(WXYZ) — Bedrock officially broke ground on the new Gratiot Life Sciences Building on the site of the failed Wayne County Jail project.
The groundbreaking was the official start of construction on a site that has had several proposals planned over the last decade.
According to Bedrock, the Gratiot Life Sciences Building will be the home of Henry Ford Health and BAMF Health's new Comprehensive Theranostics Center.
The two-story building will be 90,000 square feet with clinical operations and a flexible second space for new partners.
It's smaller than the original plan for an Innovation District, announced in December 2024. That plan called for the district, centered around life sciences, technology and entrepreneurship, with the focal point being a 220,000 square foot life science innovation building.
Located near Gratiot Ave. and St. Antoine on the eastern edge of Downtown Detroit, the site was originally supposed to be the home of a new Wayne County Jail. The project was scrapped in 2013 and demolition began in 2018.
Dan Gilbert's company took over the site as part of a land-swap agreement with Wayne County in 2018, after it was proposed that Gilbert would build a Major League Soccer stadium on the site. However, those eventual plans changed after it was announced that a potential MLS team would have played games at Ford Field.
In 2019, the University of Michigan and several other partners planned to build a $300 million innovation center on the site. After the COVID-19 pandemic, Ilitch Holdings announced the U-M Center for Innovation would be built in The District Detroit on the other side of Downtown Detroit. That construction is ongoing.
