Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County

90 acres of American innovation history just outside Detroit. The museum holds the actual Wright Brothers' bicycle shop (relocated from Dayton), the Lincoln presidential limousine in which JFK was assassinated, the Rosa Parks bus, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, and Thomas Edison's laboratory complex (Edison was Henry Ford's mentor; Ford had the lab moved here brick-by-brick). Greenfield Village outside the museum is an 80-acre living history park with relocated original buildings. Pair with the Ford Rouge Factory Tour to see F-150s being built in real time.

Charles Sorensen, Ford's vice president of production, traveled to Consolidated Aircraft's plant in San Diego in January 1941 to study how they built B-24 Liberator bombers. He watched men hand-assembling wing sections in what amounted to a giant aviation cottage industry, went back to his hotel that night, and sketched on Coronado Hotel notepad paper a single-building bomber factory a mile long and a quarter-mile wide — the biggest industrial building ever conceived. Edsel Ford, his two sons, and a few others initialed the sketch. Henry Ford committed Ford Motor Company to producing a B-24 every hour. The doubters had a name for it: "Will-it-Run." Building airplanes was not building cars. Aircraft components had thousands of tolerance-sensitive parts; the B-24 design was constantly being revised by Consolidated; aviation experts said you couldn't apply automotive mass-production methods to four-engine bombers. For more than two years they were right. Ford struggled with worker shortages, design changes, transportation logistics (the plant sat 35 miles west of Detroit at a site without highways or streetcar links — busing 42,000 workers became a logistical nightmare unto itself), and the fact that nobody had ever tried to do this before. Then 1944 arrived. In April, Willow Run produced 453 B-24s in 468 hours — one finished bomber every 63 minutes. By summer, employment was down to 17,000 from the 1943 peak of 42,000 because the system finally worked. The plant produced more than 8,600 B-24 Liberators total — nearly half of all Liberators built for the war — and in 1944 alone produced almost as many aircraft as the entire nation of Japan. The last B-24 rolled off the line on June 28, 1945. Edsel Ford, who had carried much of the project's stress as Ford Motor Company president, died of cancer on May 26, 1943, before the plant hit its stride. After the war, GM acquired the plant and made automatic transmissions there until 2010. Most of the 3.5-million-square-foot facility was demolished in 2014. The Yankee Air Museum saved 144,000 square feet of the original B-24 "roll-out hangar" — the bay where finished bombers rolled directly onto the adjacent runway — and reopened in the historic building in 2017. The museum's flying collection includes "Yankee Lady," one of fewer than two dozen B-17 Flying Fortresses still airworthy worldwide, plus a B-25, a C-47, and others. The hangar that birthed an air war is now the building that preserves it.

In 1932, the Detroit Institute of Arts director Wilhelm Valentiner and Edsel Ford — Henry's only son, then president of Ford Motor Company — commissioned Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to paint a series of frescoes about Detroit industry. They gave Rivera the entire interior of the museum's largest interior courtyard, a 4,420-square-foot space the museum still calls Rivera Court. Edsel Ford personally paid Rivera's $20,889 commission. The commission was the largest single private check Diego Rivera ever received. Rivera spent eleven months painting 27 fresco panels covering all four walls. He had researched the Ford River Rouge plant in depth — at the time the largest integrated manufacturing complex in the world, where iron ore arrived by lake freighter at one end and finished Model A's drove off the other — and the murals are an unsentimental document of what mass production looked like before there was a word for it. Workers' bodies in motion. The conveyor belts and stamping presses of the Rouge. The chemistry of the steel furnaces. Vaccines and aircraft and agriculture as parallel panels. The four races of humanity (per Rivera's pre-WWII understanding of ethnology) represented in the four corners. The whole thing wraps you when you stand in the room — it is the closest thing to entering a Rivera mural anywhere in the United States. When the murals were unveiled in 1933, the Catholic church called for them to be whitewashed. The Detroit News editorialized against them. Edsel Ford defended them publicly and they remained. Rivera himself called them his best work — better than his murals at Rockefeller Center (which Nelson Rockefeller had Rivera's "Man at the Crossroads" hammered off the wall in 1934 because Rivera refused to remove Lenin's face). The DIA's murals are intact, restored, and a designated National Historic Landmark since 2014. The DIA is the fifth-largest art museum in the United States by gallery space, with 65,000 works including Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait" (the museum's first acquisition by a living artist when bought in 1922), Bruegel's "The Wedding Dance," and a major Asian and African art collection. In 2012, the city of Detroit attempted to sell the DIA's collection during bankruptcy proceedings; an unprecedented $816 million "Grand Bargain" between foundations, the state, and the museum kept the collection intact.

The Detroit River is the only place in the United States where you can stand on US soil looking south at Canada. Windsor, Ontario sits across the river from downtown Detroit, and the surreal geometry of being north of Canada is one of the things visitors remember. The Renaissance Center anchors the Detroit skyline. Henry Ford II formed a coalition of 26 business leaders in 1970 to build it, in the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit uprising and the early stages of the city's long decline. Construction began 1973; the seven-tower complex opened 1976 with the central cylindrical hotel tower as Detroit's tallest building. At 5.5 million square feet, it is one of the largest commercial complexes in the world. General Motors bought it in 1996 and made it the corporate world headquarters in 2001. In April 2024, GM announced it would vacate the RenCen in 2025 to relocate one mile west to the new Hudson's Detroit tower at the historic J.L. Hudson department store site. The RenCen's future is being worked out — likely mixed-use, possibly residential conversion. Belle Isle is the 982-acre island in the middle of the Detroit River, a state park since 2014 and a Detroit jewel for a century before that. Frederick Law Olmsted (who designed Central Park) drew up the original 1883 plan, though it was only partly executed. The Belle Isle Aquarium (1904) is the oldest continuously operating public aquarium in North America. The Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory (1904, Albert Kahn-designed) houses one of the country's largest collections of orchids. The James Scott Memorial Fountain pumps 40 cubic feet of water per second through marble dolphins and lions. The MacArthur Bridge connects Belle Isle to the mainland. The Detroit Riverwalk runs 5.5 miles from the Ambassador Bridge to Belle Isle and is consistently rated the best riverwalk in America. Hart Plaza hosts free concerts and festivals all summer. Just east of the Riverwalk is the William G. Milliken State Park — Michigan's only urban state park.