Here's how Detroit's skyline might look when Hudson's tower is built

Crews break ground in less than two weeks on what's anticipated to be Detroit's — and Michigan's — tallest skyscraper, but you can get a peek now at what the downtown skyline might look like from various vantage points once it's complete.

Eric Paterno, of Detroit, on Sunday shared renderings using Google Earth to predict what it would be like to see the 68-story, 800-foot-tall tower from such Detroit sites as Belle Isle and Comerica Park. The gallery even includes a shot from our current tallest tower, the 727-foot-tall Renaissance Center.

Work on the $909 million building project is scheduled to begin Dec. 1 at 1208 Woodward, the site of the old J.L. Hudson department store in downtown Detroit. The 1.3 million-square-foot building is an endeavor by businessman Dan Gilbert's real estate firm, Bedrock, and it could take at least three years for completion.

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The building will offer more than 300,000 square feet of office space, 100,000 square feet of retail, food and beverage space, and about 167,000 square feet of exhibition space. The 68-floor residential tower is to include 330 apartments.

Paterno said he's an engineer at an auto company in metro Detroit. He used SketchUp, a 3-D modeling computer program, to make a model of the Hudson's site project, then dropped it into Google Earth.

Here's what the renderings show from Belle Isle:

From Capitol Park:

From Gratiot:

From Comerica Park:

And from Grand River Avenue:

Paterno said the work on the Hudson's renderings took a little more than two hours. He's previously made renderings of what the Fisher Building — including a 60-story center tower — would have looked like if the original plans for three full towers had been carried out.

He has also posted images of Detroit if Elias Brevoort Woodward's early-1800s plan to reconstruct city using spoke-and-hub street designs were fully implemented.

Contact Robert Allen on Twitter @rallenMI or rallen@freepress.com.