Architectural History
Detroit's Grand Central: Michigan Central Station
In its much-photographed desolation, Detroit's Michigan Central Station could be called America's Ruin, while New York's restored Grand Central Terminal more than ever lives up to its title as America's Piazza San Marco.
Grand Central was one of New York's first buildings to be targeted for landmark designation, sparing it from demolition to become one of the nation's most celebrated urban icons and the world's sixth-ranking tourist attraction. Michigan Central's listing on the National Register of Historic Places protects it only from federally-funded demolition. It has survived a 2009 appeal by Detroit's mayor for federal stimulus funds to pay for its removal and a City Council resolution that year calling on the Station's owner to demolish it with his own money. Michigan Central lacks the landmark designation that would give it the protection it deserves, including oversight of alterations or restoration. Political realities often drive preservation decisions and may explain how the Station remains unprotected.
The case for Michigan Central's landmark status seems obvious: America's preservation movement was born of the 1963 demolition of New York's Pennsylvania Station and proven in a battle for the preservation of Grand Central Terminal, Beaux-Arts train stations in the mold of Michigan Central.
Just how closely Michigan Central is related to Grand Central hasn't received due attention; it's often observed that they were designed by the same architects, but this only scratches the surface of their bond. The designers of both stations were a contentious team of two firms, Reed & Stem of St. Paul and Warren & Wetmore of New York. They were forced together by the New York Central Railroad, owner of the Michigan Central Railroad, in a shotgun-marriage of a partnership called the Associated Architects of Grand Central Terminal, the name by which they also designed Michigan Central. The stations were their only large-scale collaborations and were designed almost at once for effectively the same client.
Renderings of Michigan Central Station with its defining tower (left) and Grand Central Terminal with its unbuilt one (right) show how similar they were in concept. Their trios of monumental arches, each flanked by paired columns and alternating with smaller openings, reveal a more specific level of similarity. Both opened in 1913; Grand Central in February and Michigan Central in December. Michigan Central's distinctive tower made it the world's tallest train station, and owes to the idea of one conceived for Grand Central. In both renderings, America's signature architectural innovation - the skyscraper - grows from a train station modeled on an ancient Roman bath. This duality reflects an underlying battle for the soul of American architecture then led by two Chicago architects: Louis Sullivan, "father of the skyscraper" and "prophet of modernism," and Daniel Burnham, the "father of the City Beautiful" who made classicism the era's national style. Beyond their juxtaposition of skyscraper and Roman bath, the stations are permeated by a mix of the historic and futuristic, giving them unique architectural depth.
The shock of Michigan Central's abandoned grandeur distracts from its oddly conjoined building types and isolation from other large buildings. Grand Central is only the most immediate key to making sense of Detroit's Station. Its full explanation leads from ancient Rome through Paris and Chicago to New York at its most futuristic.
Richard Morris Hunt designed several houses for William K. Vanderbilt, including his 1892 Marble House in Newport (left). Hunt also designed the Administration Building (right) of Chicago's 1893 World's Fair, named the World's Columbian Exposition. The Fair popularized the classical architecture favored by Gilded Age tycoons like Vanderbilt and imprinted their taste on the American populace.
Vanderbilt was American aristocracy, the grandson of "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the New York Central Railroad. He was himself chairman of the Railroad's board of directors during the construction of Grand Central Terminal and Michigan Central Station, a time when railroads were a major part of the American economy. According to The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker, "At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly two-fifths of the shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange were associated with railroads." The steel industry spawned by the rails themselves would help make America a superpower and provide the structural framework for the skyscrapers by which the world would know its cities.
Richard Morris Hunt was the first American architect to study at Paris's École des Beaux Arts, the centuries-old school which based education on classical precedents, giving its name to Beaux-Arts architecture. A generation of Americans followed Hunt's example in studying architecture at the École, often topping off their education with an internship at New York's most prominent architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White. These "Paris men" included Boring & Tilton, designers of Ellis Island's main building; Carrere & Hastings, architects of the New York Public Library; and Whitney Warren, of Warren & Wetmore, who set the architectural style for Grand Central and Michigan Central.
