A Dark Age for the Renaissance Center

It’s the week between Christmas and the New Year in downtown Detroit, and Woodward Avenue is packed with people. Families are strolling past the Shinola Hotel and pressing their faces against the windows of Alo and Nike. Further south, closer toward the Detroit River, Shake Shack has a line out the door. Further south still, at a newly pedestrianized plaza at Jefferson Street and Woodward Avenue, bikeshare riders have dismounted to photograph themselves in front of a monument to boxer Joe Louis. In the background, the Renaissance Center, an iconic component to Detroit’s skyline and visual identity, looms in the distance.

“The biggest change in the last decade simply has to do with momentum,” shares Preservation Detroit President Devan Anderson in a phone interview.¹ “Buildings that we thought were never going to be saved, have been saved. Projects that we never imagined fifteen years ago are being built.”

This is ostensibly a remarkable scene for a city that made history in 2013 as the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in US history. At the time, Detroit had, over decades, tumbled toward bankruptcy as a measurable—and very public—low point. The city was deeply in debt and could not afford to care for its citizens. The built environment expressed this trauma spatially, in the form of underutilized, vacant buildings, and public spaces. In 2013, the same strip of Woodward that twelve years later would be the home to upscale hotels and luxury retail was a collection of boarded up, graffiti-clad commercial buildings dating to the 1920s, interspersed with empty lots and lots of surface parking. With the assistance of an emergency manager, settlement negotiations, and assurance that some of Detroit’s cultural assets would not be sold off, the city exited bankruptcy in 2014.

Yet, incrementally, a renaissance was already underway, starting with downtown Detroit’s public realm. The public and private sector, coming together as Project for Public Spaces (PPS) in 2013, engaged the public in placemaking around three downtown public spaces: Campus Martius/Cadillac Square, Capitol Park, and Grand Circus Park. PPS held focus groups, workshops, and tried out different short-term placemaking strategies.²

In 2015, the City of Detroit hired urban planner Maurice Cox as Director of Planning and Development. Cox focused on continuing to improve the connective tissue between the urban fabric, determining ways in which it could become more social and pedestrian oriented. In a city filled with historic buildings of all scales and in all neighborhoods, some with legacies of abandonment as long as their periods of service, Cox also took a tactical approach to preservation. That tactical approach included small interventions that would serve as a way to highlight a building’s potential for a larger, fully funded renaissance. In some cases, the interventions were creative in the form of a mural or public art. Others were more technical, like the installation of windows to prevent a building from further decay. In still others, the approach included considering how a building could be incrementally reused until funding could be secured for a fully scaled project. “The concept is that you focus on the partial reuse of very specific spaces within a building until funding can be marshalled to save the rest of the asset,” shares Cox in a phone interview.³

A combination of planning, advocacy, and a synergy between public and private partnerships would lead to the revitalization of the city center, which a hundred years after its most prosperous period in history, is alive with people and activity again. In 1925, Woodward and Michigan Avenues, steps away from where the Shake Shack would be located a hundred years later, could claim themselves to be the busiest corner in the United States, second only to Broadway and Seventh Avenues in New York City’s Times Square.⁴ The vision that PPS had in 2013 for the three public spaces is a reality today. New infrastructure is welcoming and plentiful, wayfinding is uncomplicated, and functional aspects, both permanent and temporary, are highly used and maintained. Vacant buildings are now home to boutique hotels, restaurants, housing, and retail, and are a part of a portfolio of architecture that includes structures that are designated as landmarks within local historic districts. “We are almost out of historic buildings to renovate, at least in the downtown area,” observes Devan Anderson. “The Renaissance Center being one of the exceptions.”

