Getting Back on Track

From Hour Detroit magazine

On the evening of Oct. 24, 1998, downtown Detroit was quite literally ground zero. Breathless reporters were perched on rooftops. Every TV station was live. Video beamed across the country via satellite. And then, at 5:47 p.m., explosions ripped through the 87-year-old J.L. Hudson building, and it collapsed in a plume of dust. While crowds — and Mayor Dennis Archer — cheered, Miles O’Brien, then a rising star at CNN, felt something else entirely. “Oh, I cried. I cried like a baby when they imploded Hudson’s,” he says without a trace of embarrassment. “I’m a fourth-generation Detroiter. … My whole family worked at Hudson’s.”

If these feelings had been festering for years, O’Brien found himself in December 2008 with an unexpected chance to do something about it. Dropped by CNN in budget cuts that claimed the entire science team, O’Brien landed in the world of public television as anchor of Blueprint America, a documentary series about America’s crumbling infrastructure. In the latest installment, Beyond the Motor City (PBS, Feb. 8), O’Brien turns conventional wisdom about Detroit on its head with the hypothesis that his hometown is not only poised for a rebirth, but could once again transform transportation in America.