Students at the École des Beaux-Arts learned to build upon historic examples like Rome's Baths of Caracalla (above). While the school promoted rational analysis and planning which would pave the way for modernism, its adherence to classical forms and compositional rules can appear cult-like or even superstitious from a modern perspective. Classical precedents were viewed as pertinent educational models because they had been gradually refined over centuries. Whitney Warren defended their applicability to the New World:
Architecture is always an evolution. Of course, we use old styles; we can't invent a new one, we can only evolve a new one. So we are taking the best elements in the old styles, and we are attempting to produce from them what is suggested and demanded by our present conditions - a new and American style.
Roman baths and basilicas were the ancient building types best suited as models for large buildings, including metropolitan train stations.



The Fair is going to have a great influence in our country. The American people have seen the "Classics" on a grand scale for the first time. . . . I can see all America constructed along the lines of the Fair, in noble, dignified, Classic style. The great men of the day all feel that way about it - all of them.
Wright responded that Sullivan - Wright's "Lieber Meister" - didn't feel that way, and that Burnham's old partner Root wouldn't if he were still alive. Wright claimed the conversation took place as Burnham offered him an all-expenses-paid Beaux-Arts education in Paris and two years soaking up Rome, to be followed by a job with his firm. Wright declined and lived to portray Burnham as Mephistopheles and himself refusing to barter his self-reliant American soul, giving Ayn Rand material for the individualistic architect-protagonist Howard Roark in her novel, The Fountainhead. Ironically, it was Sullivan, not Burnham, who had attended the École des Beaux-Arts. In his Autobiography of an Idea, Sullivan wrote of leaving it with the "conviction that this Great School, in its perfect flower of technique, lacked the profound animus of a primal inspiration." He wrote that "beneath the law of the School lay a law which it ignored unsuspectingly or with fixed intention" which he "saw everywhere in the open of life." Sullivan institutionalized this law in his 1896 essay, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered":Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change.
Sullivan had the last word: his "form follows function" is so ingrained in modern consciousness it's hard to believe architects only a century ago modeled train stations on Roman baths. Burnham's betting on the tycoons and their taste for classicism paid off. When he died in 1912 while touring Europe with his family, his firm was among the world's largest. The uncompromising Sullivan is now regarded as one of the three or four greatest architects in American history for his pioneering modernism, easily overshadowing Burnham, but he took the harder road to its bitter end. He died in obscurity in 1924, alone, alcoholic, months behind in rent on his cheap hotel-room home, his last office a couple of student-intern draftsmen in borrowed space.









Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die.
Daylight showing through the still-unfinished and unrented floors of Michigan Central's tower in photos taken after the Park's completion is a troubling sign that no one would be coming to the party, regardless of its plans or diagram. From today's defeatist attitude toward grand projects, the audacity and optimism on display at Michigan Central is - for all its hubris - impressive.


In ancient times the entrance to the city was through an opening in the walls or fortifications. This portal was usually decorated and elaborated into an Arc of Triumph, erected to some military or naval victory, or to the glory of some great personage. The city of today has no wall surrounding that may serve, by elaboration, as a pretext to such glorification, but none the less the gateway must exist, and in the case of New York and other cities it is through a tunnel which discharges the human flow in the very centre of the town.
Warren's reference to "other cities" applies his portal reasoning to Detroit and the heroic arches of his design for Michigan Central.





A memorable complex of interconnected concourses, hotels, office accommodation, shopping and railway facilities straddling two levels of tracks and interlaced with roads. Grand Central . . . is often cited by New Yorkers as proof that megastructure was invented in that city.
An anecdote from Grand Central: Gateway to a Million Lives by John Belle and Maxinne R. Leighton makes its own case that Grand Central is a megastructure:The Hotel Biltmore was located directly above the Terminal's arrival tracks, so that it was possible for a person to book a room at the Biltmore, arrive at Grand Central, and take an elevator from the concourse level or walk up a short flight of stairs from the Incoming Train Station Waiting Room to the hotel lobby without going outside. In the 1940s a honeymooning couple had arrived at the Terminal to take a train to Niagara Falls when a violent storm struck the city, disrupting all service. The couple took a room in the Biltmore, had their meals at the Oyster Bar, shopped in the Terminal's stores, and spent the weekend without once venturing out into the hostile weather.