According to the Detroit Downtown Development Authority, as well as General Motors—the Renaissance Center’s current owner—and Detroit based developer Bedrock, the kind of urbanism that has evolved within Detroit’s downtown will continue to progress by demolishing a large section—two towers and the podium—of the Renaissance Center. This demolition will provide an opportunity to expand Detroit’s riverwalk all while, its supporters claim, preserving an iconic element of Detroit’s skyline. The stated goal of the redevelopment, designed by Gensler’s Detroit outpost, would create a destination on the riverfront similar to Chicago’s Navy Pier. To carry out this plan, the Downtown Detroit Development Authority will provide $75 million dollars toward supporting the infrastructure needed for the redevelopment. General Motors will pledge $250 million toward the redevelopment, while Bedrock, Detroit’s largest private property owner, has committed to investing a whopping $1 billion dollars towards the project.⁵

In the mid twentieth century, the City of Detroit, like other US cities, publicly subsidized the destruction of the urban fabric, sending both great architecture and functional buildings to the landfills. Rising in its place were superhighways connecting the rapidly growing suburbs to the shrinking city center.

Downtowns remained centers of commerce and jobs, and to make suburban workers comfortable with their urban surroundings, the built environment was fortified for safety and transportation became centered around personal vehicles. A lack of after-hours amenities and human activity after close of business deadened the city center, both an effect of and a step in the overall narrative of urban renewal.

In the early 1970s, plans emerged for Ford Motor Company to launch a mixed-use development project on the Detroit River that would make use of a section of the city’s underutilized waterfront that consisted of industrial warehouses and surface parking lots. The project was managed by Ford Motor Company CEO Henry Ford II, the grandson of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford. Ford enacted a nationwide search for an architect. Amongst the final choices was Atlanta-based architect and developer John Portman. Upon visiting Atlanta, Ford found inspiration in Portman’s Peachtree Center, a mixed-use development that Portman had designed in phases from 1961 that adhered to a unique pedestrian-oriented design concept—but only within its own walls.

For Detroit, John Portman agreed to design a seventy-story hotel, and four thirty-nine-story office towers—what would be the largest single downtown development project in the world.⁶ In an interview with the Detroit Free Press in 1971, Portman shared “I decided to do it because at this state in my career and life I am primarily interested in attempting to solve urban problems.” Portman continued, “I don’t think we can go off and leave our central city like so much garbage and not think it won’t bring a whole lot of problems.”⁷ The project initiated public interest immediately, and in 1973, Ford announced a contest to name the project. In March 1973, “Renaissance Center” was chosen.⁸ The Renaissance Center complex is in total, a group of seven connected buildings totaling over 5.5 million square feet, with two additional towers completed in 1981. Maurice Cox sees issues in the massive scale of the Renaissance Center development, which was planned and designed during a time period when architects and planners didn’t engage the public in how megadevelopments would affect cities. “I look back at the thought of having seven buildings done by one architect and one development entity. It’s so extraordinarily misguided,” shares Cox.

Rising from the riverfront and joining Detroit’s mostly shorter scaled, early twentieth century skyline, the first component of the Renaissance Center to open was the Detroit Plaza Hotel and its two restaurants in March 1977. Occupancy of the office towers and retail stores followed. The building lived up to the hype associated with its cosmopolitan, future-flavored name, and visitors found themselves enchanted by the building’s eight-story central atrium with its concrete pods and canoe-shaped balconies above. While the outside of the building shimmered with frosted glass, the interior surfaces were almost all roughly raked concrete, decorated with potted plants and flowers, and illuminated with natural light. A framework of elevated interior walkways, elevators, and escalators connected each of the building’s towers and functions together. Disco was at its peak; Detroiters and suburbanites alike flocked to the nightlife offered by clubs like the Renaissance Center’s “Celebration” and restaurants like “La Fontaine,” which served French cuisine, and “The Mikado,” offering Japanese fare. A revolving cocktail lounge located on the 73rd story of the central tower provided city views as well as glimpses of Canada, just across the Detroit River. In February 1977, Ford Motor Company moved 1,700 employees from suburban Dearborn to the Renaissance Center.⁹ By 1980, the Renaissance Center included seventy-three retail stores and seventeen restaurants, including high-end retail like Lanvin, Halston, and Cartier, as well as a selection of local retail chains like Winkelman’s department store and Gantos, offering stylish professional clothing for women. There were grocery and bookstores, art galleries, and a F.A.O. Schwarz, as well as four first run movie theaters.

