historic preservation for the Christman/Brinker Corktown joint venture.

"The first step that we always talked about was getting the building dry," he said. "That would seem pretty simple, just put a roof on it or close off the windows. But every time we sealed off one area, we found water coming out another. We’d get one area dried out and we’d find another, a pipe that was broken that was allowing water to discharge. We found rainwater coming in through the back part of the property that wasn’t even Ford’s at the time, that we had to isolate coming into the building."

And that was before discovering the flooded sub-basement that nobody knew existed, Staley said.

"It was very obvious from the trenches that had been cut into the concrete floor there that folks at Michigan Central Station had battled water in that building for a long time," he said. "Just to figure out where the next leak was going to happen, it was like the boy putting his finger in the dike and all of a sudden it starts leaking someplace else. Literally, it took us a year."

The team removed millions of gallons of water from the basement, and then had to figure out how to get the leaks to stop and dry the place out before ever starting restoration work.

"You’ve got hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of concrete that is just soaked and it has been soaked for years. And that moisture has to come out," Staley said. "The moisture coming out of there, it was probably about a year or a year and a half later that you could walk into the building and say it’s dry. You just felt it was dry. You weren’t walking into a cold or even a warm building that was all saturated."

Sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting

Historic buildings cannot be "force" dried, which is counterintuitive, but dumping heat into the building would leave moisture in places that didn’t have a problem before, he said. "So we usually figure about an inch a month of thickness of concrete or stone that, if you just keep rain off of it, it will naturally dry it out. Think of your clothes drying out in the house. So we wanted to respect the building, respect the historic fabric that was there, and let the building do what it would naturally do."

Once the workers had installed temporary roofing, covers on the huge windows and stormwater plumbing installed, the building began to dry. Sump pumps played a key role. After drying out the building, the team had to open it up and figure out how much moisture damage had been done, and how to fix it.

"Most of the damage was not visible," Staley said. "We didn’t have any big building collapses, and the building wasn’t leaning. But there were areas of structural steel and reinforced concrete that had deteriorated. Then we had to peel the layers of the onion back, if you will, to see what’s hidden, what can’t we see.

"We found steel deteriorated in ways that in my 45 years of construction I’d never seen before because it had stayed saturated so long. The concrete would look good and we’d start to remove maybe a little bit of loose concrete and you’d find out there was no steel beam left inside. It was totally rusted away. Other pieces looked like Swiss cheese ... holes rusted right through the beam. The fact that the bricks got wet or the concrete got wet that was around that steel and kept it saturated for probably 20-30 years, caused it to corrode."

Here's how crews handled the previously unknown sub-basement

The first two years? Just drying out the building. By now, the team was already behind schedule. They replaced steel that needed replacing. Then the team installed concrete floors where it had deteriorated. Installing the heating and air and electrical systems in the basement, essential for keeping the building temperature stable, wasn't easy.

"The building was never designed for the big air conditioners and code-required air movement that we have to have nowadays. So we had to find a room in the basement to put this equipment, but you’ve got these great big concrete columns and beams down there holding the building up that you can’t move," Staley said.

"So, literally, some of these pieces of equipment had mere inches to fit into these spaces. It was designed that way. We knew what the limitations were and we used every inch we could. The mechanical contractor would take pieces of equipment apart, take them down the stairs and put them back together down in the basement to heat and cool that great big waiting room. These are basically the equivalent to a furnace for someone’s house, but they’re the size of a house trailer that had to go down into the basement."

Flooding remained a concern.

"The biggest surprise we had was finding this floor that was down in the sub-basement that nobody knew about, trying to get arms around what’s the best thing to do with that," Staley said.

They decided to fill in that mystery sub-basement, which was not depicted on any of the original building drawings, with 22,000 yards of concrete.

"Every Saturday for a month, we would bring hundreds of concrete trucks in and fill the space in. It’s one of the areas that was allowing water to come into the building, also. So we put a drain system in to capture the moisture before it got there."

But that was not even the biggest flooding nightmare.

"When we got there, there was about 6 foot of water in the basement that was not pumped out when Ford bought the building," Staley said. "There was a wall up around that sub-basement that the original drawings indicated that there was nothing back behind that. Even the sub-basement wasn’t shown. So there was just no indication that there was another space underneath there. ... There was nothing on any of the drawings that indicated there was this cavity underneath there. You could stand up with a hard hat as long as you were careful. It varied from maybe 5 feet tall to 3 feet. So it wasn’t really a floor per se, but a huge crawl space that had a concrete floor and a concrete deck above that was what we thought was finished floor."

Elevator motors tossed from the roof

Hundreds of challenges surfaced on this project, which is typical for building preservation, Staley said.

"There was no one detail that we said, 'Omigosh.' We spent thousands and thousands of man hours to work through for a building that had been totally ignored for three decades."