Michigan Central had no hotel, but it did have a vast waiting room, reading room, smoking room, lunch counter, elegant restaurant with vaulted ceilings like the Oyster Bar's, sleeping accommodations and offices for railroad personnel, stores and a barber shop adjoined by eight private dressing rooms equipped with bathtubs "to allow out-of-town patrons to change clothes and dress for evening appointments without going to a hotel," according to the Railway Age Gazette. This last amenity would enable one to awaken in New York's Biltmore Hotel, take a train to Detroit - perhaps sleeping overnight in a Pullman car - get a shave from a barber upon arrival, bathe and put on fresh clothes without going outside, all within an architecturally consistent user experience.

The architects of Chicago welcomed the steel frame and did something with it. The architects of the East were appalled by it and could make no contribution to it.
Sullivan was himself appalled by what he saw as deference to the architecture of European empires. He would have seen in Michigan Central's classical top and bottom not the gradually evolving "new and American style" Whitney Warren peddled, but what he called "the incongruous spectacle of the infant Democracy taking its mental nourishment at the withered breast of Despotism."















There is a whole story in the ramps, how the terminal engineers, not satisfied with theoretical calculations, built experimental ramps at various slopes and studied thereon the gait and gasping limit of lean men with heavy suitcases, fat men without other burden than their flesh, women with babies, school children with books, and all other types of travellers. Upon the data thus obtained they were able to construct ramps truly scientific and seductively sloped.
To a Beaux-Arts architect like Whitney Warren, for whom architecture was about procession and stairs were an opportunity to invoke ceremonial ascent, Reed & Stem's ramps must have seemed like humanity reduced to hydraulics.






If you look at the Baths of Caracalla - the ceiling swells a hundred and fifty feet high. It was a marvelous realization on the part of the Romans to build such a space. It goes beyond function.
Kahn's intimation of an architectural shadow agenda inspired another of his statements, in which the human instinct to build is projected onto the construction itself:A building rising from its foundation is eager to exist. It still doesn't have to serve its intended use. Its spirit of wanting to be is impatient and high. . . . A building built is a building in bondage of use. . . . A building that has become a ruin is again free of the bondage of use.
Preservationism stands on the recognition that useless architecture can be its own reason for being.
Great civilizations of the past recognized that their citizens had aesthetic needs, that great architecture gave respite and nobility to their daily lives. . . . Their places of assembly, worship, ceremony or arrival and departure were not merely functional but spoke to the dignity of man.
Landmarking Michigan Central Station may seem like the least of Detroit's priorities, but New York was focused on survival in the 1970s and considered bankruptcy in 1975, the year the photo above was taken. No one at the time could have imagined the city New York has become or Grand Central's vital place in it.
If anyone tells you that it is impossible within a lifetime to develop and perfect a complete individuality of expression, a well-ripened and perfected personal style, tell him that you know better and that you will prove it by your lives.
It's inspiring to see Sullivan still intent on proving it after so much cost to his own life, anticipating the International Style from his Iowa wilderness. The first two floors of his Van Allen Store store might be Le Corbusier's template for that most iconic of modern houses, the Villa Savoye, completed in 1931. As Lewis Mumford wrote, Sullivan "led the way into the promised land, only to perish in solitude before the caravan could catch up to him." To Sullivan, the White City's Beaux-Arts classicism infected the democratic American ideal of personal choice with the tyranny of "the Feudal Idea." He wrote in his Autobiography:. . . the virus of the World's Fair, after a period of incubation in the architectural profession and the population at large, especially the influential, began to show unmistakable signs in the nature of the contagion. There came a violent outbreak of the Classic and the Renaissance in the East, which spread westward, contaminating all that it touched, both at its source and outward.
