Detroit

I

Introduction

Detroit, city in southeastern Michigan and seat of Wayne County. Detroit, the largest city in the state, is one of the nation’s leading industrial centers and one of the world’s leading corporate headquarters for the automobile industry. The automobile industry gave Detroit its nickname, The Motor City. Its official name, Detroit, comes from a French word that means “the narrow place.” The city is located at the narrowest point of the channel connecting the upper and lower regions of the vast Great Lakes water system. This strategic location greatly aided the city’s economic growth, as it became a major port of the Great Lakes industrial basin, linked to global markets in Europe and Asia.

Detroit is located on the Detroit and Rouge rivers, opposite Windsor, Ontario, Canada. It is on a flat glacial plain that rises to rolling hills and lake country in the northwest. Detroit has temperate summers and moderately cold winters. Average temperature ranges are -9° to -1°C (16° to 30°F) in January and 16° to 29°C (61° to 83°F) in July. The city averages 830 mm (33 in) of precipitation a year.

II

Detroit and its Metropolitan Region

The city of Detroit has a total area of 359 sq km (139 sq mi). Detroit's metropolitan region includes Lapeer, Macomb, Monroe, Oakland, Saint Clair, and Wayne counties, and has a total area of 11,204 sq km (4,326 sq mi).

Together, Detroit and its environs form a roughly semicircular area separated by the Detroit River from the Canadian province of Ontario. The semicircle is bisected by Woodward Avenue, which extends north to the city of Pontiac, Michigan. Detroit is crossed by other major thoroughfares, among them Gratiot Avenue, extending straight to the northeast, and Grand River Avenue, extending straight to the northwest. Connecting these in an arc is Grand Boulevard, which once marked the outskirts of the city and still contains many lovely homes, interspersed with commercial sections. Other major avenues are Jefferson, which parallels the Detroit River and Lake Saint Clair in the northeast; and Michigan Avenue and Ford Road, running southwest and west respectively.

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Detroit’s major streets, many nine lanes across, give priority to the easy flow of cars. Strip-mall style commercial buildings along these streets typically hide comfortable and sometimes elegant residential neighborhoods. East side streets follow the original French riverbank settlement pattern, causing the streets to run at an angle to the west side's north-south grid.

Slightly north of downtown Detroit is the New Center area, which was built in the late 1920s. This area is home to the Fisher Tower, an ornate skyscraper designed in the art deco style by Albert Kahn. Inside the Fisher Tower is a large theater where concerts, plays, musicals, and other events are held. General Motors had its headquarters in New Center before moving downtown to the Renaissance Center in 1996. A food and entertainment festival takes place in New Center each summer.

In the city center, several newer public buildings front the Detroit River facing Canada. There are found the Civic Center, a complex that includes the City-County Building, where government offices and courts are housed, and the Cobo Hall convention center, which contains some 28,000 sq m (300,000 sq ft) of floor space. Also on the river are the five skyscrapers of the Renaissance Center, an office and hotel complex that includes one of the world’s tallest hotels. The General Motors Corporation makes the Renaissance Center its world headquarters. Renovation has extensively changed the downtown area, which is circled by a monorail that follows the outside perimeter.

The Detroit city center also houses one of the largest collections of early 20th-century skyscrapers in the United States. The Guardian Building, built in 1929, is strikingly accented with Detroit's signature Pewabic pottery, glazed ceramic tiles that were an important architectural element in buildings of the 1920s. Other buildings from this period include the 47-story Penobscot Building, constructed in 1928, for many years the tallest building in Detroit; the Book Building, constructed in 1917; and the David Stott Building, which is modeled on a design by famous architect Eliel Saarinen.

During the 20th century, Detroit became a center of the growing automobile industry, and both industrial and residential suburbs grew in the metropolitan area. The industrial suburbs, dependent on the transportation systems of the center city, formed in a ring around Detroit, while the residential areas formed in a larger ring around the industrial suburbs. These inner- and outer-ring suburbs cover much of Oakland, Macomb, and Wayne counties, with the western outer-ring suburbs extending almost 65 km (almost 40 mi) to the city of Ann Arbor.

As businesses have gradually moved out of the city center, economic growth in the suburbs has become concentrated in the northern outer-ring area, beginning with Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills about 24 km (about 15 mi) north of Detroit and stretching well past Pontiac into Oakland county. The southern suburbs, which include the older inner-ring areas of Dearborn, Ecorse, and Grosse Ile, are slower growing than their counterparts. Hamtramck and Highland Park are independent cities that are entirely surrounded by the city of Detroit.

In recent decades, heavy industries such as automobile manufacture and metal production that had supported many of the older inner-ring suburbs have relocated or shut down many of their factories. Although some jobs have been replaced by jobs in diversified light manufacturing, these areas are burdened with high unemployment and a reduced tax base. They are attempting to rebuild and solve problems of crime, poverty, and underemployment.

