When the Book Cadillac hotel opened in Detroit a century ago this month, it crowned the Motor City as one of the most dominant metropolitan powers on the planet.
The tallest hotel in the world at the time, it boasted more than 1,100 rooms set across 31 stories. Back then, Detroit was a place where all and sundry wanted to see or be seen as the city’s dominant industry – automobiles – fueled the dawn of mass mobility for the wider world.
While the decades since have been less kind, today Detroit finds itself in the midst of a resurgence.
At the recently opened Newlab technology hub, once an abandoned book depository for the city’s school system, robots move across bare concrete floors. Outside, the whirl of an electric-powered ATV fills the streets. Inside the building, more than 100 startups are working to figure out the future of mobility.
Whereas a century ago, immigrants from Syria, Poland and Ireland landed at the Michigan Central train station next door, today entrepreneurs and engineers from Mexico, Norway and beyond are descending on the city.
Many have chosen to come to Detroit rather than Boston, Silicon Valley or Austin because a new wave of innovation – and $700m worth of investment by the Ford Motor Company, city tax breaks and money from other investors – is helping revive a locale that for so long served as a poster child for the death of the American city.
Livaq, a startup founded by David Medina, a 26-year-old entrepreneur from Mexico, is developing electric all-terrain vehicles that will reduce both air and noise pollution in urban environments. The Norwegian firm wheel.me promises to turn any object into a robot capable of autonomously moving huge objects and is working with some of Detroit’s major auto manufacturers.
“When we wanted to expand into the US market, Siemens, one of our major customers, has a huge base in Atlanta, so there was a draw to move there,” says Robert Skinner, a Detroit native and the US managing director for EcoG, a Munich-headquartered EV charging technology company.
“But when the team came in for the Detroit auto show, they saw the recovery, everything that’s going on – it’s buzzing here. We got a one-on-one meeting with the governor … All that helped make the decision to be based here.”
Just a decade ago, General Motors was bankrupt, and with $18bn in debt the city ran out of cash, becoming the largest US city ever to go bust. Its emergency services were shut down as, over decades, about 700,000 residents walked away from the city and its ever-growing list of problems.
All through this time, the hulking Michigan Central building and the former book depository next door served as a reminder of both Detroit’s grand, distant past and more recent decline.
In 2018, the Ford Motor Company bought the 90-acre site for $90m and has since spent 1.7m work hours involving thousands of tradespeople to bring the stunning beaux-arts classical building back to its former glory.
“At its height [in the 1940s], 4,000 people would walk through Michigan Central every day [taking trains to and from Detroit],” says Josh Sirefman, Michigan Central’s CEO.
“Recently, we’ve had 4,000 people come to use the building again. There’s a sort of poetry to that. It’s a major statement about things coming to life again.”
The rebirth of the area was marked by a concert last summer where thousands of tickets to see performers such as Detroit natives Diana Ross and Eminem were snapped up within hours.
As the country’s largest Black-majority city, efforts to foster minority-led innovation have been a part of the revival story.
In spring 2023, Alexa Turnage and her husband, Johnnie, founded Black Tech Saturdays after being told that Black tech founders and entrepreneurs “don’t exist”.
“We would start here at 10am on Saturdays, and at 5pm people would still be turning up, looking to get involved,” says Johnnie.
Since then, the organization has held dozens of workshop and networking events in support of local and national Black tech communities from their base at Michigan Central.
“Our biggest event was when we had a woman founders takeover last March. About 1,200 people came in. We took over all three floors of this building.”
Hundreds of high school students have also gone through Google’s Code Next program, an effort that’s also housed at Michigan Central.
It’s not only Michigan Central that’s experiencing a revival.
A decade ago, most of downtown Detroit’s skyscrapers were abandoned or derelict. Today, each one has been renovated to varying states, and all are occupied once more.
The recovery of the Book Tower, a 38-floor, renaissance-style building, is especially satisfying for many.
“It’s hard to overstate how much damage had been done to the building. It was a combination of deterioration – stone panels popping off walls, painted glass ceilings were falling off – and damage,” says Jamie Witherspoon of Bedrock, a real estate company owned by Dan Gilbert, the Detroit billionaire who owns Rocket Mortgage and the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers.
Bedrock’s centerpiece project for the past decade has been bringing the Book Tower back to life.
The building had been left vacant for six years before Gilbert and his team swept in with deep pockets to repurpose the former office tower to 21st-century palates.
Last year, and nearly $400m later, it opened as a stunning mixed-use space with five restaurants, hundreds of apartments, 117 extended-stay suites and dozens of caryatids looking down on life in a resurgent city center. Architectural Digest magazine has named it one of the world’s most beautiful repurposed buildings.
“We saw this as an opportunity, at some level, to take what had been a poster child for urban decay and turn it into a place for lots of different people to come and experience,” says Witherspoon.
Still, the city faces major challenges.
Poverty in Detroit is nearly three times the national average, while rocketing housing costs in gentrifying neighborhoods have seen some residents’ lives upended.
When General Motors recently asked for the city of Detroit to come up with $250m to help renovate its iconic RenCen skyscrapers, some resident groups balked.
But the city’s upward trajectory is undeniable.
On a patch of land next to Michigan Central, Detroit City FC hopes to build a new stadium in close proximity to the Mexicantown neighborhood, a community from which the soccer team draws much of its support.
Last year, the city’s population grew for the first time since the late 1950s.
“They drive from Ohio, Kentucky [and] Tennessee. We have people come from Baltimore, New York and Toronto. One person flew in from Brazil,” says Johnnie Turnage of the people who’ve attended his Black Tech Saturdays events.
“We have one collaborator in Los Angeles who is thinking about moving here.”