In this view, Michigan Central is a Midwestern outpost of an east-coast empire in Europe's shadow. From the perspective of our day's crushing banality, the Station's rare and unrepeatable grandeur - like that of the Baths of Caracalla - is no less valuable for its imperial source. What Sullivan might have built but for the White City is as lost as Penn Station and Whitney Warren's Chelsea Piers and Biltmore Hotel. For all this cost, America is owed a protected Michigan Central Station and the chance to someday restore the balance of Grand Central Terminal. Image credits: Michigan Central Station waiting room - Copyright: Jeremy Blakeslee www.jeremyblakeslee.org/photography (CC BY 3.0) Grand Central Terminal Main Concourse - author Michigan Central Station Rendering - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Grand Central Terminal Rendering - MTA/Metro-North Collection Michigan Central Station photo - Albert duce (CC BY-SA 3.0), altered by author Marble House photo: Daderot (SA BY 3.0), altered by author White City Administration Building - The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World's Columbian Exposition by Halsey C. Ives, N.D. Thompson Publishing Co., 1893 Baths of Caracalla photo - author Baths of Caracalla drawing - Entretiens sur l'architecture by Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, London, 1877-1881 World's Columbian Exposition, Terminal Station - Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson & Burnham Archives: Archival Image Collection Birds-Eye View of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 - Library of Congress Daniel Burnham portrait photo - Wikipedia biography page, public domain Plan of Chicago illustration - Plan of Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, the Commercial Club, Chicago, 1909 Ellis Island Main Building - author Pennsylvania Station exterior photo - Pennsylvania State Archives Guillaume Abel Blouet reconstruction of the Baths of Caracalla - Bade- und Schwimm-Anstalten, by Felix Genzmer, Stuttgart, 1899 Pennsylvania Station waiting room - Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University William Wilgus portrait photo - The Technical World magazine, February, 1905 Old Grand Central Station and train yards, November 19, 1906 - MTA/Metro-North Collection Park Avenue and cross streets above depressed old Grand Central Station train yard - Scientific American, January 17, 1903 Park Avenue and cross streets above depressed old Grand Central Station train yard - Harper's Weekly, January 12, 1907 Reed & Stem Architects' Grand Central Terminal "Court of Honor" - New York Public Library World's Columbian Exposition Court of Honor - Chicago Historical Society Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Whitney Warren portrait photo - Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum New York Yacht Club window - author Reed & Stem Architects' Grand Central Terminal tower - New York Public Library Whitney Warren's 1910 Grand Central Terminal sketch - Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution Grand Central Terminal elevation drawing with Whitney Warren's handwritten notes - New-York Historical Society Grand Central Terminal main concourse ceiling photo - author Michigan Central Station main waiting room photo - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Grand Central Terminal rendering with tower - Munsey's Magazine, April, 1911 Michigan Central Station exterior photo - Detroit Free Press Archives Perspective view of Grand Central Terminal and Biltmore Hotel tower - Architecture and Building, April, 1913 Terminal City section drawings - Engineering News, May 1, 1913 Biltmore Hotel photo - Byron Collection, Museum of the City of New York Michigan Central Station partial exterior photo - author Michigan Central Station under construction - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Baths of Diocletian exterior photo - Anthony Majanlahtl (CC BY 2.0), altered by author Pennsylvania Station detail photo - Pennsylvania State Archives Michigan Central Station exterior photo - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Chelsea Piers photo - Warren & Wetmore Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University Constant-Désiré Despradelle project rendering - from Americans in Paris by Jean Paul Carlhian and Margot M. Ellis, Rizzoli, 2014 Chapelle-Notre-Dame-de-Consolation photo - Mbzt (CC BY-SA 3.0) Michigan Central Station pediment photo; Michigan Central Station window photo; Jerome L. Greene Center photo; Jerome L. greene Center detail phot; Grand Central Terminal window walkway photo; Grand Central Terminal window operator wheel photo; Grand Central Terminal interior photo with Apple Store sign; Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine photo; Grand Central Terminal Apple Store photo - author Baths of Caracalla plan - from Americans in Paris by Jean Paul Carlhian and Margot M. Ellis, Rizzoli, 2014 Grand Central Terminal floor plan - Wikipedia, citing 1939 publication Michigan Central Station floor plan - Railway Age Gazette, January 9, 1914 Michigan Central Station exterior with streetcar - L.S. Glover, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Grand Central Terminal cutaway view - circa 1912 postcard William Robinson Leigh Great City of the Future illustration - The Cosmopolitan, November, 1908 Metropolis film still - Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, 1927 Pennsylvania Station demolition photo - New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, MAS photo archives Breuer Grand Central Terminal tower renderings - Marcel Breuer and Associates Michigan Central Station distant exterior photo; Detroit Amtrak Station; Grand Central Terminal waiting room photo - author Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis photo - Mel Finkelstein, New York Daily News, 1975 Van Allen Store photo - Library of CongressDetroit's Grand Central: Michigan Central Station
In its much-photographed desolation, Detroit's Michigan Central Station could be called America's Ruin, while New York's restored Grand Central Terminal more than ever lives up to its title as America's Piazza San Marco.
