RenCen owns storied automotive history

Proposed by a Ford, it was home to GM, among others

With reports that General Motors is looking to move some of its office staff to Dan Gilbert’s new Hudson’s site development, here are key facts about the automaker’s current headquarters — the iconic Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit.

The RenCen consists of seven towers, of which GM owns the original five. The original structure opened in 1977 and consists of four 39-story office towers surrounding a central 73-story hotel, which is now a Marriott.

The original plan for the RenCen was proposed in 1971 by auto magnate Henry Ford II, then chairman of Ford Motor Co. The architect was John Portman and the development’s original ownership was a 49-member partnership spearheaded by Henry Ford II. The restaurant near the top of the central tower at one time featured a revolving floor.

In 1981, two additional 21-story towers were built. Those two shorter towers were sold late last year by a New Jersey utility company, which had owned them for years, to Farmington Hills-based real estate firm Friedman Real Estate. One of those buildings houses Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. The other, as of early this year, was mostly vacant.

GM bought the RenCen in 1996 to be its world headquarters. Previously, GM was in Detroit’s New Center area in what was then called the General Motors Building, now known as Cadillac Place.

The automaker went on to spend over $500 million on renovations and upgrades to the

RenCen in the late 1990s and early 2000s that were widely credited with making the center better, and its labyrinthine corridors somewhat easier to navigate.

In the run-up to GM’s 2009 bankruptcy, the U.S auto task force overseeing the restructuring considered having GM leave the RenCen. But the idea was scuttled in Washington by advisers to President Barack Obama, one of whom reportedly asked, “Are you out of your mind? … Think what it would do to Detroit.”

The weekday population in the RenCen plunged following the COVID-19 pandemic and the continued popularity of remote and hybrid work arrangements. GM also relocated a number of workers from the RenCen to its Technical Center in Warren.

Here are a few key happenings in the history of the Renaissance Center, with details from Free Press reporting at the time and more recently:

In March 1985, plans were announced to h add the center’s “missing link,” a climate-controlled skywalk to connect the complex to the Millender Center across East Jefferson. It was thought that the skywalk addition would finally help the complex connect with the rest of the city and even be the first of an expected network of skywalks downtown. The skywalk connecting the Millender Center to the CityCounty building was also part of the $4.7 million contract.

The end of the “pedestrian nightmare,” as h one Free Press writer described it, came with the opening of an airborne glass and steel walkway inside the complex in October 1999. The suspended circulation ring “affords a 360degree view and measures roughly one-eighth of a mile around the core of the complex, which is actually the base of the RenCen’s 73-story hotel.” Given the current challenges for the uninitiated trying to navigate the Renaissance

Center, it might be hard to imagine what it was like before this addition.

Berms no more. In August 2001, work began h on a project to remove one of the more divisive design elements connected to the Renaissance Center, the two-story berms described as “symbols of the complex’s forbidding architecture.” The east and west berms, or walls, were separated by a driveway leading into the complex, and GM had opted to remove them as part of the $500 million renovation after the company bought the complex.

Movies used to be shown at the RenCen, h but that ended in the summer of 2015 with the closing of the RenCen 4, a four-screen movie complex that had a 40-year run. The reason? The theaters were described as too old and small to be updated for movie theater audience expectations at the time. “Inside Out,” “Jurassic World,” “San Andreas” and “Entourage” were listed as the final batch of movies to be shown.

The Wayne State University anthropology h department had teams of professors and students excavating the site in the 1960s and ’70s. Researchers uncovered a variety of artifacts from earlier Detroit residents, which are now preserved at Wayne State’s Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology.

GM’s move from the Renaissance Center is certainly notable, but such a significant shift in Detroit’s office landscape isn’t without precedent. In fact, GM’s own move to the RenCen had a profound impact not just on its new home but also on the one it left behind.

GM’s previous headquarters on West Grand Boulevard in New Center had been designed by famed architect Albert Kahn, and it had the distinction of being the second-largest office building in the world in capacity when it opened in 1923, according to the Detroit Historical Society.

Any major announcement can spark speculation and uncertainty, and that was certainly the case when the RenCen move was announced. One news headline from May 17, 1996, trumpeted perhaps unsurprisingly that “GM Move Will Be Blow To New Center,” while an article the following day projected a seismic shift in the regional rental market, noting that “the results may be felt from shady Grosse Pointe streets — where realtors expect a boom in the already tight housing market — to the landscaped tech centers of Troy — where acres of office space may be vacuumed out by lowpriced rentals in the RenCen.”

In what might now be called a “hot take,” a Free Press columnist even wrote a piece on why the “GM Building Should Be Razed.”

Doron Levin noted that “GM’s move downtown spells the end of the New Center area as an office center — for now. The Fisher Building may eventually succumb, too. That’s unfortunate, but a city in Detroit’s current state simply can’t support two major office centers. On the other hand, a huge parcel of cleared, environmentally clean land not far from downtown just might attract an entrepreneur who’s prepared to develop a useful project.”

Despite the worries of a massive vacant parcel after the move, a tenant was eventually found for the building.

“GM moved out in 2000, after taking over the Renaissance Center downtown. Two years later, the building was renamed Cadillac Place after the city’s founder, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. It now houses the State of Michigan’s Detroit offices,” according to historicdetroit. org.