New and Old #169
Friday roundup and commentary
Why Ford spent $1 billion to transform an abandoned Detroit train station, Fast Company, Nate Berg, June 4, 2024
Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, is sitting in what was once one of the world’s most glorious drug dens. Michigan Central Station, the grand Beaux Arts terminal and 18-story tower that served as Detroit’s train hub from 1913 to 1988, has spent the decades since its closure in abandonment and abject decrepitude. Left to crumble under the elements and stripped of nearly all removable bits of valuable scrap, the 640,000 square foot building became a free-for-all zone that has over the years held raves, housed encampments, endured graffiti, and seen lots of drug use. From the outside, the station’s hulking ruins became synonymous with the decline of Detroit and the left-behind economies of urban America.
This most iconic of “ruin porn” Detroit artifacts has been meticulously restored, amid a somewhat quiet but real resurgence of Detroit’s population and economic situation. It’s pretty clear that the city hit rock-bottom some years ago and, however slowly, is recovering. Unlikely as this might seem, Detroit was always far too large and important a city to simply slip away into a ghost town.
The restoration of the building was a real, serious endeavor:
She says that during the renovation process, anonymous callers would reach out about returning pieces of the station they’d saved (or pilfered) over the years; many were 3D scanned in order to be replicated. Some parts of the station, including long-lost carved ram’s head column capitals, wouldn’t have been possible to recreate without them.
A glass-covered steel truss roof pours light into the main concourse, a sharp contrast from the rain and snow that fell inside for decades. Beige Mankato limestone columns climb dozens of feet over the ticketing booth and central arcade, each refurbished with new pieces of stone pulled from a quarry in Indiana that Ford’s team paid to reopen after its own 30-year closure. Centered between them, a grand wooden clock has been rebuilt using historical images and 3D printed parts. The direct view of that clock from one spot in the waiting hall made it such a popular place that decades of foot movements there have left a visible divot in the marble floor that can still be seen.
It doesn’t convince me that a car company is a great civic benefactor, but there’s something very nice and old-fashioned in a good way about seeing a private corporation do something philanthropic or in the public interest like this. The piece is very long and full of the building’s history and restoration process. Read the whole thing.
Wednesday Walk: One Less HoJo, Willoughby Hills, Heath Racela, June 5, 2024
Looking at the rendering on the fence, the argument could be made that the cupola and the dormers are an attempt at homage to Howard Johnson’s, but it also doesn’t look that different from any other small strip mall in New England. I can think of several in nearby towns built over the last decade that still sit half-vacant.
The official lineup for this development has not been announced, but according to local news reports last fall:
“One proposed restaurant could be of the ‘fast casual’ variety — not ‘fast food,’ like McDonald’s, but more on the order of Chipotle or Five Guys.
Meh.
On the one hand, I’ll be a little sad to see a relic of roadside Americana fade. Ironically, though, I can’t get too mad that the space is being taken over by national chains. After all, Howard Johnson’s was one of the first successful restaurant chains to franchise and reach critical mass on our highways and turnpikes. Chipotle and Five Guys, for better or worse, are the Howard Johnson’s of this era.
This is basically how I think about this sort of churn in the built environment. I think landmarks and memories do amount to something; I think continuity in our surroundings engenders a sense of stability and security that may be worth something. But everything old was once new, and everything new may one day be old. Time can hallow things, but there’s no reason to act as though that process can no longer unfold with the boring, common artifacts of the present day—which is what almost all historic commercial architecture once was.
This is a very nice piece expressing this tension very articulately.
Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, The Lamp, Hannah Rowan, June 7, 2024
This piece is somewhat critical of “fat pride” or whatever you would call it, but does have some nuance. There’s a lot here, give it a read. Mostly, though, it makes me think about a very American tendency among both progressives and conservatives.
We seem to take American problems (car dependence and traffic congestion, urban disorder, mass homelessness, or in this case obesity) and draw them into the culture war and imbue them with a moral and cultural valence, rather than show some curiosity as to why exactly America seems to suffer from these problems in an outsized manner.
Yes, if you’re overweight, you deserve respect and not discrimination. But lateral to that is the fact that America suffers from an outsized obesity rate, and making sure fat people have dignity shouldn’t be seen as running counter to probing obesity in general as a public health problem. And somehow those concerns seem to get split apart and sorted by politics. Just my thoughts.
A 27-Year Old Tamagotchi Mystery Has Been Solved, 404 Media, Jason Koebler, June 6, 2024
A Discord user named rhubarb_pie found out how to unlock the “Moll & Lora” twins as playable characters, which were previously seen in the handheld pet-raising-simulator as medical nurses who healed your character when it was sick. The Tamagotchi Wiki states they had previously been obtained through a “battery glitch,” but rhubarb_pie figured out how to unlock them as playable characters through the normal course of gaming.
Who knew these decades-old tiny primitive electronic toys would hold an interesting bit of trivia like this. I love stories in small, ordinary things. Give it a read!
Related Reading:
Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,000 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!
Thanks for including my HoJo piece! Always honored to be on these Friday roundups