Ford is renovating the Detroit train station for $950 million on the campus

Detroit – Ford The latest project from the Motor City is the restoration and reopening of an abandoned train station, which for decades was a symbol of Detroit's fall and now the automaker's new technology campus.

The $950 million project includes the 18-story former train station called Michigan Central Station — once the state's landmark transit building — an adjacent 270,000-square-foot building and other supporting amenities.

The 30-acre Michigan Central campus and station were initially announced in 2018 and scheduled to open by 2022. However, the coronavirus pandemic and extensive work needed to renovate the station delayed its reopening. Ford is celebrating the restoration of the century-old train station on Thursday.

Following Thursday's event, the ground floor of the train station building will be open to the public until June 16, before its first commercial occupants begin moving in this fall.

The new campus comes at a perilous time Ford investors As the company continues to restructure its business. It also comes as many companies are trying to downsize offices and fill their existing buildings with employees who have become accustomed to working from home during the pandemic.

Specifically in Detroit, a stark juxtaposition emerged: in April, Ford's crosstown rival General Motors It announced it would downsize its headquarters in the high-rise Renaissance Center along the city's riverfront to two floors in a nearby building under construction.

However, Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr. said he believes the investment made in the historic train station is a critical part of the automaker's future, including aspects of talent acquisition and retention.

“We are in a war for talent, our industry and our company,” Ford, who led the project, told CNBC. “And you have to give talent two things: You have to give them, first, really interesting problems to solve, and then you have to give them a great place to work. And with Michigan Central, we check both of those boxes.”

Bill Ford decided to purchase the dilapidated building after years of trips to Silicon Valley for his venture capital firm Fontinalis and during his tenure as a member of Fontinalis' board of directors. eBay board of directors. He has long been vocal about the need for the traditional auto industry to compete with newer technology companies in acquiring products and talent.

Ford said attracting top talent to Detroit is “getting better” but noted that it is “difficult” to convince workers from California or the East Coast to move to Detroit and work for Ford.

“If you can show them a place like Michigan Central, not just in terms of its beauty, which is incredible on its own, but then talk about the kind of things that will happen there, I think it becomes a really valuable resource for the company moving forward,” he said.

Central Michigan's campus is located southwest of Detroit's main business district in a trendy neighborhood known as Corktown. It's about 10 miles from Ford's global headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.

Michigan's Central Campus spans a total of 1.2 million square feet of commercial space, including retail, dining and hospitality. It has been awarded $300 million in state, local and historic rehabilitation tax incentives, according to officials.

Ford officials went to great lengths to restore the station to its original glory after decades of vandalism and decay. The project involved 3D scanning the rooms, matching materials and referring to historical photographs to recreate parts of the building.

This is especially true on the first floor of the train station, where the great room features huge windows, a hallway, and a large foyer filled with marble floors, terrazzo, Mankato stone, and other unique materials.

The architects and designers chose to leave some graffiti to represent the station's dormant years after its closure in 1988.

As one of Ford's design measures, officials traced the facility's original limestone to a quarry in Indiana only to discover that it had since been closed. Michigan Central worked with the owners to reopen the quarry.

“It has been painstakingly and lovingly restored, wherever possible, to its original condition,” Josh Serifman, CEO of Michigan Central, said during a tour of the project. “Before we start activating it with a lot of things, it will probably be at its best.”

Amid national commercial real estate challenges, about two-thirds of the tower has identified tenants or planned use cases, officials said. That includes an unnamed restaurant and hotel, pending rezoning approval.

The adjacent building, known as the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, houses more than 600 employees from about 100 startups.

“It's really the beginning of the ecosystem I want to create,” Bill Ford said. “There will be a lot of experiments going on there.”

Ford plans to house at least 2,500 employees in the building, most of them members of the company's electric vehicle and related services teams. Nearly 1,000 of those employees are expected to move into the station tower by the end of this year, Ford said.

Other building occupants could include local universities, other businesses and a restaurant. However, officials declined to reveal the full list of expected tenants. Googlethe project's co-founder, runs the “Code Next” program, which teaches students how to code, from the Book Depository building.

Ford said he expects automakers' employees in the future will be able to collaborate with other occupants of the station tower as well as startups that occupy the Book Depository building.

Reviving the train station and surrounding campus is the latest project undertaken by Bill Ford, grandson of company founder Henry Ford, in the Motor City.

He was instrumental in moving the Ford family-owned Detroit Lions from suburban Pontiac to a new stadium, appropriately called Ford Field, in downtown Detroit in 2002. He was also part of the team that brought the Super Bowl to the city in 2006.

He redeveloped the company's River Rouge Assembly plant into a “green” production facility amid calls for it to close. It's now a production destination for the full-size Ford F-150 pickup.

Ford, who served as CEO of the automaker from 2001 to 2006, described Michigan Central as a continuation of such projects. He described the effort as a “legacy project” for himself and those who were able to work on it.

“I'm very proud of those two previous projects, but I think this will put an exclamation mark on it because it's going to be a great place to work but it's also going to be a great place for the public,” Ford said.