Once one of the largest cities in the United States, Detroit, Michigan, is a place of immense industrial power—power mainly attained because of the automobile. Sometimes called the Motor City, the Detroit metropolitan area is the home base for the country’s leading automakers and for the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union. The city’s economy, therefore, remains unusually sensitive to the fortunes of the automotive industry. Detroit lost more than half of its population in the second half of the 20th century as large numbers of people moved from the city to the suburbs. By the end of the century, the loss of population, combined with a decline in automobile making, caused Detroit’s economy to struggle. After the city underwent bankruptcy proceedings in 2013, Detroit leaders had hope that they would be able to overcome the remaining obstacles and oversee a return to a stable economic climate.
Detroit lies on a flat plain in southeastern Michigan at the edge of the Detroit River. The latter is actually a strait connecting Lake St. Clair to the north with Lake Erie to the south. The river is part of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which connects the city with the Atlantic Ocean, enabling freighters from around the world to transport goods to and from the city. Detroit was named for the river, whose name comes from the French word détroit, meaning “strait.”
A finger of Canada lies to the south of Detroit, and the Canadian city of Windsor can be seen from Detroit’s downtown. Tall buildings dating back to the 1920s dot the downtown area, with the magnificent Fisher Building and the Penobscot Building among the most notable examples. Among the largest of Detroit’s modern developments is the seven-building GM Renaissance Center (GMRENCEN), with its 73-story hotel, shops, restaurants, office towers, and convention center. The interconnected complex is owned by General Motors, which has its offices there. Residential neighborhoods begin at the edge of downtown. As the city grew outward, it encompassed the towns of Highland Park and Hamtramck. Today each of those enclaves remains a distinct self-governing city within the Detroit city limits.
Detroit has a continental climate, with warm humid summers and cold dry winters. However, the moderating effect of the Great Lakes generally ensures mild temperatures.
The metropolitan population is the product of the massive industrialization that began in early-20th-century Detroit. Production of autos, steel, and rubber required an enormous labor force, attracting domestic and foreign immigrants and creating a dynamic urban environment. Thus Detroiters come from a variety of backgrounds, a diversity greatly celebrated by the city. Arab Americans, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Italians, Hispanics, and Asians are among the ethnic groups who call Detroit home.
The lure of factory jobs in the early 20th century also attracted farm families from the South and the Midwest. Many Southerners, both whites and blacks, came north when hard times hit agriculture in their home states after 1910. The arrival of African Americans in Detroit was especially dramatic—their community grew from 6,000 in 1910 to 41,000 in 1920. Many were recruited by manufacturers when World War I shut off the supply of immigrant labor. In the early 21st century, African Americans constituted some four-fifths of the Detroit population.
Detroit’s taxpayers have strongly supported the arts and education. The city has several colleges and universities, including the University of Detroit Mercy, a combined Jesuit and Religious Sisters of Mercy institution, and state-supported Wayne State University. The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village, two sister museums in suburban Dearborn, trace the history of the United States through the homes, vehicles, and everyday objects of its people. Other cultural offerings include the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Detroit Historical Museum. The Cranbrook Educational Community in suburban Bloomfield Hills includes a house and gardens, prekindergarden through grade 12 schools, an art museum, an institute of science, and a graduate school of the arts.
Detroit is notable also for its contributions in music and communications. One of the first commercial radio stations in the United States was station 8MK (now called WWJ), which began broadcasting from downtown Detroit on August 20, 1920. The city has a world-class symphony and is well known as the home of Motown Records. Founded in 1959, the music company and its artists had an immeasurable impact on American popular culture in the second half of the 20th century.
Sports are important to many Detroiters, and the metropolitan area is home to several professional teams. The Detroit Lions play football at Ford Field in the downtown area, and the Detroit Pistons play basketball at the Palace of Auburn Hills. Joe Louis Arena in downtown Detroit is home to the Red Wings hockey team. The Detroit Tigers formerly played in Tiger Stadium, which was one of the oldest ballparks in major league baseball before it was demolished in 2008–09. In 2000 the team moved to the newly built Comerica Park in downtown Detroit.
