In 2018, Chevy invited me on company dime to the Detroit Auto Show for an early preview of the then-redesigned Silverado. The trip included a stay at the Renaissance Center – just a short people mover ride from the show. I’ve been visiting Detroit in January for nearly a decade and have never once set foot inside General Motors’ glass-walled headquarters. I was intrigued, to say the least.
As I think back on my time in the buildings that GM will leave behind when it heads to the new Hudson’s location on Woodward Avenue, two things stood out to me. On the one hand there are the hotel rooms cold in January. Sure, they’re glass towers designed in the 1960s and 1970s; I adjusted my expectations accordingly. But when I could hardly see anything of the place because of all the ice forming Inside Looking at the glass, it became clear how flawed this iconic structure is.
My second and more relevant observation was that RenCen doesn’t feel like a city at all, let alone a city as populous as Detroit. The complex is effectively separated from its surroundings by swirling bands of river and asphalt. To the west is the entrance to the Windsor Tunnel; To the east there are parking spaces as far as the eye can see. To the north is the massive Jefferson Avenue and to the south is the Detroit River. One gets the feeling that if Henry Ford II and his team of investors had had their way, the whole thing would have been built offshore, with the swirling channel doubling as a moat. This is not a building that captivates the city; It is designed to stay outside.
Frost on the inside of the RenCen hotel glass.
Unlike the new Hudson’s project that GM plans to move into, a mixed-use anchor of residential, office, retail and entertainment right in Detroit’s most vibrant neighborhood, the RenCen is a symbol of an era in which every office in the Downtown Detroit was an island in a rising sea of decay. Back then, those who resisted the rapid erosion of Detroit’s urban bedrock had the best chance of survival. This was the era that gave us ugly skyways and eventually the people mover – anything that helped suburban commuters keep their metaphorical feet dry. The RenCen offered – and still offers – virtually all the essentials and plenty of “nice-to-haves,” all accessible without ever going outside, especially in the winter, but these temptations are aimed at those from the Coming to the suburbs to toil in the corridors.
GM hasn’t always tried to isolate itself from the city it built. The company has a long history of strategic spending in Detroit. Not long after the RenCen was built on Detroit’s riverfront, GM dropped a decent coin sprucing up around its former headquarters in the New Center district – another along the Woodward Avenue corridor. One of the jewels of the New Center Commons redevelopment effort was Detroit’s only car-free residential street, Pallister Park. The street itself is pedestrian-only, although each of the restored homes has a garage fronting an alley. Hey, it’s General Motors, not General Sneakers.
Even after packing up for RenCen in 1996, GM’s investment in New Center continued to strengthen the community against the blight that was spreading through surrounding neighborhoods. To this day, it provides convenient lodging for employees of the neighboring Henry Ford Hospital and residents of GM’s old headquarters building on West Grand Boulevard, not to mention the surrounding arts and business districts, which include Detroit landmarks like the Fisher Building and the Motown Museum belong . GM left Cadillac Place in 2001, but these investments helped keep the area alive and even thriving to this day. Ford hopes to do something similar with its investment in Corktown around Michigan Central Station, which it is redeveloping.
The view to the east from the RenCen Hotel, January 2018.
The city is working hard to reassemble what remains of its dilapidated neighborhoods into a larger urban fabric. New Center Commons hasn’t just shored up a few failing residential streets; It helped ensure that surrounding landmarks and historic districts did not fall victim to Detroit’s seemingly incessant rhythm of bankruptcy cycles. While the commercial real estate strategy of building suburban embassies like the RenCen in populated downtowns may have been attractive in the 1970s and 1980s, today’s Detroit needs fewer RenCens and more New Centers and Michigan Centrals. There definitely needs to be more Hudson’s.
Detroit needs a strong downtown to subsidize what remains of its far-flung single-family neighborhoods – neighborhoods that were built on the foundation of tightly knit public transportation networks but that disappeared as the automobile relentlessly overtook the train as America’s most popular form of rapid transit. Eventually, many Detroiters packed up the same cars and left the city for good, with no one to replace them. Urban space itself is like a car. The less you use it, the less reliable it becomes, and a city relies on its land to generate more tax revenue than it costs to maintain. Projects like Hudson’s are the treatment for Detroit’s toxic expanses of empty space. Build enough of it and it becomes a full-fledged antidote.
At the Renaissance Center, GM could sit comfortably while the world burned around him. By moving beyond Jefferson to downtown, GM symbolically blends in with the city itself. It’s an honorable gesture and hopefully one that will be recognized by others looking for a new home base. TThe NFL Draft was no accident. Detroit is once again on the move. It’s encouraging to see GM on board.