Once the richest city in America and maybe even the world, Detroit's descent from booming metropolis to urban nightmare was rapid and alarming. But now, it seems, a recovery is finally taking place in one of America's greatest and most historic industrial hubs.
Read on to follow Detroit’s rollercoaster history, and see the Motor City spirit that has kept the place alive...
Sitting on the Detroit River where it connects Lake Erie with Lake St Clair, Detroit was founded in 1701 by the French trader Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. It quickly became an important fur-trading post, and by the beginning of the 19th century it had grown into an important processing centre for agricultural produce heading for other parts of the US and Europe. By 1900 the city was becoming more of an industrial centre, but rural trade remained important, as seen in this 1892 photo of bison skulls waiting to be ground into fertiliser.
Around the same time, a young engineer was tinkering with a project that would transform the fortunes of the city completely. The engineer’s name was Henry Ford, and the project was a small combustion engine. It would go on to power his first automobile, the Quadricycle, which Ford is driving in this image on Detroit's Grand Boulevard in 1896. It would go on to revolutionise both personal transportation and Detroit, but not straight away. Ford’s first automotive company, the Detroit Automobile Company, went bankrupt about 18 months after it was founded.
The year 1896 also saw the opening of the stunning Majestic Building, Detroit’s second skyscraper and definitely its most lavish. The 14-storey building was the brainchild of Christopher Mabley, an English immigrant nicknamed 'the merchant prince'. It was meant to be called the Mabley Building and house Michigan’s largest department store, but four months before the building was completed Mabley’s company ran out of money and it was sold. Faced with an abundance of fanciful M’s incorporated into the building’s design, the new owners settled on calling it the Majestic. It dominated the Detroit skyline for the next 65 years.
Baseball came to Detroit’s Corktown neighbourhood in 1896 with the opening of Bennett Park. The new home for the Detroit Tigers was built on top of a former hay market and quickly gained a reputation as one of the worst grounds in the league. Not enough soil was put on top of the hay market’s cobbled surface, meaning that stones sometimes protruded through the grass and dirt. The ground cemented its place in local history on 24 September 1896 when it hosted the city's first ever baseball game played under electric lights.
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By the turn of the 20th century, Detroit had transformed from a transportation hub to an industrial centre, producing metal crafts, railcars, stove works, paints, iron, brass and copper. The fledgling Ford Motor Company was born in 1903, and an influx of African-Americans moving from the South as part of the Great Migration swelled the workforce. When this photo was taken of Woodward Avenue in the early 1910s, Detroit's population had grown so much that it was the ninth largest city in the United States. By 1920 it would move up to fourth.
Henry Ford’s dream of everyone owning one of his Model T vehicles took a giant step forward on 1 December 1913, when he introduced the world’s first moving automobile assembly line (pictured). Cars were conveyed from one worker to another for specific and repetitive tasks, cutting the time needed to build a car from more than 12 hours to one hour and 33 minutes. This innovation revolutionised the automotive industry and transformed Detroit. Motor City had well and truly arrived.
As demand for the Model T grew, so did the Ford Motor Company’s workforce. The company introduced two nine-hour shifts, six days per week to try and meet the demand, but conditions weren’t great and turnover was high, forcing Ford to hire 52,000 men to keep a workforce of 14,000 working full time. This began to change in 1914 when he reduced shift times to eight hours and increased pay to five dollars a day – effectively doubling workers' wages. Here we see 25,000 workers gathered in front of the Ford Motor Company plant around 1913.
Henry Ford would come to call the massive wage increase "the smartest cost-cutting move I ever made". But it wasn't unconditional, and company 'inspectors' would visit employees' homes to ensure they deserved the extra pay by living in an upstanding way. Requirements included abstaining from alcohol, keeping their homes clean and contributing money towards a savings account. Although some workers, like this one testing engines in the 1920s, resented these intrusions, they were still among the happiest and most productive in the country.
Michigan became the first state to ban alcohol by ratifying Prohibition in 1917, which made Detroit the first major US city to go alcohol-free. But its location, across the river from Canada, made it perfect for smuggling. Some estimates claim that 75% of the alcohol smuggled into the US crossed the Windsor-Detroit border, and by 1929 smuggling liquor was Detroit’s second largest industry, just behind the automotive industry. Here we see Canadian bootleggers driving across the frozen Detroit River in 1930, always with one door open so that if the car went through the ice the driver could scramble free.
Detroit’s heavy reliance on the automotive industry meant that the city was one of the worst affected by the Great Depression. A 75% drop in auto sales saw one out of every two workers out of a job. One of America's worst unemployment records, combined with a lack of social security, meant that charities had to open soup kitchens to feed the hungry (pictured). When the banks closed in 1933, Detroit took to printing its own money in order to pay municipal employees.
It was against this backdrop of mass unemployment and industrial unrest that the famous Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, came to Detroit between 1932 and 1933 to create what he regarded as one of his greatest works, the Detroit Industry Murals. Made up of 27 panels on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the murals depict (among other things) workers at the Ford River Rouge Plant. Rather than painting economic hardship, Rivera instead focused on technology and industry, which he depicts as Detroit's native culture.
Like the rest of America, Detroit was dragged out of economic depression when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, causing the United States to fully enter World War II. Ford built a factory to produce B-24 Liberator bombers at a rate of one per hour, while General Motors had become the largest military contractor in the world by the end of the war. Chrysler built tanks in an all-new 113-acre factory in nearby Warren, which operated 24/7 during the war. Seen here on 18 June 1942, it churned out tanks by their hundreds, day and night.