Detroit’s historic dependence on the automobile industry led to hard times beginning in the 1980s. Drastic reductions in new automobile purchases led to a massive decrease in production and unemployment rates of more than 15 percent. Faced with economic catastrophe, Detroit in the 1990s began to diversify its economy. The service sector has grown steadily and employs a large portion of the labor force. Health care, technology, and financial services are some of the city’s most-vital new industries.
Detroit’s automobile industry remains a key economic force, however. Michigan is the largest producer of cars and trucks in the United States. The Big Three automakers are headquartered in metropolitan Detroit—the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) in Auburn Hills, and the General Motors Company (GM) in Detroit itself. After the carmakers encountered financial difficulties in the early 21st century because of the flagging U.S. economy, the U.S. government offered them an emergency financial rescue package in 2008. Although the Big Three continued to employ thousands of people at their headquarters, automation and the use of plants outside Detroit negatively affected Detroit’s economy, as did the changeability of the automobile market.
The city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013 after it was unable to pay its outstanding debts. After being home to 1.8 million people in the 1950s, when the automobile industry was at its peak, the city’s population declined to some 700,000 by 2012. With a lower population, the city’s tax base was smaller, and it collected far less in taxes. The huge outflow of residents also significantly reduced the demand for Detroit real estate. The reduced demand led to spiraling drops in property values. Detroit was particularly hard-hit by the Great Recession of 2007–09. The city found itself in deep debt, and it was unable to pay the pensions of its public employees. Unemployment, rundown neighborhoods, crime, underfunded basic public services, and an underperforming educational system kept people from returning to the city. Gentrification in some areas of Detroit, however, as well as an uptick in business—such as the 2010 relocation to the city of mortgage-lending giant Quicken Loans—showed promise of economically revitalizing the area. In 2014 the federal courts allowed Detroit to exit bankruptcy amid a plan that forgave some debt and approved a major restructuring deal that, among other things, reinvested in basic public services.
Detroit is a major transportation hub. The city connects with Windsor via the Ambassador Bridge and by a railroad tunnel and a vehicle tunnel under the Detroit River. The river is heavily used by Great Lakes shipping. Detroit’s port, the largest in Michigan, handles significant quantities of steel products, coal, iron ore, cement, and road-building items. Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport is located about 17 miles (27 kilometers) southwest of downtown.
The first humans to occupy the Detroit region were Native Americans, who arrived following the last Ice Age some 15,000 years ago. French explorers and trappers from Quebec arrived in the 17th century. Most of the Native Americans they encountered belonged to the Ottawa, the Ojibwa, and the Potawatomi peoples. The first recorded sighting of the area was made by Father Louis Hennepin, a French priest traveling aboard a Great Lakes expedition.
The city itself was founded in 1701 by another French explorer, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac. An army officer from the south of France, Cadillac persuaded Louis XIV of France to allow him to establish an outpost on the strait between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. Cadillac contended that the outpost would protect the French fur trade. The fort slowly grew into a settlement as French trappers established farms nearby.
In 1760 the British conquered Detroit in the French and Indian War. It remained a British possession until 1796—well after the American Revolution. Under the British the character of the community remained essentially unchanged. The settlers were still predominantly French, though a large group of them became unhappy with their new rulers and fled. The Native Americans also disliked the British. The Ottawa chief Pontiac nearly took Detroit from the British in a military action that historians would later call Pontiac’s Conspiracy.
During the American Revolution, the British used Detroit mostly as a launching point for attacks on colonial settlers and forces to the east. After the war Detroit remained a quiet outpost with hundreds of French farmers and a handful of English and American traders. The town was incorporated in 1802. Three years later it burned to the ground in a fire that started in a baker’s stable.
Detroit finally came of age in 1825, when the Erie Canal was completed. Suddenly the time it took to travel from the east coast to Detroit was reduced from a month to a mere five and a half days. New Englanders brought their families to Michigan, cleared the virgin woods, and began farming. Fortunes were made and lost in land speculation. Merchants grew rich, and lumber barons began carving up the state’s forests. Detroit’s population grew from 2,000 in 1830 to more than 30,000 in 1855.
