The Green Garage

The Green Garage was built in 1920, and was a showroom for the city’s pride: Model T-based automobiles. 

Now it’s a metaphor for urban reinvention. Last fall, the building reopened as the Green Garage, a living laboratory and co-working space for the what its owners, Tom and Peggy Brennan, see as the future of Motown — triple-bottom-line sustainable enterprises that define success by social and environmental measures as well as by financial profit.

Not everyone can envision a future in this place. Even as the postbailout auto industry shows signs of life, Detroit’s landscape, with its derelict skyscrapers, abandoned homes and shrinking population, has become a potent symbol of economic collapse. But the Brennans see the potential for new growth here. 

Though Detroit already has several business incubators, the Green Garage, they say, will walk a different path.