Yesterday GM announced that it is moving its headquarters from the Renaissance Center to the new Hudson building next year. The announcement has me feeling sad. I moved to the Detroit area in 1989 to start my career with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which then was a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors. I could have worked at any one of dozens of offices in the Detroit area that EDS or GM occupied, but my job was located at the General Motors Building, now known as Cadillac Place, a beautiful building designed by architect Albert Kahn and constructed in the early 1920s. Every work day for two years I walked through the architectural marvels that are the Fisher and GM Buildings.

In 1995 GM spun off EDS into an independent company and to complete that spin off EDS paid GM $500 million. A year later GM announced it was buying the Renaissance Center for $73 million and moving their headquarters to that building. I remember watching the announcement GM made to their employees that featured an animation of a helicopter placing the GM logo on the top of the RenCen tower. Six years later EDS announced it was consolidating some of its Detroit offices, all used in support of GM, into Tower 500 of the Renaissance Center, and a few years after that I moved into a brand new cube in the newly renovated tower.

Detroit today looks very different than it did back in 1996, back then the Detroit riverfront as mostly discarded properly with piles of dirt or dirt parking lots. Today a beautiful walking path stretches from Belle Isle south by about five miles, connecting a few new parks along the way. The difference one sees in Detroit today can be traced back to GM’s purchase of the Renaissance Center and the millions of dollars it spent to revitalize the riverfront area. I am certain that without the investment that GM made Dan Gilbert would not have been as interested to make the investments in Detroit that lead to the new tower on the Hudson site.

I very much enjoyed my years working at the Renaissance Center, although the commute that could stretch for more than an hour if there were an accident, not so much. Whenever there was an event, like the Super Bowl, or the Red Bull air races, or when there were parades for the Detroit Red Wings or Pistons championships, the RenCen was energetic.

The announcement yesterday did not include any information about the future of the RenCen. While GM and its subsidiaries occupied nearly the whole of all four office towers, that began to decrease over time either through head count reductions or by GM’s sale/spinoff of GMAC/Ally Finanicial that moved to another office building in Detroit. During my time working at the RenCen EDS went from occupying all 13 floors of Tower 500 to slowing emptying out floors of that building and ultimately ending up in two floors of Tower 100, and at that time EDS was again acquired, this time by Hewlett Packard. We eventually moved from the Renaissance Center to an entire office building in Pontiac until 2018 when the landlord of that build sold it and the now DXC Technology moved to two floors in building in Auburn Hills.

It is hard to imagine the Renaissance Center being torn down because it is so iconic, but at the same time it is hard to imagine that much office space being occupied. Perhaps the center (tallest) tower can be renovated into a mix of hotel and loft/condos, but it is hard to imagine all four towers being occupied in such a manner. During the announcement yesterday it was said that GM, the city of Detroit, Wayne County, and Bedrock (Gilbert’s company) will be working together to plan the future for the site. I will not be surprised if the four office towers are torn down with the tallest middle one remaining to make room for some new development.