Having lost nearly a million people in the last 60 years, Detroit has a backlog of thousands of empty office buildings, theaters, houses and hotels. Downtown alone, more than 200 abandoned buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places. Most are examples of the Art Deco and neo-Classical styles that were popular before World War II, when Detroit was booming.

But with 500,000 square feet of space on 14 acres of land, Michigan Central Station is “different from your standard vacant building,” said Mickey Blashfield, a government relations official with the station’s owner, CenTra Inc., a trucking and transportation company that acquired it by default through a property transfer in 1995 and has struggled to find a use for it since.

“Architecturally and historically,” Mr. Blashfield said, “it has more of an emotional connection with people than virtually any building in the city.”

As it is, Michigan Central Station, with its 18-story office tower, has been picked to the bare bones by scavengers, who over the years have made off with a treasure-trove of chandeliers and mahogany and marble ornaments.

But it is still a magnet for urban explorers and photographers from around the world. On various Facebook pages, it has more than 15,000 fans and friends. Phillip Cooley, a restaurant owner who lives across a park from the station, estimates that about 30 sightseers a day show up at its locked gate, cameras raised. He calls the building “an education.”

“A building like that would not be allowed to deteriorate that way and remain standing in any other city,” said Mr. Cooley, who spends some of his free time around the station with neighbors cleaning up and planting grass. “It shows our postindustrial landscape: how nature takes over, what abandonment looks like. There’s a lot to be learned from its current state. It needs to be a public space again.”