On 20 June 1943, underlying racial tensions in Detroit came to head as three days of rioting broke out between Black and white citizens in the city. Despite plentiful jobs, African Americans experienced racism, low-quality housing and unequal access to goods and services. In total 34 people were killed and 670 people were injured in the riots, with 3,500 heavily-armed federal troops brought in to quell the violence. Witness accounts recall police beating unarmed suspects and spraying buildings with bullets.
The decade that followed the end of World War II saw Detroit on top of the world. Boosted by its flourishing auto industry, the city was now home to 1.85 million people. Jobs were abundant and well-paid and residents enjoyed some of the best living standards in the country. With its elegant wide boulevards and French-inspired Gilded Age architecture, it was dubbed 'the Paris of the Midwest'. Here we see the beautiful Art-Deco skyscrapers that reflected the city's new status.
With help from lucrative union contracts, Detroit’s auto workers rode the postwar boom and enjoyed a period of relative stability and prosperity. They received benefits like pensions and company-paid health insurance, plus wages that roughly doubled between 1947 and 1960. For workers like these ones checking Plymouth cars in 1959, life was pretty good. But there were storm clouds on the horizon. Steel prices were rising, automation was increasing and a persistent recession created job insecurity, especially for African Americans who faced discrimination.
In January 1959, Detroit-born Berry Gordy took a loan from his family and founded Tamla Records. Set in an unremarkable house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, he merged it into the Motown Record Corporation (a portmanteau of 'motor' and 'town') less than a year later, and the rest is history. The label cultivated one of the most iconic sounds in music history and introduced the world to superstars like the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross and the Supremes. Here we see Smokey Robinson outside the famous studios – rechristened 'Hitsville USA' – around 1966.
On 23 July 1967 the racial tensions that had been bubbling below the city’s surface since the start of the century erupted again when police raided an unlicensed bar and arrested all its patrons. Decades of institutional racism and segregation spurred five days of violence that left 43 people dead, hundreds more injured, 7,200 arrested and more than 2,500 buildings looted, damaged or destroyed. It remains one of the costliest civil disorders in American history.
By the 1970s, the industry that had pioneered Detroit’s success was proving pivotal to its decline. Japanese car manufacturers were gaining market share while American manufacturers began moving their operations to states that had looser union laws. When the country was hit by a recession, Detroit’s over-reliance on one industry meant that the city's unemployment rate was higher than the national average. This 1975 photo shows a long line outside a Michigan Employment Security Commission office.
The years following the 1967 riots saw a mass exodus of white residents from Detroit (nicknamed 'white flight'), which drastically altered the city's demographics. The makeup of Detroit flipped from majority white to 75% Black and saw the election of the city’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young. Serving an unprecedented five terms, he oversaw the city’s iconic Renaissance Centre development and held 'the world's largest garage sale' in 1978 to get rid of all the junk collected by the city over the preceding decades.
By the 1980s a wide spread of Detroit residences lay vacant, blighted or abandoned. Rather than deal with the issue, authorities let the buildings rot, concentrating instead on new developments. These neglected buildings proved perfect fuel for arsonists, particularly on the night before Halloween, known as Devil's Night, which was traditionally associated with low-level mischief. In the 1980s the night became notorious instead for arson, peaking in 1984 when firefighters responded to a frightening 810 fires.
Plans to revitalise the city continued to come and go, usually involving the regeneration of one of its former landmarks. In 1989 it was the turn of the old Michigan Central Railway Station. It was bought by real estate developer Mark Longton Jr, who planned to turn the cavernous building into a lavish hotel and casino. Longton famously patrolled the building personally to deter scrappers and vandals (he's pictured here in 1990 with his dog in the vast ticket hall), but just a year later his investment fell into foreclosure.
Meanwhile, through much of the city, Detroit’s weary residents had more pressing concerns. For much of the 1980s the city was in the grip of a deadly drug epidemic that turned some of its dilapidated neighbourhoods into so-called 'no-go zones'. The government’s much-touted 'war on drugs' saw heavy-handed policing and mass incarceration of mainly young Black men, but little action on the underlying causes of debilitating poverty and sky-high unemployment. Here we see angry mothers demanding that the authorities do something about the illegal drugs that were still devastating their communities in 1992.
In 2001, however, a saviour came along in the form of charismatic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. He was dubbed 'the hip hop mayor' because of his flamboyant style, and leaned into that image by holding a 'hip hop summit' in 2003 (pictured) that branded his ideas for the city as a 'remix'. Those ideas included regenerating the city’s downtown and waterfront, but his lavish lifestyle was funded by public money and in 2013 he was sentenced to 28 years in prison for 24 felony counts, including extortion, racketeering and fraud. Detroit, it seemed, just couldn’t catch a break.
Kilpatrick left the city drowning in debt, and Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013. But judicious financial management and investment from local billionaire Dan Gilbert saw the revitalisation of the city’s downtown, bringing middle-class families back to the area's boutiques, restaurants and bars. The Ford Motor Company’s $950 million (£754m) redevelopment of the iconic Michigan Central Railway Station (pictured) into a cultural centre and tech hub, opened on 6 June 2024, has only cemented the city’s turnaround.
Detroit's return to the fold as one of America’s great cities is set to be confirmed by the opening of Hitsville NEXT in the summer of 2026. This 40,000-square-foot (3,700sqm) expansion of the famous Motown Museum will house immersive exhibits, a café and a state-of-the-art theatre and recording studio. Motown is perhaps the city’s greatest cultural contribution to the world, and this $75 million (£60m) celebration of the sounds and stars that put Motor City on the map will be a glittering and joyous signal that, at last, Detroit is back.
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