The blocks around the Madison, however, are strikingly different.
Coming up the block to the building, located directly across the street from the half-moon-shaped Grand Circus Park, the “differentness” of the Madison is obvious. There’s a small plates-style restaurant a few doors down, complete with New York–style sidewalk seating, and an organic bakery on the corner. It’s different, and it’s a welcome change compared to the gritty urban canyons that surround it, but it’s just the start of what Gilbert has in mind for Detroit.
Gilbert’s end goal is to overhaul the entire downtown core, updating existing buildings, improving retail and restaurant spaces, and even adding new residential units between Grand Circus and the Detroit River.
It’s a huge project. It’s at least seven blocks of Woodward Avenue—nicknamed “Webward Avenue” due to all of the tech startups moving into the area—much of which is currently all but abandoned, and capital investment in the millions to bring these buildings not only up to code but also up to modern-day standards of desirability. Most of these buildings, which Gilbert is admittedly picking up for pennies on the dollar, need wiring and electrical updates, but they also need structural improvements, new ceilings, new paint, and all sorts of other renovations.
But it appears to be working, if slowly, and the neighborhood is already visibly changing.
In order to get a better view of this entire project, I caught up with Eric Randolph, a manager with Gilbert’s real estate firm, Bedrock Management, for a tour of the “new” Downtown Detroit. Starting at the Madison, Gilbert’s companies have bought more than a dozen existing structures in the immediate area, all the way down Woodward Avenue to the river, with plans to pick up additional properties to the east and west as the project progresses.
It starts at Grand Circus, which is immediately adjacent to the Madison. The thirty-five-floor Broderick Tower is one of Detroit’s iconic skyscrapers and, until recently, was one of the better-known emblems of the city’s decline. Completed in 1928, the Broderick was at one time the second-tallest building in Michigan and, until renovations began in 2010, had fallen into disrepair and sat empty for years. Now it, and the 1997-era humpback whale mural that’s painted on its side, is one of the hottest residential addresses in the city, with some 125 apartments on the upper floors, many of which are occupied by Madison-related tenants. In fact, it’s becoming something of a “dorm” for Detroit’s young entrepreneurs.
Detroit Labs cofounder Dan Ward, whom I met while touring the Madison, lived downtown for about two years prior to this most recent overhaul and says urban life in the city is definitely doable, despite what many outside the area might think.
“You miss out on some things, service things like groceries and laundry,” he says, “but it’s getting fixed. You adapt how you live a little bit, but it’s a city, so you’re going to do that anyway. But it’s great. You can go out, walk around. It’s a city like any other.”
Back on our tour, Randolph and I stop at 1527 Woodward Avenue, the future home of Bizdom. It’s a nondescript, six-story steel and blue structure. Certainly nothing that would be out of the ordinary in any American city, though a little dated and maybe a bit rough around the edges. Up on the second floor, however, Bedrock has dramatically overhauled the space, opening up the once-cramped offices, creating a large open workspace, and bringing in new light from the street-facing windows. It’s an old office, to be sure, but the promise here is clear. Once complete, it will be every bit as nice as any modern office space and at least twice the size of Bizdom’s cramped quarters at the Madison.
“So all of this is brand new,” Randolph says, pointing around the room at all of the new installations, “and it just shows you what you can do with these spaces. We kept the ceilings the way they were, the walls the way they were, and we kept the columns here and just fixed them a little bit. But as far as power, networking, nothing was here.”
And that’s just one example. Two doors down, a three-story 1960s-era office building is getting a similar overhaul, with restaurant space slated for the ground level and a handful of smaller offices upstairs. Next door to that, Randolph points out a turn-of-the-century red stone structure on the corner that could easily have been a bank or private home back a century ago. It is now being restored to its former glory, with loftlike offices slated for construction above a large open retail space on the first floor. Similar projects are under way across the street and up the block, as Randolph points out building after building that Gilbert now owns.
But it’s still a work in progress. At the moment, there isn’t much street-level retail or a single restaurant to speak of within two blocks on this particular stretch of Woodward, though Randolph is optimistic that this area will be a Midwestern version of New York’s West Village in just a few years’ time. Part of the delay, he explains, has to do with a new light rail project that will eventually connect Downtown Detroit with some of the popular Midtown neighborhoods a few miles to the north. Once construction begins, Woodward Avenue will be torn up for a few months, which could make it difficult for retailers and restaurants in the area in the short term.
“The last thing we want to do is have these businesses move downtown, and then Woodward gets ripped up and they don’t do well,” Randolph says. The plan is for these businesses to move in after the light rail is complete.
We walk another block, past several buildings where the “Gilbert effect” has already taken hold. In one, we see a series of chain stores and some real signs of life. Across the street, there’s a rough-looking convenience store that clearly is not part of the master plan. On the corner, a shiny new Moosejaw Outfitters store anchors another Gilbert-owned building, with another Madisonlike collaborative space set to go in nearby. It will eventually rent out space to small startups that might need just a few workstations instead of a full office, Randolph explains.
“We want to get people out on the streets,” he says. “We want to make this a destination. So we’re working with some urban planners to make sure we plan this the right way and get the right people in the right spots. We only get one shot, you know.”
At the time of my visit, the real meat of the project was happening around Campus Martius Park, where the Quicken Loans offices are located in the modern Compuware building and where several of Gilbert’s larger corporate tenants are moving in. The twenty-five-story First National Building, for example, is anchored by Midwest law firm Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP, complete with a snazzy New York–based coffee shop called Roasting Plant in the lobby. Across the street, at 611 Woodward, stands the Qube, a modernist structure where approximately 4,000 Quicken Loans employees are now located, as well as JPMorgan Chase Bank’s Detroit offices. Originally built in 1959, the building was overhauled by Gilbert and company in 2011.
Oddly enough, the Qube is also home to the Quicken Loans “command center,” which provides security services to the whole Campus Martius area. The company operates a series of more than fifty security cameras on all of its buildings, all capable of facial recognition, and it monitors them 24/7 from this glass-enclosed “eye in the sky.” This is in addition to the private Quicken security force that patrols Campus Martius on foot and provides shuttle service to employees.
“This area is the safest area in Detroit,” Randolph says. “People always say these negative things about Detroit but considering what goes on in New York, Chicago, Miami—all cities—the same things happen, but here it’s just further out. This is the safest part of the city, and we’re trying to make it even more secure.”
As part of this effort, Randolph explains, every time they buy a building they make a point to “light it up”—installing new lighting on the façade, the sidewalks, even the alleys. Everything. He says, “Before we came downtown, it was dark down here, and people were scared. Now people are coming back because they’re seeing that things are happening.”
It’s an impressive project, to be sure, and a valuable service to both Gilbert’s employees and the city