People throughout the country still remember news of the stolen clock that once hung on the Detroit train station built in 1913, a timepiece returned by a thief shortly after Ford Motor Co. purchased Michigan Central Station.
The station had been abandoned for three decades. The act of kindness went viral. The clock was left by an abandoned building, wrapped in a blanket and the subject of an anonymous call to The Henry Ford Museum (and, later, text to the automaker) for pickup.
Thief: “I only have the clock. No other material. I left it leaning against a burned-out building on Lawton. It is between Warren and Buchanan. The building is between the train tracks and 4470 Lawton. Please send two men and a truck immediately. It has been missing for over 20 years and is ready to go home. Thank you so much.”
Ford Land: “Thank you! I will try to send a crew right now.”
Thief: “Please have them lay it face up in the truck. The paint is very delicate. You can tell the front from the back by looking at the exposed legs.”
It was left just 2 miles from the depot in a low-activity area north of Corktown that includes Bargain Office Equipment and Faithful Mount Triumph Baptist Church.
The clock is one of hundreds of antiques and decorative parts stolen from the 18-story Beaux Arts structure, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
And America celebrated a thief who displayed a bit of civic responsibility.
Yet time can change how we see things, including the stolen clock scenario.
“I don’t like to refer to it as having been stolen because the Detroiter who took the clock did so in order to protect it from being melted down from scrap and preserved it,” said Dan Austin, communications director at Michigan Central. “In many ways, he didn’t steal it; he saved it. Had it not been for him, we would not have it today. And we would not be able to return it to the carriage house,”
He hated referring to the man who returned the carriage house clock as a thief.
“As a preservationist,” said Austin, who runs the historicdetroit.org website, “he’s a hero to me and not a thief.”
While the man returned the clock anonymously, a member of the Michigan Central community engagement team later revealed knowing the person. Ford actually reached out to celebrate his generosity but the man declined and requested to remain anonymous, Austin said.
Eventually, the clock will be installed again on the exterior of the renovated former train station.
But that’s not the only Easter egg at Michigan Central as visitors pour through the grand halls that once shipped soldiers to war and later welcomed them home.
An empty beer bottle wrapped in mystery
There’s a message in a bottle from 1913 discovered during demolition of the historic reading room. While finding old beer bottles and cigarette tins stuck behind the crumbling plaster walls was not unusual for restoration workers, the bottle of Stroh’s Bohemian Beer had a handwritten note inside. It was among more than 200 items found from more than a century ago and collected.
Stephanee Borger, 41, of Oak Park, and Adam Sekuler, 46, of Detroit, stopped Friday night to take a closer look of the “Message in the Bottle,” while touring the first floor of the Michigan Central Station for the “Summer at the Station” self-guided tours.
“We’re trying to make out the indecipherable word,” Sekuler said. “It’s interesting, in general, the ways people left treasures in the building. You get to kind of make up your own narrative.”
Learning of the found artifacts impressed Borger.
“The fact that they even had the thought to preserve and look inside the bottle is something that probably would not have happened anywhere else but Detroit,” Borger said.
The pair continued to talk about how the items on display made the opening of Michigan Central Station more than just about restoration of the building, but more about reconstructing and connecting them to the past and how special that makes Detroit. Leaving graffiti in areas of the iconic building, though controversial to some, is also about honoring the past, Ford said.
Lost, ruined, scrapped
Jeremy Dimick, manager of collections at the Detroit…
Read More: Stolen clock, message in a bottle some of the Easter eggs at Michigan Central