Bedrock, GM shouldn't\u00a0take the wrecking ball\u00a0to RenCen so fast

For more than two decades, I have had a front-row seat to Detroit's struggle with itself, covering a city that has been declared dead, rediscovered, celebrated and remade, often by some of the same powerful institutions that once questioned its future. I have watched buildings fall, neighborhoods fight to survive, corporations leave and return, and billions of dollars poured into a downtown that not long ago was searching desperately for believers. That history is why the proposed demolition of two Renaissance Center towers by General Motors and Bedrock should not be treated as merely another real estate transaction. Detroit has lost too much, endured too much and reinvented itself too many times for the permanent alteration of its skyline to be decided principally by those with the capital to change it. GM and Bedrock may own and develop property, but Detroiters have something equally consequential at stake: the memory, identity and inheritance of their city. For nearly half a century, the Renaissance Center has defined Detroit's riverfront. Its very name was an audacious declaration of faith in a city many had already begun writing off. The complex is imperfect because it was designed for another era. Downtown office life has changed dramatically, and cities must change as well. But economic development should not automatically become permission to erase history in a city like Detroit. Before something this consequential and irreversible disappears from Detroit's skyline, GM and Bedrock should demonstrate that preservation and architectural reinvention have genuinely been exhausted. Michigan Central Station should have taught us that. For years, the abandoned train station was presented as evidence of Detroit's decline. There was a time when demolition might have seemed more practical than restoration. Ford Motor Company chose imagination instead. I thought about that transformation through the eyes of my late friend Bishop P.A. Brooks, the longtime dean of Detroit's faith community. More than 60 years ago, when Brooks came to Detroit from Chicago, he arrived through Michigan Central Station. Decades later, in our conversations in his office, he took enormous pride in watching a place connected to his arrival in this city be given new life. That is what preservation can mean, because a building can hold more than bricks, steel and an economic function. It can hold someone's arrival, a family's beginning, a city's memory and the passage of one generation into another. Today, Michigan Central stands as a powerful rebuke to the idea that yesterday's obsolete building cannot become tomorrow's civic treasure. That does not mean every building can be saved. It means Detroit should be very careful about deciding what cannot. And that brings us to the larger question I've been wrestling with for the last several weeks: whose city is this? Detroit should welcome corporate investment because anyone who lived through the years of disinvestment understands what it means when capital abandons a city. But investment does not confer ownership over Detroit's memory. Corporations possess capital, developers have expertise and government controls regulatory authority. But Detroiters possess something none of them can purchase: inheritance. They've lived through this city's rise, decline, abandonment and resurgence. Many stayed when investment fled. They raised families here, paid taxes here and carried Detroit's name when the rest of the country made the city a punchline. Their voices should matter when permanent decisions are made about Detroit's identity. Perhaps GM and Bedrock will ultimately demonstrate that the two towers cannot reasonably be saved. Then make that case to Detroit. Show the alternatives and explain why they cannot work. Give Detroiters more than a finished decision accompanied by dazzling architectural renderings. Frankly, Detroit's resurgence should give this city greater power to preserve its history, not greater permission to erase it. The wrecking ball should be the last argument regarding what goes and stays in Detroit. X (formerly Twitter): @BankoleDetNews bankole@bankolethompson.com Bankole Thompson's columns appear on Mondays and Thursdays in The Detroit News.