As GM prepares to move out, let's be honest: The RenCen is an embarrassment. | Opinion

Now that part of Detroit’s Renaissance Center may be demolished, a story once told to me by legendary mall builder A. Alfred Taubman comes to mind.

Taubman was friends with Henry Ford II, the longtime chairman and CEO of Ford Motor Co., and the prime mover behind the creation of the RenCen in the 1970s. As site work was just getting underway, Ford, extolling the virtues of project, drove Taubman past the excavation site.

But Ford was a car guy, not a real estate developer, and Taubman, who parsed the details of rental rates and market demand for his living, could sense a boondoggle in the making. He advised his friend to walk away from the project, telling him, “Henry, fill up the hole!”

If only Ford had listened. Had the RenCen never been built, Detroit would have been spared the embarrassment of a project long derided as a fortress on the waterfront, cut off from the rest of downtown, and now, fifty years on, a see-through building largely empty, with partial demolition viewed as the only viable option.

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War and hubris

How could Henry II make such a blunder? And why did Detroit leaders go along with it?

Partly because Ford was the biggest of big names in Detroit, and partly because city leaders were desperate to stem a decline that dated at least from the 1950s.

But there’s even more to it.

The reasons behind the debacle of Detroit’s Renaissance Center also lie behind other tragic urban blunders of the mid-20th Century, including the twin disasters of urban renewal — destroying neighborhoods like Detroit’s Black Bottom — and the construction of expressways that slashed through whole neighborhoods.

It all goes back to how the U.S. and its allies won World War II.

In that titanic struggle against fascism, Detroit played the key role of Arsenal of Democracy, and nowhere more so than at the giant Ford bomber plant at Willow Run, built by Edsel Ford, son of company founder Henry and father to Henry II.

That plant and other industrial complexes in and around Detroit produced an output never seen in history. At full production, Willow Run churned out big B-24 Liberator bombers at the incredible rate of one per hour. And this massive logistical effort was aimed at defeating perhaps the greatest evil America ever faced on the battlefield.

Victory brought a flush of self-confidence to young Henry II, who had served briefly in the U.S. Navy early in the war before running Ford Motor, and to millions in his generation like him. But in one of history’s great wrong turns, they took the lessons that beat Germany and Japan — massive overwhelming force against a clear enemy — and started to direct them against less clear, less obvious problems in American cities.

Inadequate housing in places like Black Bottom? Let’s wipe out the whole district in the moral equivalent of war. See a need to accommodate suburban commuters? Just ram expressways through cities, the displacement of thousands a price worth paying. A whole generation of architects and urban planners deployed such tactics in city after city with a nonchalance that seems incredible today.

And it was this same belief that urban problems required Willow Run-scale solutions that led Ford II to build the Renaissance Center — a gargantuan structure meant to solve the city’s problems and lead to a clear-cut victory. How elusive that goal proved!

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Ford’s generation didn't understand cities

It was only later generations of planners and builders, perhaps with lessons learned in more humbling military debacles in far-off jungles and deserts, that understood cities to be vastly more complex places than Ford II and others thought. Cities were not simplistic problems requiring one stupendous silver-bullet solution, but rather places of infinite challenge and variety, requiring a mosaic of approaches and a big dose of humility.

As the saying has it, Henry Ford II was still fighting the last war when he built the Renaissance Center. And today, as Detroit and the RenCen’s current owner, General Motors, prepare to demolish at least part of it, let’s take a moment to ask whether Detroit would have been even better off if Ford had heeded Taubman’s advice: To fill up the hole, and walk away.

John Gallagher was a reporter and columnist for the Free Press for 32 years prior to his retirement in 2019. His book, Rust Belt Reporter: A Memoir, was published this year by Wayne State University Press. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters and we may publish it online and in print. 

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: GM says it may demo Detroit's RenCen. It's an embarrassment. | Opinion