Detroit Guide

Detroit built the modern world — the moving assembly line was born here, and for a century the cars that put America on wheels rolled out of its plants — and then it created the soundtrack, when Berry Gordy started Motown in a little house on West Grand Boulevard in 1959 and sent the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye out to change music. The city has carried more than its share of hard American history: the Great Migration, the 1967 uprising, decades of decline, and a bankruptcy. But the comeback is real and worth seeing — a restored riverfront, Eastern Market on a Saturday, the Detroit Institute of Arts with Diego Rivera’s astonishing industry murals, and neighborhoods finding their feet. Come with respect for the whole story, not just the ruins-porn or the boosterism.