In 1842 the Ojibwa turned over to the U.S. government all rights to the copper- and iron-rich land they had occupied for thousands of years in northern Michigan. The sudden access to abundant raw materials facilitated Detroit’s rise as a manufacturing center. Long before the first car rolled down its streets, the city was known as the potbelly-stove capital of the country. In addition, Detroit produced railway equipment, boats, and marine engines. By the time Henry Ford founded his Ford Motor Company in 1903, there was no shortage of the skilled labor needed to build American cars. The world’s first mile of concrete road was laid in Detroit in 1909.
In 1910, in the Detroit area, 38 companies were making automobiles. In 1917 annual production reached 1 million. Two years later Ford established the first automotive assembly line in his massive new plant in Highland Park. In 1920 the country’s first electric traffic light was installed in Detroit’s downtown.
By 1920 Detroit’s population reached 993,000. The city boomed during the 1920s but fell into desperate straits during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when all but the biggest automakers went bankrupt and disappeared. During the summer of 1931, about one-third of the city’s workers were without jobs. Battles frequently erupted between police and labor demonstrators who protested wage cuts and long hours in the factories. One of the most famous Detroiters during this period was Father Charles E. Coughlin, who preached against communism and fostered his form of right-wing extremism from the pulpit and on his national radio show from suburban Royal Oak.
The onset of World War II and its great need for tanks, trucks, planes, and jeeps brought Detroit out of the Depression. After the war many Detroiters moved to the newly developing suburbs, a trend that continued for the rest of the century. Between 1970 and 2000, Detroit lost almost a third of its population to this so-called urban flight. By the mid-1960s, much of Detroit’s urban core was crumbling; those families who remained were trapped in a downward spiral of poverty. Many experts blamed this for the infamous riots that occurred in Detroit in 1967. The riots left 43 people dead, almost 1,200 injured, and huge swaths of property destroyed by looting or fire.
Many saw the election in 1973 of Detroit’s first African American mayor, Coleman Young, who would serve an unprecedented five terms (1974–93), as a turning point. However, the city continued to suffer economically. Competition with foreign automakers, coupled with economic recession in the 1980s and 1990s, devastated the Detroit auto industry and the urban economy that depended on it. The city turned a significant corner after the 1993 election of Mayor Dennis Archer, who implemented a strong program of economic development. Under his administration the city spent millions of dollars on infrastructure. Casino gambling was legalized along the Detroit River, and new stadiums were built for the Lions and for the Tigers. Scandals plagued the tenure of the city’s next mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who was forced to resign in 2008 during his second term. He was later accused of having abused the power of the mayor’s office, and in 2013 he was convicted of multiple counts, including bribery, racketeering, and extortion. He was ultimately sentenced to 28 years in prison.
In May 2009 former Pistons star Dave Bing was elected to complete Kilpatrick’s final months in office; in November of that year, Bing was reelected to a full four-year term. Faced with a city whose population had declined by one-fourth over the previous decade, Bing embarked on a dramatic plan to turn Detroit around. He shifted city dollars away from distressed neighborhoods, essentially allowing them to die, in an effort to encourage people to move to more stable areas. However, as the city’s financial situation continued to spiral downward, it became a challenge to provide even the most basic of municipal services.
In March 2013 Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed bankruptcy attorney Kevyn Orr to be Detroit’s emergency manager. Orr was granted wide-ranging executive powers to deal with the city’s $19 billion debt, but he was unable to reach an agreement with the city’s creditors. In July 2013 Orr submitted a claim for bankruptcy protection for Detroit. It was the largest such claim ever filed for a U.S. city.
Bing declined to seek another term. In November 2013 voters elected Mike Duggan, who had orchestrated financial turnarounds at numerous Detroit-area organizations, as mayor. When Detroit officially emerged from bankruptcy in December 2014, Orr resigned, and control of the city’s operations reverted to Duggan and the city council. Population (2010) 713,777; metropolitan area (2010) 4,296,250.
Austin, Dan. Lost Detroit: Stories Behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins (History Press, 2010).Binelli, Mark. Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis (Metropolitan Books, 2012).Gallagher, John. Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City (Wayne State University Press, 2010).Gavrilovich, Peter, and McGraw, Bill, eds. The Detroit Almanac: 300 Years of Life in the Motor City (Detroit Free Press, 2006).Martelle, Scott. Detroit: A Biography (Chicago Review Press, 2012). Thomas, June Manning, and Bekkering, Henco, eds. Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City (Wayne State University Press, 2015).