Grand Central was one of New York's first buildings to be targeted for landmark designation, sparing it from demolition to become one of the nation's most celebrated urban icons and the world's sixth-ranking tourist attraction. Michigan Central's listing on the National Register of Historic Places protects it only from federally-funded demolition. It has survived a 2009 appeal by Detroit's mayor for federal stimulus funds to pay for its removal and a City Council resolution that year calling on the Station's owner to demolish it with his own money. Michigan Central lacks the landmark designation that would give it the protection it deserves, including oversight of alterations or restoration. Political realities often drive preservation decisions and may explain how the Station remains unprotected.
The case for Michigan Central's landmark status seems obvious: America's preservation movement was born of the 1963 demolition of New York's Pennsylvania Station and proven in a battle for the preservation of Grand Central Terminal, Beaux-Arts train stations in the mold of Michigan Central.
Just how closely Michigan Central is related to Grand Central hasn't received due attention; it's often observed that they were designed by the same architects, but this only scratches the surface of their bond. The designers of both stations were a contentious team of two firms, Reed & Stem of St. Paul and Warren & Wetmore of New York. They were forced together by the New York Central Railroad, owner of the Michigan Central Railroad, in a shotgun-marriage of a partnership called the Associated Architects of Grand Central Terminal, the name by which they also designed Michigan Central. The stations were their only large-scale collaborations and were designed almost at once for effectively the same client.
Renderings of Michigan Central Station with its defining tower (left) and Grand Central Terminal with its unbuilt one (right) show how similar they were in concept. Their trios of monumental arches, each flanked by paired columns and alternating with smaller openings, reveal a more specific level of similarity. Both opened in 1913; Grand Central in February and Michigan Central in December. Michigan Central's distinctive tower made it the world's tallest train station, and owes to the idea of one conceived for Grand Central. In both renderings, America's signature architectural innovation - the skyscraper - grows from a train station modeled on an ancient Roman bath. This duality reflects an underlying battle for the soul of American architecture then led by two Chicago architects: Louis Sullivan, "father of the skyscraper" and "prophet of modernism," and Daniel Burnham, the "father of the City Beautiful" who made classicism the era's national style. Beyond their juxtaposition of skyscraper and Roman bath, the stations are permeated by a mix of the historic and futuristic, giving them unique architectural depth.
The shock of Michigan Central's abandoned grandeur distracts from its oddly conjoined building types and isolation from other large buildings. Grand Central is only the most immediate key to making sense of Detroit's Station. Its full explanation leads from ancient Rome through Paris and Chicago to New York at its most futuristic.
Richard Morris Hunt designed several houses for William K. Vanderbilt, including his 1892 Marble House in Newport (left). Hunt also designed the Administration Building (right) of Chicago's 1893 World's Fair, named the World's Columbian Exposition. The Fair popularized the classical architecture favored by Gilded Age tycoons like Vanderbilt and imprinted their taste on the American populace.
Vanderbilt was American aristocracy, the grandson of "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the New York Central Railroad. He was himself chairman of the Railroad's board of directors during the construction of Grand Central Terminal and Michigan Central Station, a time when railroads were a major part of the American economy. According to The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker, "At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly two-fifths of the shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange were associated with railroads." The steel industry spawned by the rails themselves would help make America a superpower and provide the structural framework for the skyscrapers by which the world would know its cities.
Richard Morris Hunt was the first American architect to study at Paris's École des Beaux Arts, the centuries-old school which based education on classical precedents, giving its name to Beaux-Arts architecture. A generation of Americans followed Hunt's example in studying architecture at the École, often topping off their education with an internship at New York's most prominent architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White. These "Paris men" included Boring & Tilton, designers of Ellis Island's main building; Carrere & Hastings, architects of the New York Public Library; and Whitney Warren, of Warren & Wetmore, who set the architectural style for Grand Central and Michigan Central.
