John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press

Joe Guziewicz spent much of the past 20 years building high-rise hotels and casino towers around the country for Caesars Entertainment. Now he’s bringing that skyscraper expertise to building what promises to become the tallest building on Detroit’s skyline.

Businessman Dan Gilbert hired Guziewicz a year ago to build his stunningly ambitious project on the Hudson’s block downtown — a 1.5-million-square-foot mixed-use array of residential, retail, office, entertainment and civic space all wrapped up in an eye-popping architectural package.

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But as Guziewicz told me this week, going from concept to ribbon-cutting demands an incredibly complex ballet of construction workers, traffic control and coordination with all the other construction projects on the boards now. Those other projects include those by Gilbert himself that Guziewicz will juggle as vice president of construction for Gilbert’s Bedrock real estate arm.

“It’s just this incredible logistics dance,” he said.

It helps that Detroit is flexing its construction muscles again after some dormant years. A city that knows how to build stuff is gearing up to build its most ambitious project since the Renaissance Center in the 1970s.

The first task in erecting the huge project is finding room near the Hudson’s site for all those construction trailers for subcontractors that normally dot any big construction site. Guziewicz is looking for vacant lots and empty buildings nearby where contractors can stage their efforts. That’s getting harder by the day as downtown fills up with new employees and residents who have occupied many of the once-empty buildings.

Then, too, Guziewicz needs to find parking spaces for the hundreds of construction workers who’ll be building the project and who will need places to park their personal vehicles each day. That, too, is getting trickier by the day now that Gilbert has brought something like 17,000 new workers downtown in the past six years. Look for Bedrock to set up shuttle runs to bring in workers from remote lots.

That parking squeeze will get even tighter because the underground parking garage now on the Hudson’s site will be demolished to make way for the new project to rise there.

Once under way, the construction work will have to compete with traffic on nearby streets, the operation of the new QLINE streetcar line, and all the daily life passing by on downtown streets. It's unclear now whether any street closings will be necessary in the blocks surrounding the project. Making sure the construction doesn't pose safety risks to the public adds another layer of complexity.

While trying to minimize disruption to daily life, one of the toughest tasks will be coordinating the delivery of materials. There just won’t be room on site to let steel and other materials stack up for days or weeks.

“The materials need to be on demand,” Guziewicz said. “You can’t have a crane waiting for a piece of steel to come with a truck, so there’s a lot of coordination with how materials are staged in order to get the right piece of steel at the right time in the right place.”

All this would create headaches enough if the Hudson’s project was the only one going on. But,,of course, Detroit has multiple big projects under way in the next few years, including others by Gilbert himself, such as the creation of the Shinola Hotel in the next block north of the Hudson’s site.

I asked Guziewicz whether there’s enough workers, trucks, cranes, steel and other necessities to go around.

“The answer, ultimately, to the question is yes,” he said, but coordination remains key. “We’re looking at all these projects and whether they’re overlapping. So at every stage of it, when we’re erecting steel (at the Hudson’s site),we want to make sure that the other projects are in the next phase or the prior phase. We’re looking at all these projects to make sure we don’t step on each other’s toes.”

There is, of course, a big “if” standing in the way of Gilbert’s vision for the Hudson’s block. He’s hoping that state lawmakers will approve a package of significant new tax incentives to fill the gap between what a major new project costs to build and what the owners can get back in the form of rent in a weaker market like Detroit.

Without those new incentives, the Hudson’s project will scale down somewhat.

“We would have to take a pause, step back,” Guziewicz told me. “It would certainly affect many things, potentially the tower. Certainly, the uniqueness of the podium would be a pain point for us. So you’d definitely see a different project that’s less unique and interesting, because unique and interesting is a great thing to drive people's interest but it’s also very costly.”

That question will be resolved soon, certainly well before Guziewicz and his team break ground on the Hudson’s project in December.

And three years later, after that incredibly complex ballet of workers, material deliveries, coordination with traffic and the rest, what could be Detroit’s tallest tower ever will grace the skyline.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.