Motown, muscle cars, and techno's birthplace
Detroit sits on the river connecting Lake Huron to Lake Erie, and it is a city built by the auto industry and shaped by everyone who came to work in it. Ford, GM, and Chrysler turned it into the arsenal of democracy and the birthplace of the American middle class, but the city's cultural exports run deeper — Motown Records, the MC5, and a Belleville basement where a few Black teenagers invented techno in the early 1980s. Decades of decline hollowed out entire neighborhoods, but Detroit's comeback is real: a rebuilt downtown, a thriving art and food scene, and one of the largest collections of public murals in the country.
