Quote:
Originally Posted by excel
Great pictures. That pedestrian bridge between those two buildings is really cool. What really is the purpose of it? Does a big company have offices in both buildings?
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Sort of. I'm assuming you're talking about One Woodward Avenue, the white modernist building, and the Guardian Building, the orange art deco building.
One Woodward Avenue was originally built as the HQ for the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company (aka MichCon) in the 1960s. In the 1980s, MichCon was split up and part of the offices were moved into the Guardian Building while One Woodward Detroit was used for the parent company, American Natural Resources (or vice versa, not really sure). Either way, the pedestrian bridge was built then to connect the offices of both companies.
These days, MichCon has been absorbed into DTE and ANR was absorbed into some Houston-based company. Currently OWA is owned by Dan Gilbert and includes office space occupied by Quicken Loans and the eastern Michigan HQ for Fifth Third Bank as well as some other tenants. The Guardian Building is mostly used as office space for Wayne County.
The bridge has no real functional use anymore, but it's too much of a hassle to get rid of it and no one's really complained about it so it's just there now. Might be useful in the even of an evacuation of either building though.