Michigan Central Station, Detroit, 2010

If you somehow could designate an architectural symbol for the City of Detroit—say for the cover of a magazine—the possibilities would not take long to work through. The Renaissance Center, a building only a chamber of commerce could love that nevertheless usually fills the role, wouldn't make the list. Albert Kahn's Fisher Building, the Guardian, the Penobscot, the Book Cadillac—distinctive buildings from the city's great era of expansion in the 1920s, still standing (unlike others from that period) but no longer resonant. A regular reader of this journal might think of Henry Ford's Highland Park factory, or even the mythical Rouge Plant; but the one you could not pick out of a lineup of early-twentieth-century factory buildings, and the other was a city itself—impossible to fit in a single frame. Maybe a highway cloverleaf, moving up a notch or two in abstraction, but one looks pretty much like another. A few others.

Then there is the building that graces the front cover of this, the last issue of Technology and Culture to originate from Detroit: the beautiful and desolate shell of the abandoned Michigan Central Station. It rises eighteen stories above Roosevelt Park, next to Corktown, the city's oldest neighborhood. To its front are Michigan Avenue—the old Chicago Road—and two interstate highways, I-96 and the long concrete line of I-75, which runs from Lake Superior to Miami. Behind it lie Ontario, the Detroit River, and the Ambassador Bridge, which with the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel carries the traffic of the busiest commercial border crossing in the world. It isn't easy to approach the city's center from the east, south, or west without using one of these routes, and the nearest building more than fifty feet tall is a quarter-mile away, so the station stands out. The sight is a shock to the first-time visitor, and can catch a local unawares.

A likely place to contemplate both the building and the shock is Slows Bar-B-Q on Michigan, sometime haunt of the T&C editorial team, the city's best barbeque. It opened seven or eight years ago, not long after the Detroit Tigers abandoned their historic ballpark nearby: part restaurant, part "third place," part arts collective, part civics project, a testimonial to the power of unconventional thinking. A different perspective can be found on the other side of the station, in the general area of 17th and Howard. From that corner on a summer night the Ambassador Bridge sparkles, and the line of semis idling at customs stretches out of sight. To the right the Michigan Central seems even bigger and emptier than it does in the daytime, its windows as dark as deep space. The occasional wiseass suggests lighting it up like Rome does with the Coliseum.

The Michigan Central Station in winter. The low building to the left is the Roosevelt Warehouse, another of the city's ruins, more notorious than most. Once the Detroit Post Office, it was later used by the Detroit Public Schools as a warehouse. When the DPS abandoned the building after a 1987 fire it left behind tons of books and supplies, a scandal in a city with a criminally negligent school system. Then in January 2009 a group of what is colloquially known as urban explorers found a dead man almost completely encased in ice in an elevator shaft in the building. Amid the titillated media patter that followed, the discovery of a body and the incompetent response by 911 somehow seemed less remarkable than what they had been doing in the building: playing hockey.

(Photo by Joe Braun, www.citrusmilo.com. Reproduced with permission.)

It is really two buildings, a depot and the tower, which housed the railroad's offices. The Michigan Central was an independent subsidiary of the New York Central, and the station was designed by the same architectural firms responsible for New York City's Grand Central Terminal, at about the same time and in the same Beaux...