Yet, in order to enjoy the soaring atrium, stroll along the interior walkways, shop, drink, or eat—the kind of insulated urbanism that the Renaissance Center offered—you would have to get inside it first, and using anything but a personal vehicle to do so was an outwardly hostile experience. The Renaissance Center was severed from the rest of the city at the street level by ten lanes of traffic at Jefferson Avenue, which at the easternmost sections of the Renaissance Center transforms into I-375, a mile-long spur trench highway that feeds into a larger interstate, I-75. The primary entrance consisted of a long, pugnacious-raked concrete wall, and ancillary pedestrian entrances at the rear and sides were equally hostile and difficult to find. The design pointed toward a clear preference for the use of personal vehicles to get to the Renaissance Center. In 1987, a light rail system—the Detroit People Mover—was constructed within the city center. While there is a Renaissance Center Station stop, the People Mover itself, a unidirectional system operating in a circle less than three miles wide that serves more as an attraction than a mode of transportation, does little to extinguish the need for personal vehicles.

Upon the building’s grand opening in 1977, the Detroit Free Press ran articles on both how to drive to get to the Renaissance Center and where to park, as well as the safety measures put in place, including a special Detroit Police Department unit, to assure guests that they would be shielded from the city’s more undesirable qualities—and residents. This, of course, had undeniably racial undertones. It was only a decade earlier, in the summer of 1967, when the Detroit Police Department clashed with African American residents after systemic racism and discrimination hit a boiling point, resulting in an uprising that lasted six days. Twenty-five years earlier, Mayor Albert Cobo ran and won on a platform of housing and educational segregation, destroying African American business districts and displacing thousands to build highways like I-375. White Detroiters had become white suburbanites, and many were hesitant to return to the city center because of racially charged notions of safety. Even Ford Motor Company would assure their Renaissance Center employees that those concerned with safety could utilize a security escort if they were reluctant to walk back to their cars after working late.¹⁰

“Part of the Renaissance Center’s history is as a reaction to the urban renewal era,” shares Maurice Cox. “It’s this idea of building a city within a city as a fortress.” As Planning Director, Cox worked to initiate plans that would connect the Renaissance Center to the downtown grid, including shrinking Jefferson Avenue and redeveloping I-375 from a trench highway into a surface boulevard.

The Renaissance Center is a fixture in both the Detroit skyline and its culture. It is a landmark and a point of navigation, and it is as recognizable as a symbol of the city as the logo for the Detroit Tigers or the music of Motown. “There are good things and there are bad things about the Renaissance Center,” shares Devan Anderson. “But it means Detroit, nearly as much as the Old English D does at this point.” Like so much of Detroit’s built environment, the Renaissance Center has a complex yet crucial relationship with the automotive industry.

In 1996, General Motors purchased the Renaissance Center from the Ford Motor Company. At the time of purchase, GM was the world’s largest company and would use 1.9 million square feet of the Renaissance Center’s office space for its world headquarters.¹¹ General Motors would vacate their purpose-built 1922 headquarters, designed by architect Albert Kahn. Renamed Cadillac Place, it would be reused by other companies, as well as housing offices of the State of Michigan. Within its first few years of occupation, GM invested half a billion dollars towards a renovation of the complex, including renovating the front entrance, creating new walkway connections inside the building, and building a five-story winter garden at the building’s pedestrian level facing the Detroit River.

Completed in 2002, the winter garden, lush with tropical plants, added additional retail and event rental space, and infused the Renaissance Center with an amenity for the new millennium. Designed by Chicago’s Skidmore Owings & Merrill, the winter garden awakened the Renaissance Center’s relationship with the riverfront. Yet, by 2003, many of the Renaissance Center’s original urban-centric amenities, like the movie theaters, had closed.

Just blocks away, across the street from what was once the busiest corner in the United States, Compuware hired architecture firm Rossetti to design a new global headquarters for the software company, initiating another suburb-to-city corporate move that was to have a transformational effect on Detroit’s city center. The Compuware building included a stalwart tourist draw: a Hard Rock Cafe. Built on a lot that had been vacant since the mid 1960s, Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage) moved into the Compuware Building in 2010. In 2011, Bedrock, formed by Rocket Mortgage cofounder and billionaire Dan Gilbert, began purchasing buildings—in cash—within Detroit’s city center and renovating them. Many of the buildings that Bedrock would purchase, including the Book-Cadillac Hotel and the Book Tower, were emblematic of the chronic vacancy challenges facing Detroit and had been the subject of renovation projects that, while imaginative, lacked the resources to break ground. In 2013, Rock Ventures, the umbrella company over the nearly 100 entities owned by the Gilbert family, served as a stakeholder for Project for Public Spaces.

