Detroit Travel Guide: Architecture, Baseball and Football in Motor City
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Jul 24, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
Downtown Detroit
Michigan is the only state made of two separate landmasses, the Lower and Upper Peninsulas, split by the Straits of Mackinac. Both are ringed by the Great Lakes. Lake Superior, bordering the Upper Peninsula, is the largest freshwater lake in the world. Lake Michigan, bordering the Lower Peninsula, is the only Great Lake entirely inside the United States, though it also touches Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana along the way.
My trip stayed on the Lower Peninsula, the state's more populated half, home to Lansing, the capital, Ann Arbor, and Detroit, where I started.
History and Monuments
Detroit was founded as a French fort in 1701 and became part of the United States in 1796. Its name comes from the French le détroit, meaning "the strait," for the narrow waterway separating Michigan from Ontario. That same waterway later gave Detroit one of the most significant roles any American city played in the years before the Civil War.
Underground Railroad conductors codenamed Detroit "Midnight." It was one of the last stops before freedom, the final crossing point before the Detroit River delivered escaped slaves into Canada, where slavery had already been abolished decades earlier. An estimated 45,000 freedom seekers passed through the city on their way north.
In Hart Plaza, where I started my visit, a bronze memorial called Gateway to Freedom depicts a group preparing to board a boat, guided by George DeBaptiste, a free Black conductor who used his own steamship to ferry people across the river under cover of darkness. Directly across the water, in Windsor, Ontario, a companion sculpture called Tower of Freedom stands as the other half of the same story, part of the crossing thousands of freedom seekers actually made. I learned about it afterward and didn't get to see it myself. It's on the list for next time.
Detroit's twentieth century told a different kind of story. The automotive boom earned it the nickname Motor City, and that same era overlapped with the rise of Motown Records, which reshaped American music and helped drive the Civil Rights Movement forward. More on both in the posts that follow.
Transcending
Hart Plaza holds two more monuments worth slowing down for. Transcending, a 63-foot arc designed by David Barr on a base by Sergio de Guisti, is considered the largest monument in the country dedicated to the labor movement. It's built from two separate arcs that never actually touch, a deliberate choice symbolizing labor's unfinished work.
Horace E. Dodge and Son Memorial Fountain
Nearby, the Horace E. Dodge and Son Memorial Fountain, a 120-foot aluminum and steel tower designed by Isamu Noguchi, sat dormant for over a decade after Detroit's 2013 bankruptcy left it broken and unmaintained. It's since been restored, and seeing it running again felt like a small, literal symbol of the city's own recovery.
The Spirit of Detroit
Just across the street, The Spirit of Detroit is the city's most recognized monument. Marshall Fredericks was commissioned to sculpt it in 1955 and never gave it that name himself. Detroiters did, informally, until it stuck for good. The likely source is the Bible verse inscribed behind it:
"Now the Lord is that Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." — 2 Corinthians 3:17
The Fist
Beside it stands The Fist, Robert Graham's tribute to Joe Louis, the twelve-year heavyweight champion who called Detroit home. The bronze arm alone runs 24 feet and weighs 8,000 pounds.
Architecture
I'd been told before arriving not to miss Detroit's Art Deco architecture, and after falling for the style in Miami and Cincinnati, I wasn't about to skip it here.
Guardian Building
The Guardian Building came first.
It was designed by Wirt C. Rowland and built to evoke the Roaring Twenties from the moment you step inside.
Its interior reads more like a cathedral than an office tower, two towers connected by a central hall that functions almost like a nave, ...
... which is exactly why it's earned the nickname the Cathedral of Finance.
Forty artisans worked on its mosaics, stained glass, and murals, and the design pulls from Native American and Aztec influences as freely as it does European ones. Photographs undersell it. It's one of those buildings you actually have to stand inside to understand.
Not only is the building an amalgamation of artistic mediums, it also blends diverse cultural influences including those from Native American and Aztec cultures.
I can try to describe how lavish, elegant and timeless this building is, but my words won't do it justice. Go visit yourself and marvel at the design, craftsmanship and explosion of color up close.
Fisher Building
The Fisher Building came next.
It was designed by Albert Kahn and completed in 1928, earning a silver medal from the Architectural League of New York the following year.
A marble-clad facade, a hand-painted barrel-vaulted ceiling, and ornate bronze elevator doors are just some of the highlights.
These aspects and more have earned the 441-foot tower the title of “Detroit's Largest Art Object.”
Book Building and Book Tower
The Book Building closed out the architecture tour, Neo-Classical and Neo-Renaissance rather than Art Deco, designed by Louis Kamper and completed in 1926 as the tallest building in the city at the time.
After years of vacancy and a $300 million renovation, it reopened in 2023, a year before I stood in its rotunda looking up at a 6,000-panel glass dome set with 7,000 jewel embellishments.
If you go, take the elevator up to Kamper's Rooftop Lounge in the Book Tower afterward for a drink and a view of the skyline you just spent an afternoon admiring from the ground.
Sports
Ford Field
Detroit's sports identity runs just as deep as its architecture. Ford Field, home to the Lions, seats 65,000 and expands to 80,000, and hosted the Super Bowl in 2006.
Comerica Park
Comerica Park sits right next door, home to the Tigers since 2000.
It is framed by 80-foot bats at its gates and 33 tiger statues scattered around the stadium.
My hotel that night looked straight out over the Detroit River, and I spent more evenings than I probably should have out on the balcony, watching the sun go down.
Detroit is the only major U.S. city where you can look south and see Canada directly across the water, close enough that Windsor's own skyline catches the same sunset. Standing there, it was hard not to think back to Hart Plaza that morning, and the people who once stood roughly where I was, looking at that same shoreline, waiting for the courage to cross it.
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