In 1886, an impressive stone railroad depot was constructed in Ann Arbor to serve the rail line linking Detroit to St. Joseph, Michigan. The building is located at 401 Depot Street, just south of the rail line and west of State Street. The station, built by the Michigan Central Railroad, was appointed with high ceilings, elaborate trim, stained glass windows, terra cotta fireplaces and French tile floors. Upon opening, the building was referred to as “the finest station on the line between Buffalo and Chicago”. The original design offered separate men’s and women’s waiting areas at opposite ends of the building and included a garden with a fountain. The building’s architect, Frederick Spier of the Detroit architecture firm Spier and Rohn emigrated from Germany and designed other stations for Michigan Central, including those in the towns of Niles, Battle Creek, Lansing, and Grand Rapids.
The building was designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style with a rusticated, locally quarried stone masonry exterior. The station as it was originally designed consisted of the main passenger depot and two smaller accessory buildings, a railway office and baggage building, located on either side and connected by an open-air metal canopy that ran the entire length of all three structures. The buildings were later joined by enclosing the canopies.
The passenger building stands at 2 ½ stories in height with a steeply pitched slate roof featuring eyebrow dormers. The main façade features two prominent gables that break the main volume of the building. The easternmost gable showcases an impressive hemispherical Richardsonian archway that marks the main entrance to the building, with a series of smaller arched punched openings above a contrasting stone beltline. The composition of the façade is one of balanced asymmetry, with a lower eave line and a trio of roman arched openings to the west of the entrance, followed by the other, slightly smaller, gable that features a second Richardsonian hemispherical arch form, this time surrounding a window and framed in contrasting stone. The track side façade features a turret, tower, and stone chimney.
The depot was a busy transit hub for many years with as many as 13 Detroit to Chicago runs per day in the early 1900’s. The station also became a popular “whistle stop” campaign destination for political figures including Teddy Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, Willam Howard Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. As personal automobiles became ubiquitous, train ridership declined drastically. The depot was sold to Detroit restaurateur Chuck Muer in 1968 and converted to a fine-dining restaurant. Muer was interested in historic preservation and had successfully converted historic buildings in Cincinnati and Pittsburg. The restaurant, which opened in 1970, was aptly named Gandy Dancer to honor the building’s railroad history and is still operating today. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. It is also featured in this month’s MAF Architecture Road Trip, through historic Ann Arbor; click to read.