Students at the École des Beaux-Arts learned to build upon historic examples like Rome's Baths of Caracalla (above). While the school promoted rational analysis and planning which would pave the way for modernism, its adherence to classical forms and compositional rules can appear cult-like or even superstitious from a modern perspective. Classical precedents were viewed as pertinent educational models because they had been gradually refined over centuries. Whitney Warren defended their applicability to the New World:
Architecture is always an evolution. Of course, we use old styles; we can't invent a new one, we can only evolve a new one. So we are taking the best elements in the old styles, and we are attempting to produce from them what is suggested and demanded by our present conditions - a new and American style.
Roman baths and basilicas were the ancient building types best suited as models for large buildings, including metropolitan train stations.



The Fair is going to have a great influence in our country. The American people have seen the "Classics" on a grand scale for the first time. . . . I can see all America constructed along the lines of the Fair, in noble, dignified, Classic style. The great men of the day all feel that way about it - all of them.
Wright responded that Sullivan - Wright's "Lieber Meister" - didn't feel that way, and that Burnham's old partner Root wouldn't if he were still alive. Wright claimed the conversation took place as Burnham offered him an all-expenses-paid Beaux-Arts education in Paris and two years soaking up Rome, to be followed by a job with his firm. Wright declined and lived to portray Burnham as Mephistopheles and himself refusing to barter his self-reliant American soul, giving Ayn Rand material for the individualistic architect-protagonist Howard Roark in her novel, The Fountainhead. Ironically, it was Sullivan, not Burnham, who had attended the École des Beaux-Arts. In his Autobiography of an Idea, Sullivan wrote of leaving it with the "conviction that this Great School, in its perfect flower of technique, lacked the profound animus of a primal inspiration." He wrote that "beneath the law of the School lay a law which it ignored unsuspectingly or with fixed intention" which he "saw everywhere in the open of life." Sullivan institutionalized this law in his 1896 essay, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered":Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change.
Sullivan had the last word: his "form follows function" is so ingrained in modern consciousness it's hard to believe architects only a century ago modeled train stations on Roman baths. Burnham's betting on the tycoons and their taste for classicism paid off. When he died in 1912 while touring Europe with his family, his firm was among the world's largest. The uncompromising Sullivan is now regarded as one of the three or four greatest architects in American history for his pioneering modernism, easily overshadowing Burnham, but he took the harder road to its bitter end. He died in obscurity in 1924, alone, alcoholic, months behind in rent on his cheap hotel-room home, his last office a couple of student-intern draftsmen in borrowed space.









Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die.
Daylight showing through the still-unfinished and unrented floors of Michigan Central's tower in photos taken after the Park's completion is a troubling sign that no one would be coming to the party, regardless of its plans or diagram. From today's defeatist attitude toward grand projects, the audacity and optimism on display at Michigan Central is - for all its hubris - impressive.


In ancient times the entrance to the city was through an opening in the walls or fortifications. This portal was usually decorated and elaborated into an Arc of Triumph, erected to some military or naval victory, or to the glory of some great personage. The city of today has no wall surrounding that may serve, by elaboration, as a pretext to such glorification, but none the less the gateway must exist, and in the case of New York and other cities it is through a tunnel which discharges the human flow in the very centre of the town.
Warren's reference to "other cities" applies his portal reasoning to Detroit and the heroic arches of his design for Michigan Central.





A memorable complex of interconnected concourses, hotels, office accommodation, shopping and railway facilities straddling two levels of tracks and interlaced with roads. Grand Central . . . is often cited by New Yorkers as proof that megastructure was invented in that city.
An anecdote from Grand Central: Gateway to a Million Lives by John Belle and Maxinne R. Leighton makes its own case that Grand Central is a megastructure:The Hotel Biltmore was located directly above the Terminal's arrival tracks, so that it was possible for a person to book a room at the Biltmore, arrive at Grand Central, and take an elevator from the concourse level or walk up a short flight of stairs from the Incoming Train Station Waiting Room to the hotel lobby without going outside. In the 1940s a honeymooning couple had arrived at the Terminal to take a train to Niagara Falls when a violent storm struck the city, disrupting all service. The couple took a room in the Biltmore, had their meals at the Oyster Bar, shopped in the Terminal's stores, and spent the weekend without once venturing out into the hostile weather.
