12 Abandoned Buildings People Saved, Like Detroit’s Train Station That Sat Empty for 30 Years

When the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was finished in 1870, it stood a safe 1,500 feet from the ocean. By 1970, the surf was only 120 feet away.

In the summer of 1999, crews lifted the 4,830-ton tower onto steel beams and roller dollies, and hydraulic jacks pushed it along a track 5 feet at a time. It set off on June 17 and reached its new foundation on July 9, 2,900 feet from the spot where it had stood for 129 years. It now stands about 1,600 feet from the shore.

Kiruna, a Swedish town about 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is moving its whole center: more than a century of iron ore mining has been cracking the ground under it. Its red timber church, built in 1912, is 115 feet tall and weighs 672 tonnes.

Instead of taking it apart, the town moved it in one piece. On Aug. 19 and 20, 2025, the church rolled 3 miles on giant trailers to the new town center, at no more than 500 meters an hour.

Battersea Power Station once supplied power to a fifth of London. After it was decommissioned in 1983, it lay abandoned for some 30 years, and one owner even removed its roof for a theme park that never happened.

The rebuild took about a decade. Workers took down and rebuilt all four white chimneys, and two of the firms that made the original bricks supplied 1.75 million matching ones. It opened in October 2022 with offices, shops and 254 flats, and a glass lift now carries visitors 357 feet up one of the chimneys.

Michigan Central Station opened in late 1913, an 18-story depot that was Detroit’s grand front door.

The last train pulled out in 1988, and for the next 30 years the building sat empty while scrappers stripped it. It was bought in 2018, and after a six-year renovation it opened to the public again in June 2024. More than 3,100 workers restored 8 million bricks and 29,000 tiles in the Grand Hall. Both photos were taken from the same park across the street, 14 years apart.

In February 2021, the Englander House, a seven-bedroom Victorian built in the early 1880s, had to leave its lot on Franklin Street to make room for new homes. Instead of tearing it down, the owner moved it.

Crews loaded the house onto giant dollies and towed it six blocks to Fulton Street in about six hours, at roughly 1 mile an hour. The move cost $400,000 and needed the approval of more than a dozen city agencies. It was the first time since 1974 that a Victorian like it had been moved in the city.

In 1968, the owners of Grand Central Terminal filed plans for a 55-story office building cantilevered over the station. New York’s landmarks commission said no, the public protested, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis joined the campaign to save it. On June 26, 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the city’s landmarks law, and the station stayed as it was.

In the 1990s, it was restored: crews spent a year cleaning black tar off the ceiling painted with constellations. In 2013, NPR counted 750,000 people walking through every day.

For 120 years, the Rubjerg Knude lighthouse stood on a sand dune on Denmark’s north coast. By 2019, erosion from the North Sea had left it only a few yards from the edge of the cliff.

On Oct. 22, 2019, engineers lifted the 75-foot tower and moved it 230 feet inland, “like skates on rails.” They couldn’t go faster than about 40 feet an hour, and the move was over within hours. The tower turned out to weigh 720 tonnes, not the 1,000 the engineers had planned for.

Vienna’s four brick gasometers in the Simmering district are each 75 meters tall, about 246 feet, and the city’s Giant Ferris Wheel would fit inside any one of them.

From the end of the 1990s, four teams of architects worked on converting the 102-year-old gas holders into one complex: 615 apartments, an events hall for 4,200 people and a big shopping floor at ground level. The subway stop next to them is simply called Gasometer.

After Notre-Dame de Paris lost its roof and spire in 2019, about 2,000 workers spent five years putting the 12th-century building back together. Carpenters hewed giant oak beams by hand for the roof frame and the spire, and about 2,000 oak trees were felled to supply the wood.

The work was paid for by 340,000 donors from France and around the world. The cathedral reopened on Dec. 7, 2024.

The grain silo at Cape Town’s harbor dates from the 1920s. Heatherwick Studio turned it into the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.

The designers cut the central atrium out of the silo’s concrete tubes in a shape inspired by a single grain of corn, so the curved walls rise through the middle of the building. Daylight pours in through tubes 18 feet wide. The old tower on top kept its shape and got new windows of bulging glass.

Tate Modern lives in the former Bankside Power Station on the Thames. The Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron spent four years and £134 million converting it. They kept the 115-foot-high turbine hall as a huge entrance, with 84 galleries on three levels above it.

The gallery opened on May 11, 2000, and within a year some five million people had visited. Battersea Power Station, from No. 3, is three times its size, its project manager told the BBC.

The moated Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers in western France dates back to the 13th century. By the end of the 1930s it was a ruin, and trees moved in.

In late 2017, a crowdfunding campaign let anyone become a co-owner for at least €50, and it raised more than €500,000 in 40 days. In the end, the castle was bought by 27,910 people from 115 countries. It isn’t restored, and it may never be. Volunteers are stabilizing the ruins, and it is open to visitors.