Detroit is known for its automotive heritage, the Motown sound, and American's first mile of concrete highway. But this cityon the river has more than three hundred years of history, and most of it iseasy to experience if you know where to look. There's the Michigan Theatre, theornate movie house turned parking garage with a grand stage looming over itscars. Picturesque Alfred Brush Ford Park once stored nuclear missiles among itsplaygrounds and fishing spots. Then there are incredible landmarks like Detroit'smassive salt mines and a monument to urban graffiti known as the Dequindre Cutas well as the world's oldest operating jazz club. Secret Detroit explores thisgreat American city to investigate everything that is odd, unexpected, andextraordinary. Detroit is the kind of city you need to see and experience tounderstand why locals brag about being from the Motor City. Full of stories andtall tales, this book is a must-have for urban explorers, history buffs, andtravelers of all experience levels
Seventh-generation Detroiters Andy Linn, Emily Linn, and Rob Linn, and local business City Bird produced Belle Isle to 8 Mile: An Insider's Guide to Detroit, Second Edition, the second edition of the most popular printed guide to the city in a generation. Six years since the original book, and fully revised and expanded for 2019, this new edition includes 45 new illustrations and more than 500 new entries and featured locales. In total, the book highlights more than 1,500 Detroit attractions, sites, institutions, events, restaurants, bars, shops, and curiosities, from the essential to the obscure, making this edition of Belle Isle to 8 Mile the most comprehensive Detroit guide book ever published, in the known record. The result of thousands of hours of research, thousands of site visits, and contributions and ideas from hundreds of local residents, this community-driven, streetwise guide is a key for readers to unlock the city. Led by the Linns, the Belle Isle to 8 Mile team administered surveys, conducted in-depth research, and explored the widest-reaches of the city's neighborhoods to document the full scope of the city's 139 square miles. Like its predecessor, the book builds off of this in-depth research to chronicle both long-standing institutions and off-the-beaten-path neighborhood treasures and hidden gems that make the city so special, documenting each featured locale in historical context, with informative descriptions that capture what make them special, as well as ample touches of humor along the way. However, the expanded second edition of the book also captures the ways in which Detroit has grown and evolved since the publication of the first volume, acting as a printed account and living document of a changing city, as well as a testament to the small, independent businesses that have continued to thrive in the neighborhoods and driven the city's evolution. In addition to entries that detail more than1,500 locations and destinations organized geographically to encourage exploration, the book features maps and original, intricate pen and ink illustrations to help orient readers as well as an alphabetical index to aid discovery and utility. The book also employs a star system throughout the volume to denote destinations that are exceptional, particularly unique, or essential for first time visitors. In addition, in chapter 13, the editors highlighted recommended top destinations for particular tastes to help plan a visit, including rounding up top architectural destinations, vegetarian options, cheap eats, soul food, family activities, and many other areas, for residents and tourists alike. From high art to folk art, national attractions to basement museums, haute cuisine to food trucks, cocktail bars to dive bars, farmer's markets to urban farms, and rock 'n' roll to blues and soul--and whether in Detroit for the first time or for a lifetime, or learning about it from afar--readers will delight in uncovering and discovering this great American city. This guide is essential reading, not just for visitors, but for long-time residents, as well as for anyone who loves Detroit.
Detroit's auto heritage is known worldwide, but this fascinating city's history runs much deeper. Step inside the tiny recording studio where Berry Gordy, a young entrepreneur who faced tremendous prejudice, created a music empire that broke down racial barriers. Tour Art Deco masterpieces so spectacular they're called cathedrals to commerce and finance. Walk in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Cobo Hall, where he first delivered his I Have a Dream speech. Join Karin Risko for an intimate tour of the city that put the world on wheels and discover an amazing history of innovation, philanthropy, social justice and culture.
Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest and most diverse Arab communities outside the Middle East. Arabic-speaking immigrants have been coming to Detroit for more than a century, yet the community they have built is barely visible on the landscape of ethnic America. Arab Detroit brings together the work of twenty-five contributors to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. Memoirs and poems by Lebanese, Chaldean, Yemeni, and Palestinian writers anchor the book in personal experience, and more than fifty photographs drawn from family albums and the files of local photojournalists provide a backdrop of vivid, often unexpected images. Students and scholars of ethnicity, immigration, and Arab American communities will welcome this diverse collect on.
Detroiters need to get to know their neighbors better. Wait ― maybe that should be, Detroiters should get to know their neighborhoods better. It seems like everybody thinks they know the neighborhoods here, but because there are so many, the definitions become too broad, the characteristics become muddled, the stories become lost. Edited by Aaron Foley, The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook contains essays by Zoe Villegas, Drew Philip, Hakeem Weatherspoon, Marsha Music, Ian Thibodeau, and dozens of others.
Intense attention has been paid to Detroit as a site of urban crisis. This crisis, however, has not only yielded the massive devaluation of real estate that has so often been noted; it has also yielded an explosive production of seemingly valueless urban property that has facilitated the imagination and practice of alternative urbanisms. The first sustained study of Detroit’s alternative urban cultures, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit initiates a new focus on Detroit as a site not only of urban crisis but also of urban possibility. The Guide documents art and curatorial practices, community and guerilla gardens, urban farming and forestry, cultural platforms, living archives, evangelical missions, temporary public spaces, intentional communities, furtive monuments, outsider architecture, and other work made possible by the ready availability of urban space in Detroit. The Guide poses these spaces as “unreal estate”: urban territory that has slipped through the free- market economy and entered other regimes of value, other contexts of meaning, and other systems of use. The appropriation of this territory in Detroit, the Guide suggests, offers new perspectives on what a city is and can be, especially in a time of urban crisis.
"Grand River Avenue and Greenfield Road marked the center of a community bustling with retail, recreation, faith, and civic pride during the 1950s. Once a rural farming village, the neighborhood gained popularity following the World War II housing boom. New schools were built, local businesses filled storefronts, and the area prospered for 20-plus years until suburban life, facilitated by new superhighways, beckoned white, middle-class residents and business owners to abandon life in the city. Like a microcosm of Detroit, the neighborhood echoed the trend commonly called white flight. Today, strip malls have replaced national retailers and once well-manicured homes are in disrepair; however, another wave of dramatic change is promised as the city targets the area for urban renewal."--Back cover.
For ten years James Robertson walked the twenty-one-mile round-trip from his Detroit home to his factory job; when his story went viral, it brought him an outpouring of attention and support. But what of Robertson’s Detroit neighbors, likewise stuck in a blighted city without services as basic as a bus line? What they’re left with, after decades of disinvestment and decline, is DIY urbanism—sweeping their own streets, maintaining public parks, planting community gardens, boarding up empty buildings, even acting as real estate agents and landlords for abandoned homes. DIY Detroit describes a phenomenon that, in our times of austerity measures and market-based governance, has become woefully routine as inhabitants of deteriorating cities “domesticate” public services in order to get by. The voices that animate this book humanize Detroit’s troubles—from a middle-class African American civic activist drawn back by a crisis of conscience; to a young Latina stay-at-home mom who has never left the city and whose husband works in construction; to a European woman with a mixed-race adopted family and a passion for social reform, who introduces a chicken coop, goat shed, and market garden into the neighborhood. These people show firsthand how living with disinvestment means getting organized to manage public works on a neighborhood scale, helping friends and family members solve logistical problems, and promoting creativity, compassion, and self-direction as an alternative to broken dreams and passive lifestyles. Kimberley Kinder reveals how the efforts of these Detroiters and others like them create new urban logics and transform the expectations residents have about their environments. At the same time she cautions against romanticizing such acts, which are, after all, short-term solutions to a deep and spreading social injustice that demands comprehensive change.
Containing some of the leading voices on Detroit's history and future, Mapping Detroit will be informative reading for anyone interested in urban studies, geography, and recent American history.
