What Might Have Been - Detroit Main Library Subway Station!

[A2Mike]

While looking up Boston's magnificent Public Library, by McKim, Mead and White, I was practically knocked over at pictures of the Boylston Street side of the building's opulent entrance to the subway's green line. Had only Detroit's street car lines been put below the streets when underground obstructions were fewer and simpler, and costs accordingly lower, they might not have been so easily eliminated - they might have created a critical mass of support for their continued operation. Even in the motor city of WWI through WWII, huge numbers of industrial and downtown workers used public transit and a useful system could have shaped the city's development post-WWII, with a denser, less sprawling city and suburbs. How the present can recapture some of the past's unrealized potential is a complex and daunting issue, but a few streetcars in the inner core of town, like the people mover, don't seem enough to signal a significant commitment to building a new city capable of attracting the creative, urban-oriented people presently going elsewhere.
Detroit has plenty of of its own past splendors but it's enticing to imagine that Boston subway entrance on Woodward in front of Cass Gilbert's equally grand DPL. Perhaps contemporary architects like Tod Williams/Billie Tsien, with origins in Detroit's industrial ascendancy, could create suitable civic amenities for our own times.

[wolverine]

There's some diagrams of what the downtown transfer subway station would have looked like in Detroit. Probably would have gotten a magnificent entrance at the old city hall.

With Detroit's past wealth and talented architects, I have no doubt the stations would have been extravagant.