Bedrock also purchased vacant land, including the site of the former J.L. Hudson’s Department store on Woodward Avenue. Built in 1911 with subsequent midcentury additions, the downtown Hudson’s location closed in 1983, and in 1998 the building was imploded, the largest such implosion in United States History. In 2017, Bedrock, who had become the owners of over a hundred buildings within Detroit’s downtown, began the construction of a new building on the site that would repurpose the now-defunct company’s name. Hudson’s Detroit, a new development consisting of a twelve-story block with a 45-story skyscraper, is a mixed-use building designed by SHoP Architects that seeks to create a sense of comfort with the new via a somewhat fantasized interpretation of nostalgia and civic pride, a formula utilized to great success in Detroit by developers like Bedrock and professional sports teams like the Detroit Tigers.

In April 2024, General Motors announced that the company would relocate its global headquarters from the Renaissance Center to Hudson’s Detroit. This announcement initiated a new discussion on the significance—and future—of the Renaissance Center; now at the threshold of preservation’s fifty-year rule, a practical measurement often used to determine if a building has aged into significance. In July 2024, General Motors signaled that demolition was a possible outcome, particularly if subsidies were not offered towards renovation.¹² The resulting public outcry prompted General Motors to consider other alternatives. General Motors, Bedrock, the City of Detroit, and Wayne County began studying possible outcomes for the Renaissance Center.

In the resulting conversations between GM, Bedrock, and the City of Detroit, a solution emerged for the Renaissance Center, credited to Bedrock founder Dan Gilbert: three of the towers would be redeveloped as a hotel, offices, and apartments, while two others would be demolished. In the place of the two demolished towers, a park for an entertainment district would be developed. “You have to fight through 39 stories of concrete and steel,” said Detroit mayor Mike Duggan, who claimed during a state of the city address in March 2025 that it would be cheaper to build new apartments instead of renovating the existing towers.¹³

Devan Anderson believes that the Renaissance Center would be an ideal candidate for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, particularly as a listing would unlock the ability for a developer to utilize both state and federal historic tax credits, which he notes Bedrock has used before on other downtown renovations. Preservation Detroit advocated for the City of Detroit to study the Renaissance Center’s eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places and encouraged the City of Detroit to consider designating the Renaissance Center as a local historic district. “There were two city council members who were supporting designation,” shares Anderson. “But the vote ultimately failed, which is ironic, because had it succeeded, it would only put a yearlong moratorium on work and demolition to give the city time to study. We are currently a month away from the end of any moratorium, and no work has started.”

In Detroit, state and federal tax credits do the heavy lifting in terms of preservation incentives, as local designation does not provide any financial incentives. “I refer to them as being all stick–no carrots,” shares Anderson. “Not that doesn’t mean that the city council or the state legislature couldn’t be moved to designate specific financing.” Anderson continues, “this development in particular is leveraging tons of public funding for demolition. Why not use them toward rehabilitation?”

Preservation is familiar with this false dichotomy regarding the unaffordability of adaptive re-use, just as Detroit is familiar with the contempt of rightsizing. In 2014, Detroit received $50 million from the US Department of Treasury’s “Hardest Hit Fund” program, resources that would go toward demolishing dilapidated and vacant buildings owned by the Detroit Land Bank.“¹⁴ Starting with an inventory of 47,000 abandoned homes, the number is now down to just 942, with only 240 remaining on the demolition list as the program reaches its final closeout.“¹⁵ Initiated as an effort that would provide the City of Detroit with an opportunity to concentrate services and “rightsize” the built environment, the program yielded opportunities to create public space and allowed home values to rise among longtime homeowners in Detroit who were living in communities where blight was an endemic challenge. Yet, this effort to consolidate existing buildings occurred in neighborhoods, not downtown, and the buildings targeted for demolition were not the responsibility of multinational companies taking advice from a city’s largest private property owner. If perhaps, John Portman as architect and developer held too much power in designing and building such a massive complex in the 1970s, then the private sector in the 2025s—mainly Bedrock and GM—should not replicate history in terms of their power to decide what the fate of the Renaissance Center should be.

