Demolition makes way for Detroit’s tallest building

Contractors have been working over the past several weeks to demolish a four-story underground parking structure on site of the former J.L. Hudson building in Detroit to make way for what will be the tallest building in the state, MLive.com reports.

Opened in 1911, the J.L. Hudson store stood 410 feet tall and occupied 2,124,316 square feet of space—making it one of the world’s biggest department stores and a Detroit landmark.

J.L. Hudson’s closed in 1983 and was eventually imploded in 1998. The site, which has since remained vacant, is being prepared for a new 800-foot-tall, 58-story skyscraper that will serve as a mixed-use facility. The skyscraper will house up to 450 residential units, while a corresponding 12-story building will house a ground-floor market and exhibition space. In total, the new facility will include 240 square feet of office space, 100,000 square feet of retail space and 120,000 square feet of event space.

The 1.1 million-square-foot project is estimated to cost $1 billion and be completed in 2022.

"When we lost Hudson's, it symbolized how far we had fallen," Dan Gilbert, the billionaire businessman whose Detroit-based real estate firm, Bedrock Detroit, is behind the project said during a December 2017 groundbreaking ceremony. "Detroit is coming back today.”