Michigan Central Station, or MCS as it is often called, consists of a three-story train depot and an eighteen-story office tower. It is made up of more than eight million bricks, one hundred and twenty-five thousand cubic feet of stone and seven thousand tons of structural steel — plus another four thousand tons in the sheds. The foundation has twenty thousand cubic yards of concrete. When the building opened, it was the tallest railroad station in the world, and the fourth tallest building in Detroit. The railroad invested a total of $16 million (nearly $332 million today) on the new station, office building, yards and the underwater rail tunnel, which was inaugurated on Oct. 16, 1910. The price tag for the station alone was about $2.5 million ($55 million today).

The depot was to be formally dedicated on Jan. 4, 1914, but a fire that started at 2:10 p.m. on…