2 days ago
A Train Station Taught Me What Education Is For
On a recent trip to Detroit (my first, somehow) I was pressed for time, so I skipped the Detroit Institute of Arts and the aquarium and headed to Michigan Central Station, a shining jewel of the city's resurrection. It was so beautiful that I felt I might almost have a heart attack. The experience left me thinking not just about the grandeur of the building and the tremendous labor that brought it back to life but about what education should be — and should not be.
Opened in 1913, the station was a grand depot, a sibling of New York City's Grand Central designed by the same firm, with an office building on top of it as had once been proposed in New York. Michigan Central was a wonder in its day, but after World War II, rail travel lost ground to airplanes and cars.
By the 1970s the building was little but a half-closed Amtrak stop, and in 1988 it was shuttered. The once magnificent structure decayed into a crumbling husk, flooded on its lower levels, plundered for parts, sprayed with graffiti, with windows shattered and gone. Its devastation was, in its way, almost as awesome as what it once had been, much like the Titanic as it looks now, at the bottom of the ocean.
Over the past seven years, however, Michigan Central Station was painstakingly restored, through a mix of the oldest craft techniques and the latest digital technology. Three thousand people rebuilt everything from the massive structural elements to the tiniest aesthetic details, recreating clocks, moldings and décor from old photos and scraps recovered from the wreckage. The work was so extensive and so creative that the station even houses a museum to explain how it was all done. (Restorers: Regarding that message you found in a bottle lodged in a wall, are you sure the word you consider illegible is not just 'ceiling'?)
I stepped into the station and time stopped. The vaulted ceilings, the big lovely windows designed to keep things cool in an era before air-conditioning, the elegant curve of the arches, the hints of Greco-Roman frivolity — all just wondrous. (And the linguist part of me enjoyed seeing how words on old signs that we now keep together were separate: suit cases, sight-seeing, foot ball.)
Detroit is full of this kind of beauty, so abundant you can walk by it a few times without even noticing. That's what I did with the David Stott Building, an Art Deco skyscraper towering over the corner of Griswold and State Streets, until I looked up and thought, ouch, how pretty! I stood on that corner snapping pictures and wondering how architects make such breathtaking things. I had a similar feeling once in Washington when I happened to walk by the Kennedy-Warren apartment building. I was so floored by its doughty sprawl, nestled splendidly into the woodsy slope behind it, that my heart actually beat faster. I sat on a nearby bench for a good 20 minutes just agape.
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