Hundreds of Quicken Loans employees, media (both local and national), business people and city politicians crammed into the Chase Building's long ground floor hallway fronting Woodward Avenue Monday morning to welcome the downtown mortgage company's latest wave of employees.
About 2,000 employees are moving into the Chase Building, the square building that looks like a cheese grater overlooking Campus Martius. Many of them were dressed in Lions gear and cheered loudly, and unprompted, when the likes of
Quicken Loans Chairman Dan Gilbert,
Detroit Economic Growth Corp CEO George Jackson, Detroit Mayor
Dave Bing and Detroit City Council President
Charles Pugh.
"Welcome to the city we both love," Push said to the crowd.
"You're going to like Detroit," Bing added a few minutes later. "We are on the rise. We are looked upon by the country as the comeback city."
Quicken Loans and its family of businesses, led by Gilbert, have been buying, renovating and moving white collar and tech workers into downtown office buildings along the Woodward corridor. Gilbert's team is branding the section of lower Woodward between Grand Circus Park and Campus Martius,
Webward. He has already moved 3,700 workers from the suburbs to downtown in the Compuware and Chase building, and plans to bring thousands more.
"It is a special feeling down here," Gilbert says. "There is something special about not only downtown but the city of Detroit."
Quicken Loans controls six floors of the 14-story building today, and plans to take over another two floors by January. Each floor holds about 300 workers and are decked out in the bright colors and contemporary design that is becoming the
trademark of Quicken Loans downtown offices. Gilbert's team plans to bring the
Madison Building overlooking the Grand Circus Park next month and the First National Building across Woodward from the Chase Building online later this year. These building will be filled by a number of employees from Quicken,
smaller firms in its family of companies and
other growing small businesses the loan giant is recruiting to come downtown.
Source: Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans; Dave Bing, mayor of Detroit; Charles Pugh, city council president of Detroit
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at
SEMichiganStartup.com.
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