Anderson speaks of the potential loss of the two towers as one that will be cumulative, both in an environmental sense and in terms of a missed opportunity to reuse historic buildings. “In five years, we are going to wish we didn’t demolish these buildings,” continues Anderson, who points to two historic buildings demolished in Detroit in 2005—the Statler Hotel and The Madison Lenox—as examples. “If we hadn’t demolished those buildings they’d be renovated and occupied today.”

Detroit, like so many US cites, sent viable buildings—and great architecture—to the landfill, exacerbating climate change and, in many cases, supercharging the housing crisis. In an ideal situation both cities, and the people with the power or influence to make them, would have learned from urban renewal. Yet, demolition is still presented as an option, even when the players, like Bedrock, GM, and even Gensler as architect of record for the renovation, have committed to sustainability and reducing carbon emissions.

Maurice Cox left his position at the City of Detroit in 2019 after being appointed Commissioner of the Department of Planning Development in Chicago, a position he would hold until 2023. Cox believes that there could have been more creativity implemented in the decision-making process. “I would have recommended to the mayor that we bring some of the foremost thinkers of urban regeneration to reflect on the history and the potential for the Renaissance Center,” says Cox.

Both Cox and Anderson believe strongly that patience in terms of future possibilities for the Renaissance Center is a key component that is missing in the Bedrock and GM plans to demolish portions of the building. For both, mothballing the two towers currently posed for demolition provides a more sustainable option. “We are going to need housing,” shares Anderson. He continues, “we clearly need housing now, and we are going to need more housing later, especially as sea levels rise. And even if office space doesn’t make sense today in a post-pandemic world, we may need office space again.” Cox sees mothballing as a strategy aligned with tactical preservation. “You require a level of thought leadership and adaptation to figure out what to do when you have more square footage than you have program and resources.” In Detroit, projects like Michigan Central Station, renovated in 2024 after being vacant for forty years, either by design or as a matter of course, serve as an example that a long game strategy is necessary for the Renaissance Center.

There might yet be time for a better outcome. While GM is no longer illuminating the crowns of the two riverfront towers the company intends to demolish—a not so subtle attempt to create a level of comfort towards their eventual disappearance—the two remaining restaurants at the Renaissance Center, Andiamo Detroit Riverfront and Joe Muer Seafood, will remain open until November or December 2026 and June 2027, respectively.

The Renaissance Center, while imperfect, isn’t a component in a perfect city either. None of its functional, design, or cultural complications warrant demolition at the scale proposed, and in losing two of the five towers Detroit alters its skyline in a way that won’t fool anyone into believing that they had to be sacrificed in order to bring life and urban stimulation to the riverfront. While Detroit’s city center might be approaching a saturation point in terms of adaptive reuse of older and historic buildings, most of its neighborhoods have not seen the same level of transformation.

Devon Anderson points to a National Register of Historic Places listing for the Renaissance Center as a way in which scholarship around the building can be established, heightening its profile as a building with civic and cultural value. A multiple property listing for Urban Renewal era Resources in the United States, written by Heritage Consulting Group, and approved by the National Park Service for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places in December 2025, lays the groundwork for a deeper contextual understanding of this era of development—and provides a framework for utilizing the resources of historic preservation to determine how these complicated resources can be adaptively reused, so as the problems created when they were built are not repeated as they are razed.

Unlike the crowded holiday season activity on Woodward Avenue near Hudson’s Detroit and Shake Shack, the Renaissance Center is quiet and sparsely occupied. Yet, GM maintains a presence, and its curiosity-rousing walkways, concrete pods, and corridors are still open to the public. In little more than a decade, Detroit’s downtown has experienced an almost improbable renaissance, perhaps serving a reminder that the outcome for the Renaissance Center too might possibly change.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Devan Anderson and Maurice Cox for their time and interviews. Thanks to David Schalliol and Karen Widi, Manager of Library, Records and Information Services at SOM, for providing several of the photographs included in the monthly column.