Newspapers and magazines do this thing that drives Detroiters crazy. Doesn't matter the headline. Maybe Detroit is coming back, maybe crime is falling, maybe a few neighborhoods are seeing a resurgence, maybe it’s all a bit more complicated than a few statistics make it seem. But editors generally use a particular photo to symbolize the city: the gorgeous but abandoned and ill-used Central Depot.

The station feels like a symbol because it is. When it opened in 1913, the grand 18-story office tower, its cavernous waiting room fronted by looming Corinthian columns, was the tallest rail station in the world. Two hundred trains left each day, bound for New York City and Boston and Chicago and West Virginia and Canada. In the station’s heyday, from the 1920s to the '50s, Detroit was the fourth-most populous city in the US, fed by influxes of immigrants who came to work for the mighty auto industry that called the city home.

Eventually, that industry helped put a stake in the primacy of American rail travel, and thus in the beaux-arts station. By 1967, the owners of the depot had closed its restaurant, main entrance, and large parts of its main waiting room—revenue couldn’t support the maintenance costs. The last Amtrak train pulled away in 1988. That and the general decay of Detroit, which, through years of intense segregation and job loss, saw its population shrink by more than 60 percent between the mid-20th century and the early aughts. Squatters have stripped the abandoned structure of everything worthwhile, graffiti and broken glass litter the floors, and Central Station has become a central figure in the slideshow of Detroit ruin porn.

For locals who have watched businesses slowly up their investments in the city, this feels unfair. “In Detroit, because there’s been some progress, and because part of Detroit’s problem is that it’s a belligerent place, there’s this almost revulsion over this building,” says Erik Gordon, who studies the automotive industry at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “It’s the picture you keep seeing and Detroiters say, ‘Oh, no, no, show a photo of this incubator. Show a photo of our airport—there's a great airport here. Or show a photo of our new basketball or hockey arenas.'”

Detroiters might soon grow more enthusiastic about photos of Michigan Central. Today Ford officially announced it would purchase and restore the station, transforming it into the centerpiece of a new 2,500-employee autonomous and electric vehicle testing and research center by 2022. (About 2,500 more employees will be added later.)

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Self-Driving Cars

This is a savvy PR move, sure, but it’s also a major investment with a big message. Sayeth Ford: We’re not Midwestern fuddy-duddies anymore. We’re a forward-thinking, get-around-anyhow-anyway sort of transportation network, in competition with another big Detroit automaker, sure, but also with Uber and Waymo and all the Silicon Valley tech giants.

"Palo Alto is about moving bits. We’re about moving people," said Jim Hackett, the company’s CEO said during a Tuesday morning press conference, in front of the station’s stained edifice now draped with blue Ford banners. "This can be our Sand Hill Road."

The purchase and restoration is symbolic on a few levels. It says, first, that Ford is here for Detroit. The 115-year-old company is actually based in Dearborn, up the road, but this will be an important incursion into the revitalizing downtown Corktown area. The purchase feels momentous for long-time (and long-frustrated) Detroit residents.