The relationship between the city and the suburbs is one of the many problems that Detroit faces today. The metropolitan region combines a battered inner core showing impressive signs of new investment, an economically challenged inner ring of older suburbs, and an outer ring marked by intense investment, typically in large homes, office or manufacturing parks, and shopping malls. As the suburbs expand, conflicts about zoning the outer fringe for either farming or development have also increased.

III

Population

Detroit’s population has declined dramatically since its peak of 1,850,000 in 1950. In 2000 the population was 951,270. By 2005, Detroit's population was estimated at 886,671. This population decline was a concern to city government because the drop below one million could jeopardize funding from the federal and state governments and other forms of revenue, hurting city services.

At the time of the 2000 census, African Americans made up 81.6 percent of the population of Detroit; whites, 12.3 percent; Asians, 1 percent; and Native Americans, 0.3 percent. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders numbered 251. People of mixed heritage or not reporting race were 4.9 percent of inhabitants. Hispanics, who may be of any race, were 5 percent of the population.

Detroit’s metropolitan area had a population of 5,456,400 in 2000. The metropolitan area also includes significant minority groups, including the largest community of Arab Americans in the nation, numbering 102,000 people in 2000. There are very few distinct ethnic neighborhoods within Detroit or its metropolitan area.

At the turn of the century the population of Detroit was about two-thirds native-born, mainly of French, Canadian, and American ancestry, but with some descendants of German and Irish immigrants. In the first half of the 20th century, the percentage of foreign-born residents declined, even though many immigrants arrived from eastern Europe. During World War II (1939-1945), both whites and blacks were attracted from the South to work in the city’s defense industries. In 1950 foreign-born and black residents each made up about 16 percent of the total population.

In the five decades after 1950, the city lost almost half of its population, as many white residents moved to adjacent counties. As businesses and industries gradually spread to the suburbs, much of the white population followed. Detroit’s outlying areas grew much faster than the inner city and by the mid-1960s had twice the population of Detroit proper. Two other factors also contributed to white flight from the inner city. Blacks moved into inner city neighborhoods, and government programs were established to provide housing loans.

Mortgage and insurance companies actively encouraged white flight by refusing to guarantee housing mortgages in predominately black areas. This policy, known as redlining, made it much easier and cheaper for a white family to buy a new house in the suburbs than to buy or repair an existing house in a black inner-city neighborhood. The attraction of jobs and cheap land, together with concerns about crime, the quality of schools, and declining property values, made the suburbs attractive throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

During the same decades that whites left the city, Detroit’s black population grew. The substantial number of factory jobs that still remained in the city attracted African Americans. Many blacks successfully found higher paying jobs, but their success was often short-lived, as the auto plants and their related industries either closed or moved in partial response to foreign competition. At the same time, blacks were often denied housing loans, which effectively prevented them from following whites out of the city.

The Detroit area is home to a large number of religious groups, including a large Catholic population that dates back to the first French families; a large Jewish community; Muslims (both Arabs and members of the Nation of Islam); Chaldeans (Christian Arabs primarily from Iraq); a small number of Buddhist and other Asian denominations; and a broad range of black and white Protestant denominations.

IV

Education and Culture

Detroit underwent a multimillion dollar renewal of its cultural resources in the late 20th century. The 1980s saw renewed investment in the Detroit Historical Museum, most notably in its acclaimed Motor City Exhibition that interprets the influence of the automobile industry on the city’s life and development. During the same period, a group of volunteers renovated Orchestra Hall on Woodward Avenue, which was slated for demolition. This acoustical masterpiece, once again home to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, is the centerpiece for the Max M. Fisher Music Center, a performing arts complex that opened in 2003.

The city’s center includes the world-class collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in particular its signature murals by Diego Rivera, titled Detroit Industry (1932-1933). The nearby Detroit Science Museum with its IMAX theater and hands-on exhibits cooperates with area schools to promote science. The Museum of African American History, also located near the Institute of Arts, is devoted to African American history, art, and culture. Slightly to the north, in the New Center area, is the Motown Museum, formerly the headquarters of Motown Records. Motown Records became famous in the 1960s as the world headquarters and recording studios for an array of popular black soloists and musical groups, including Stevie Wonder, Temptations, and the Supremes.

Ethnic festivals at Hart Plaza on the waterfront draw crowds each summer weekend. In addition, Detroit has two traditional events that bring more than one million people downtown. One is the Thanksgiving Day Parade; the other is the fireworks display in early July cosponsored by the United States and Canada.

Outside the city limits, two key cultural institutions consistently attract international attention to the metropolitan area: Dearborn's Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, which house a vast assemblage of technological and historical artifacts and buildings, and Bloomfield Hills’ Cranbrook Academy. Founded in the 1920s and principally designed by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, Cranbrook is a unique cultural center composed of five separate educational institutions. Outstanding collections are housed in the library and galleries of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and in the museum of the Cranbrook Institute of Science.

The metropolitan area is home to over a dozen institutions of higher learning, from two-year programs to major research institutions. These include Wayne State University, the University of Detroit Mercy, and Marygrove College in the city, and Madonna University, Oakland University, and the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses in the surrounding area.