Ford to revamp Detroit book warehouse into innovation hub

DETROIT (AP) — Ford Motor Co. revealed plans Tuesday to transform a long-vacant book warehouse into a hub for automobile innovation in Detroit’s oldest neighborhood.

Corktown, long known for its wood-framed houses, restaurants and taverns, is the site of the automaker's planned $740 million project to create a place where new transportation and mobility ideas are nurtured and developed.

The Dearborn, Michigan-based company's foray into Corktown started with its 2018 acquisition of the massive Michigan Central train station and other buildings in the neighborhood just west of downtown.

When work is completed, the 30-acre (12.1 hectare) site will have more than 1 million square feet (304,800 meters) of commercial space.

“This is a really, authentically beautiful neighborhood. It’s really important that we maintain its integrity,” said Mary Culler, Ford’s Detroit development director and president of the Ford Foundation.

For decades, Corktown stood in the long shadow of the hulking 17-story train station. After being vacated in 1988, the building epitomized Detroit’s blight and economic despair amid the city’s steadily shrinking manufacturing base and exodus of people.

Between the 1950s and 2010, Detroit lost more than 1 million residents. Stable, middle- and blue-collar neighborhoods were emptied of families. Houses became vacant, stripped of metal and anything else of value before collapsing or razed into mounds of wood and other debris.

Through it all, the train station remained standing — too costly to demolish, too large for other uses, and a contradiction to its once-ornate grandeur.

The depot opened in late 1913 and was designed by the same architects who created New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Like other train stations across the U.S.,...