A remembrance of the RenCen

By Todd Lassa*

First time I saw Detroit’s Renaissance Center was 1982, when my friend Tom Cesarz and I borrowed my dad’s 1980 Mazda RX-7 to drive the 375 miles from Milwaukee (Dad always was generous about letting me drive it) to attend our first-ever live Formula 1 race.

We showed up early Saturday evening, too late to watch qualifying, but in time to get a lay of the land and to be somewhere in the vicinity of Alain Prost, Keke Rosberg, Niki Lauda, Nigel Mansell, and the like. After we parked near the RenCen and its massive concrete sidewalk barriers, three locals walking by spotted the Wisconsin vanity plate, HMMMM7, on the RX-7. One of them said, presumably having seen the “America’s Dairyland” slogan on the plate, “Ya bring your cow?”

In retrospect, we should have jumped back in the sports car to quickly drive away lest some local assembly line workers carrying tire irons walk by the Japanese two-seater. Remember this was 1982. But we instead tried to find our way into the RenCen. Built by Henry Ford II some five years earlier as a “city within a city” (locals called it “The Deuce’s Last Erection”) the one car we found on-display inside among the European-ish throng of F1 fans was one of the Ford GT40s that ran the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Wouldn’t one of Jim Clark’s Lotus Ford DFVs have been more appropriate?

We couldn’t afford to stay at the RenCen Westin and instead returned to the RX-7 to find it apparently untouched, and drove off to a Holiday Inn near Ann Arbor.

Our $30 seats, cheapest available for the first-ever Detroit Grand Prix, allowed us the largely walled-off view of a first-gear corner at what was then named Cobo Hall (now Huntington Place), where we watched John Watson’s McLaren-Ford (another potential display car) lead a parade of downshifting F1 cars to the win.

Fourteen years later I moved to Detroit to take a staffer job at Autoweek and a year after that, 1997, I moved to a turn-of-the-century warehouse converted to apartments about a mile east of the RenCen. Offices of Crain Communications, which owned AW at the time, weren’t far from the RenCen, so I went there with colleagues once or twice a week for lunch.

The maze inside the seven connected cylinders was as confusing as its walled-off exterior was intimidating. Finding my way to the appropriate corporate office for an interview or press conference held within the structure was not unlike making my way between the U.S. Capitol and the Rayburn House or Dirksen Senate office buildings via their connected basements, as I had for four years prior editing Capitol Hill newsletters.

Wikipedia says Ford sold the RenCen to General Motors in 1996, the year I moved to Detroite, though my faulty memory placed the sale later in the ‘90s. Ford had trouble keeping the complex filled with retail stores and services, and while GM managed to sign a couple of decent restaurants over the years, there were still more than a few vacant storefronts. The RenCen multiplex movie theater closed—and in that part of Detroit there weren’t a lot of screens. The raised People Mover monorail, which has a stop at the RenCen, was never much more of a tourist novelty, except when shuttling fans from parking garages to Red Wings, Tigers or Lions games, or me, some times, to the North American International Auto Show.

My best memories of the place involve attending the Detroit Jazz Festival and Electronic Music Festival held outdoors on the plaza west of the seven cylinders.

Another close friend, Tim Bailey, was an assistant comptroller for the RenCen Intercontinental Hotel in the mid-‘80s. He told me hotel rooms were difficult and expensive to keep warm because of their rounded outer walls. Not exactly beneficial for the hotel’s utility bill.

The good news is after GM’s 2009 bankruptcy, the automaker undertook a renovation on the seven cylinders that included knocking down those exterior concrete barriers. It was no longer a “city within a city,” a fortress you had to drive to, designed to keep out the locals who didn’t have business there (with all the racism that implies). Now it was a place you could walk or bike to, and around. The grand southern entrance faces downtown Windsor, Ontario, and leads to a walkway along the Detroit River.

I’m not sure what more can be done to turn the seven-cylinder fortress into a more welcoming place that can attract tenants who in turn would attract locals and visitors alike, but that’s the plan. GM has announced it will move out of the RenCen in 2025 and into a new office building at the landmark site of the downtown Hudson’s department store, which was imploded in 1999.

GM, along with the Bedrock real estate firm (which almost singlehandedly rebuilt Detroit’s downtown during the last 15 or 20 years) and the city will develop “ideas to remake the seven-building Renaissance Center,” according to The Associated Press. GM is not selling the RenCen and instead plans to return someday — after it is “remade.”

I have to wonder why, or if, GM really will return. The location it is moving to is on a conventional, easily accessible city block and there are probably bike lanes on Woodward Avenue, which it faces, by now. And from the renderings released of the new building, it looks something like a giant fuel-cell stack. Now that’s a future.

And the still-under-construction Hudson’s Tower will be the second-tallest building in Detroit.

Henry Ford II’s structure remains the tallest.

*Todd Lassa is editor-in-chief of The Hustings and contributing editor to Autoweek.