Detroit Audioguides

Detroit was the fourth-largest city in the United States in 1920. Henry Ford's moving assembly line at Highland Park had transformed manufacturing globally, and by that year local automakers were producing roughly half of all the cars on earth. The Detroit River once carried more cargo tonnage than the ports of London and New York combined. The city peaked at 1.85 million people in 1950, then spent the next six decades losing 65% of them.

What remains is stranger and more interesting than the narrative of decline suggests.

The Guardian Building, a 1929 Art Deco tower on Griswold Street tiled in iridescent Pewabic pottery, still stops people mid-stride. Hitsville U.S.A. on West Grand Boulevard, where Berry Gordy ran Motown from a converted house, is now a museum where you can stand in Studio A and understand exactly how that sound was assembled. Detroit also gave the world techno music -- born in the Black clubs of the 1980s and exported to European warehouses before most Americans had heard of it.