Michigan Central had no hotel, but it did have a vast waiting room, reading room, smoking room, lunch counter, elegant restaurant with vaulted ceilings like the Oyster Bar's, sleeping accommodations and offices for railroad personnel, stores and a barber shop adjoined by eight private dressing rooms equipped with bathtubs "to allow out-of-town patrons to change clothes and dress for evening appointments without going to a hotel," according to the Railway Age Gazette. This last amenity would enable one to awaken in New York's Biltmore Hotel, take a train to Detroit - perhaps sleeping overnight in a Pullman car - get a shave from a barber upon arrival, bathe and put on fresh clothes without going outside, all within an architecturally consistent user experience.

The architects of Chicago welcomed the steel frame and did something with it. The architects of the East were appalled by it and could make no contribution to it.
Sullivan was himself appalled by what he saw as deference to the architecture of European empires. He would have seen in Michigan Central's classical top and bottom not the gradually evolving "new and American style" Whitney Warren peddled, but what he called "the incongruous spectacle of the infant Democracy taking its mental nourishment at the withered breast of Despotism."















There is a whole story in the ramps, how the terminal engineers, not satisfied with theoretical calculations, built experimental ramps at various slopes and studied thereon the gait and gasping limit of lean men with heavy suitcases, fat men without other burden than their flesh, women with babies, school children with books, and all other types of travellers. Upon the data thus obtained they were able to construct ramps truly scientific and seductively sloped.
To a Beaux-Arts architect like Whitney Warren, for whom architecture was about procession and stairs were an opportunity to invoke ceremonial ascent, Reed & Stem's ramps must have seemed like humanity reduced to hydraulics.






If you look at the Baths of Caracalla - the ceiling swells a hundred and fifty feet high. It was a marvelous realization on the part of the Romans to build such a space. It goes beyond function.
Kahn's intimation of an architectural shadow agenda inspired another of his statements, in which the human instinct to build is projected onto the construction itself:A building rising from its foundation is eager to exist. It still doesn't have to serve its intended use. Its spirit of wanting to be is impatient and high. . . . A building built is a building in bondage of use. . . . A building that has become a ruin is again free of the bondage of use.
Preservationism stands on the recognition that useless architecture can be its own reason for being.
Great civilizations of the past recognized that their citizens had aesthetic needs, that great architecture gave respite and nobility to their daily lives. . . . Their places of assembly, worship, ceremony or arrival and departure were not merely functional but spoke to the dignity of man.
Landmarking Michigan Central Station may seem like the least of Detroit's priorities, but New York was focused on survival in the 1970s and considered bankruptcy in 1975, the year the photo above was taken. No one at the time could have imagined the city New York has become or Grand Central's vital place in it.
If anyone tells you that it is impossible within a lifetime to develop and perfect a complete individuality of expression, a well-ripened and perfected personal style, tell him that you know better and that you will prove it by your lives.
It's inspiring to see Sullivan still intent on proving it after so much cost to his own life, anticipating the International Style from his Iowa wilderness. The first two floors of his Van Allen Store store might be Le Corbusier's template for that most iconic of modern houses, the Villa Savoye, completed in 1931. As Lewis Mumford wrote, Sullivan "led the way into the promised land, only to perish in solitude before the caravan could catch up to him." To Sullivan, the White City's Beaux-Arts classicism infected the democratic American ideal of personal choice with the tyranny of "the Feudal Idea." He wrote in his Autobiography:. . . the virus of the World's Fair, after a period of incubation in the architectural profession and the population at large, especially the influential, began to show unmistakable signs in the nature of the contagion. There came a violent outbreak of the Classic and the Renaissance in the East, which spread westward, contaminating all that it touched, both at its source and outward.
