Mitch Albom: Michigan Central Station celebrates not just Detroit’s future, but its present

“The past is a bucket of ashes.”

— Carl Sandburg

Sandburg was right. The past is ashes. And the first thing you should know about Detroit’s newly famous train station is that, much like our city itself, it has now risen from the ashes twice.

A fire claimed the city’s previous train depot in 1913 and rushed a new building in Corktown into immediate service — one day after Christmas. It wasn’t finished, but it didn’t matter. Anyone coming through the doors saw its promise.

Today, 111 years later, history is repeating itself. Now dubbed the Michigan Central Station, the once magnificent Beaux Arts building has risen from the ashes again, this time the ashes of urban decay, under which it sat in shadowed abandonment for 35 ugly years.

And what mattered last century is what matters in this one.

Promise. Hope. A future of the possible.

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Here in the Motor City, we have been making a big fuss over the station’s reopening — special tours, a massive concert, etc. And perhaps the outside world is wondering why we bother. It’s just a train station, right?

Not to us. Michigan Central is more than a building. It’s more than a new beginning. It’s the end of something.

It’s the end of rot as a symbol of Detroit. The end of decay as some kind of Detroit sport. The end of headlines like the New York Times ran in 2012:

“How Detroit Became the World Capital of Staring at Abandoned Buildings.”

Sorry, great Gray Lady. You want poverty porn, you’ll have to go someplace else.

We’re about the future now.

Decades in the making

I recently took a tour through the Michigan Central renovation with the project’s CEO, Josh Sirefman. As we walked through the former lobby, the reading rooms, the elegant parlors and the various magnificent spaces of this 15-story tower and adjacent buildings, covering 30 acres of a future tech and innovation hub, he gave witness to the transformation this project represents.

“It’s been a privilege to help this come together,” he said.

Sirefman himself is a microcosm of Detroit’s full circle. He came here as a young man to get a master’s at the University of Michigan. While enrolled, he moved into Detroit, about six blocks from the train station. This was in the mid-1990s.

“It was a lot different then,” he understated. “But I fell in love with Detroit, and kind of always hoped for an opportunity to be able to be involved again.”

He left for New York and was gone for decades. Still, Detroit stayed with him, the way it stays with many people who come to know it. So when the chance to helm the renovation arose, under the new ownership of the Ford Motor Co., Sirefman jumped at it.

Since then, he has helped spearhead Ford’s nearly $1 billion effort. It’s taken six years, thousands of workers, and everything from an original clock being dropped off anonymously to 3D laser printers re-creating rams heads above doorways. But the results are nothing shy of stunning.

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You can’t fit into words what the MCS now represents. It’s a blend of past and future so bright it appears seamless.

Here, refurbished tiles and copper skylights spill into modern art displays and a virtual mini-museum of historic Detroit posters. Here, the Doric columns and the marble tiles of the early 20th century surround an undulating 21st century history display. Original and freshly created architecture dance together under a 29,000-tile ceiling. In adjacent buildings, modern tech businesses bustle under the arches and exposed rafters of bygone days.

This is not just a train station. Hardly. In fact, trains have little to do with it. Sure, someday in the not-too-distant future, a train may begin to stop here. But for now, this project is about rebirthing an entire neighborhood and anchoring a second Detroit downtown, not only the main terminal, but with the beautifully redone Book Depository building, which already houses dozens of budding startups, shared office space and food options.

Not to mention the hotel that is coming, the massive parks, the additional structures tabbed for tech and innovation, the outdoor leisure options and the parking.

The fabulous future. Not the rot of the past.

Take your ruin porn obsession elsewhere

I remember the year I went to the Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea. Reporters had heard of impoverished areas in the city that the government was hoping to shield from the press. One day, I got into a taxi and, through a translator, asked the driver to see “one of the really poor neighborhoods.”

He hesitated. He looked upset. Finally, he turned to the translator and said, “Why does he want to see the worst of my city? He is a guest here. Let me show him the best.”

For years, many of us felt that way when people came to visit Detroit. Our Poverty Porn, or Ruin Porn, had somehow become a major attraction, often the first thing outsiders wanted to see. The Packard Plant. The train station. The rows of abandoned homes.

Eight years ago, Britain’s newspaper, “The Guardian,” did a story about those gawkers, and how they were advancing nothing and helping no one.

“The ruins,” it wrote, “are gazed upon for amusement, gratification and pleasure.”

Well, guess what, decay junkies? We’re no longer here for your debris obsession. We are not interested in putting our ugly past on display.

Instead, come look at our growth. Come see a future we’re proud of, not a past we can’t help.

The Michigan Central Station, by itself, isn’t a cure-all. But it’s part. It isn’t a neighborhood. But it’s anchoring one. It isn’t everything to everybody. But it’s a whole lot to a whole lot of people. And anyone who witnesses its impressive span will see what we mean.

There’s a small section of the train station’s reconstruction that deliberately left a rotting staircase and a graffiti wall. It is chained off, and clearly marked as a historic relic. But it’s there: as a reminder of what was, and an appreciation of what is. If we want to be reminded of the bad old days, we’ll set aside a reminder. But that’s our prerogative. It’s no longer the reason for people to come to town.

Carl Sandburg’s full quote is as follows: “The past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, nor just for tomorrow, but in the here and now.”

Pretty good advice, for life, or for a symbol of rebirth in the form of a train station. And like a locomotive pulling to a steaming stop, it’s no longer coming, folks. It’s here.

All aboard.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.