His firm is known for its restoration work on state capitols in Michigan, Maryland and Virginia, as well as the U.S. Capitol and Mount Vernon, home of George Washington.

"We love taking buildings apart and putting them together," Staley said.

Key stages he described:

• Putting separate sets of drawings together that identified everything the team needed to do, which included a "make safe and dry out" package. They installed temporary netting in case anything fell from the ceiling. Carpenters covered holes. Ironworkers put metal plates down. Plumbers installed pipes. Roofers put in temporary roofing. "We just had to try and stop the water from coming in."
• Up in the top of the tower, the roof was pretty well deteriorated. Workers installed a water collection system on what was then the 13th floor and caught all the water coming in through the roof. Tarps would have blown off. Then workers had to start repairing the stormwater collection system and getting water out of the building. "So that was just a lot of plastic pipes that we were using, shooting water out of the windows or getting it down to sump pumps. The monumental windows in the waiting room were still wide open when Ford bought the building, so workers put tarps over them immediately to try to limit the rain coming in. They installed a temporary roof over the waiting room itself, single-ply rubber roofing. Workers had to install temporary roofing in multiple areas, then peel up damaged floors.
• There were holes through the roof where the elevator motors had been thrown from the penthouse. Ironworkers had to put steel plates over those holes before roofing was installed. The backside of the building had some massive holes, where it appeared when scrappers were taking elevator motors out that they rolled off the tower.

While the unknown flooding in the basement was a huge surprise, the project was riddled with little surprises.

"We would a find a whiskey bottle stuck behind a piece of plaster from one of the original workers," Staley said. "The terra-cotta up at the roofline, there’s 1,300 feet that was redone. When we opened that up we found brand new pieces of terra-cotta that had never gotten installed because the workers didn’t want to haul them back downstairs from 1913. You would find piles of ticket stubs somebody used as a mattress for when they were homeless."

As weather liquified plaster and left pock marks on cement columns, which remain today, the integrity of the Guastavino arches were essential to the whole project. Some 29,000 ceiling tiles are self-supporting, and only about 3,000 had to be replaced. If those had fallen, it would have been impossible to re-create. The ceiling in the biggest room would have collapsed. And forensic research indicated that was just two to three years away.

Cultural history unique to Detroit

While the transformation of Michigan Central Station may sound unbelievable, anything is possible with enough money, said Heather Veneziano, a professor of historic preservation at the Tulane University School of Architecture.

"As preservationists, I think we’re all committed to seeing the job through, from start to finish. You often don't know what you're going to encounter. It's kind of like surgery," she said. "In Detroit, you’re not just working toward the restoration of a physical building but working toward preserving something that tells a larger cultural history of the city."

Detroiters have called Michigan Central Station a metaphor for the Motor City. The struggle inside the building makes it an even more perfect depiction of Detroit and its relentless fight to come back, said Marcus Collins, marketing professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

"Here’s a location that had been ruined for such a long time. There are so many reasons why you could’ve cut bait and walked away. In many ways, that’s sort of how people discounted Detroit," said Collins, author of "For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want To Be." "In many ways, the train station is an artifact that signifies the spirit of Detroit and seeing it through."

Thousands of Detroiters visited the station after the Ford purchase in 2018 and thousands more are expected to attend the celebration in June. Some native Detroiters flew in from around the country six years ago.

"Nothing is 'just a building.' Everything is meaningless until we give it meaning," Collins said. "Cloud Gate in Chicago is just metal in the shape of a bean. But it has meaning because we give it meaning. The Empire State Building is just a building. Why go there? Because of what it signifies. Just like people will go to see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, why wouldn’t they come here to see this immaculate artifact that’s so impregnated with meaning now that it’s been refurbished here in Detroit?"

City leaders say crowd records set during a flawless NFL draft last month changed the nation's perception of Detroit.

"I think the NFL draft opened the country’s eyes to Detroit," Duggan told the Free Press. "I think the opening of the train station is going to give people across the country one more reason to visit. And it will be the most photographed site in the city of Detroit. This weekend, I saw a wedding couple in Roosevelt Park getting their pictures taken in front of it and it’s not even open yet ... The abandoned train station was a symbol of Detroit’s collapse. I think you’re going to see the reopened train station be the symbol of Detroit’s recovery."

To so many families, including that of Giesey, the story of the train station is highly personal.

"My grandmother came up from West Virginia after her father died. Her mother bought a house in Corktown at 25th and Howard, and she raised her family there" Giesey said. "They used to go to the train station and sing carols. This project is my past, my story."

Editor's Note: The reporter's husband worked on the train station as an electrician employed by Conti. And her great-great grandfather founded T.J. Wall & Sons paint company in Corktown in the 1800s.

Contact Phoebe Wall Howard : 313-618-1034 or phoward@freepress.com . Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter @phoebesaid . Read more on Ford and sign up for our autos newsletter .

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan Central Station: How secret basement, flooding nightmare led to renovation delays