In this view, Michigan Central is a Midwestern outpost of an east-coast empire in Europe's shadow. From the perspective of our day's crushing banality, the Station's rare and unrepeatable grandeur - like that of the Baths of Caracalla - is no less valuable for its imperial source. What Sullivan might have built but for the White City is as lost as Penn Station and Whitney Warren's Chelsea Piers and Biltmore Hotel. For all this cost, America is owed a protected Michigan Central Station and the chance to someday restore the balance of Grand Central Terminal. Image credits: Michigan Central Station waiting room - Copyright: Jeremy Blakeslee www.jeremyblakeslee.org/photography (CC BY 3.0) Grand Central Terminal Main Concourse - author Michigan Central Station Rendering - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Grand Central Terminal Rendering - MTA/Metro-North Collection Michigan Central Station photo - Albert duce (CC BY-SA 3.0), altered by author Marble House photo: Daderot (SA BY 3.0), altered by author White City Administration Building - The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World's Columbian Exposition by Halsey C. Ives, N.D. Thompson Publishing Co., 1893 Baths of Caracalla photo - author Baths of Caracalla drawing - Entretiens sur l'architecture by Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, London, 1877-1881 World's Columbian Exposition, Terminal Station - Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson & Burnham Archives: Archival Image Collection Birds-Eye View of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 - Library of Congress Daniel Burnham portrait photo - Wikipedia biography page, public domain Plan of Chicago illustration - Plan of Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, the Commercial Club, Chicago, 1909 Ellis Island Main Building - author Pennsylvania Station exterior photo - Pennsylvania State Archives Guillaume Abel Blouet reconstruction of the Baths of Caracalla - Bade- und Schwimm-Anstalten, by Felix Genzmer, Stuttgart, 1899 Pennsylvania Station waiting room - Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University William Wilgus portrait photo - The Technical World magazine, February, 1905 Old Grand Central Station and train yards, November 19, 1906 - MTA/Metro-North Collection Park Avenue and cross streets above depressed old Grand Central Station train yard - Scientific American, January 17, 1903 Park Avenue and cross streets above depressed old Grand Central Station train yard - Harper's Weekly, January 12, 1907 Reed & Stem Architects' Grand Central Terminal "Court of Honor" - New York Public Library World's Columbian Exposition Court of Honor - Chicago Historical Society Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Whitney Warren portrait photo - Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum New York Yacht Club window - author Reed & Stem Architects' Grand Central Terminal tower - New York Public Library Whitney Warren's 1910 Grand Central Terminal sketch - Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution Grand Central Terminal elevation drawing with Whitney Warren's handwritten notes - New-York Historical Society Grand Central Terminal main concourse ceiling photo - author Michigan Central Station main waiting room photo - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Grand Central Terminal rendering with tower - Munsey's Magazine, April, 1911 Michigan Central Station exterior photo - Detroit Free Press Archives Perspective view of Grand Central Terminal and Biltmore Hotel tower - Architecture and Building, April, 1913 Terminal City section drawings - Engineering News, May 1, 1913 Biltmore Hotel photo - Byron Collection, Museum of the City of New York Michigan Central Station partial exterior photo - author Michigan Central Station under construction - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Baths of Diocletian exterior photo - Anthony Majanlahtl (CC BY 2.0), altered by author Pennsylvania Station detail photo - Pennsylvania State Archives Michigan Central Station exterior photo - Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Chelsea Piers photo - Warren & Wetmore Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University Constant-Désiré Despradelle project rendering - from Americans in Paris by Jean Paul Carlhian and Margot M. Ellis, Rizzoli, 2014 Chapelle-Notre-Dame-de-Consolation photo - Mbzt (CC BY-SA 3.0) Michigan Central Station pediment photo; Michigan Central Station window photo; Jerome L. Greene Center photo; Jerome L. greene Center detail phot; Grand Central Terminal window walkway photo; Grand Central Terminal window operator wheel photo; Grand Central Terminal interior photo with Apple Store sign; Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine photo; Grand Central Terminal Apple Store photo - author Baths of Caracalla plan - from Americans in Paris by Jean Paul Carlhian and Margot M. Ellis, Rizzoli, 2014 Grand Central Terminal floor plan - Wikipedia, citing 1939 publication Michigan Central Station floor plan - Railway Age Gazette, January 9, 1914 Michigan Central Station exterior with streetcar - L.S. Glover, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Grand Central Terminal cutaway view - circa 1912 postcard William Robinson Leigh Great City of the Future illustration - The Cosmopolitan, November, 1908 Metropolis film still - Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, 1927 Pennsylvania Station demolition photo - New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, MAS photo archives Breuer Grand Central Terminal tower renderings - Marcel Breuer and Associates Michigan Central Station distant exterior photo; Detroit Amtrak Station; Grand Central Terminal waiting room photo - author Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis photo - Mel Finkelstein, New York Daily News, 1975 Van Allen Store photo - Library of Congress- Detroit's Grand Central: Michigan Central Station May 27, 2015