Detroiters Have a Newly Restored Michigan Central Station to Be Thankful for This Holiday Season

On the second Monday of December, a holiday party was thrown in Detroit the likes of which hasn’t been seen in close to a century. A jazz band crooned seasonal tunes—and, since it was cold outside, also took the gathering to the month of May with “My Girl”—as stylish guests ate from a charcuterie table the size of a Mustang Cobra hood.

“Detroit is having a moment,” Jim Farley, Ford Motor Company’s president and CEO (also, the cousin of the late great Tommy Boy himself), proudly announced, raising a glass.

The moment certainly wasn’t lost on the attendees inside Michigan Central Station, the former Motor City masterpiece-turned-American-ruin that was on the brink of demolition until 2018, when Ford committed to a billion-dollar restoration project returning MCS, as it is often called, to its Gilded Age grandeur, now as a technology and innovation hub. It was a coming-out Christmas party 111 years in the making.

The train station originally opened December 26, 1913. It saw its final Amtrak pull out on January 5, 1988, and then spent the better part of 40 years in an ever-worsening state of putrescence, albeit one that became a living canvas for photographers, graffiti artists, cinematographers and local hip-hop icon Eminem, who found the decay “Beautiful” enough for his song’s video shoot.

As Jamon Jordan, Detroit’s first official historian, succinctly puts it: “The great thing about the restoration of Michigan Central Station is that it is no longer a national symbol of our failure.”

The swanky soiree offered more than just an opportunity for partygoers to gaze in awe at intricately restored historical details, such as the 29,000 interlocking Guastavino tiles—only 1,300 were replaced—that make up the Grand Hall’s vaulted ceiling. It was also the launch event for The Station: The Fall and Rise of Michigan Central, a collaborative photo-driven book (of…