Detroit travel guide

Top 10 sights in Detroit

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Michael Barera · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Detroit Institute of Arts

   One of the largest art collections in the United States, holding about 65,000 works, whose centrepiece is Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry murals of 1932-33 — twenty-seven panels wrapping a courtyard, painted after Rivera spent months in the Ford Rouge plant. The city tried to sell the art during its 2013 bankruptcy and was stopped.

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2. 

   2© Dane Hillard · CC BY 2.0

   Islamic Center of America

   A mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, opened in 2005 and among the largest in North America. It serves a community of Lebanese and Iraqi descent that has been settling in this city since the car plants opened.

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3. 

   3© Dwight Burdette · CC BY 3.0

   Automotive Hall of Fame

   A hall of fame and museum at Dearborn honouring the people who built the motor industry, from Benz and Daimler to Soichiro Honda. About eight hundred have been inducted since 1939, and the museum stands beside The Henry Ford.

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   Fort Detroit

   The French fort Cadillac built on the north bank of the Detroit River in 1701, taken by Britain in 1760 and held against Pontiac's siege in 1763. It passed to the United States in 1796 and was demolished by 1827; brass markers downtown trace it.

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5. 

   5© Alvintrusty · CC BY-SA 3.0

   The Henry Ford

   A history complex at Dearborn holding the chair Lincoln was shot in, the bus on which Rosa Parks refused to move, and Kennedy's presidential limousine. Greenfield Village next door has about a hundred buildings Ford had moved here, including Edison's Menlo Park laboratory.

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   Belle Isle Park

   A 397-hectare island park in the Detroit River, laid out from 1883 partly to a plan by Frederick Law Olmsted. It holds an aquarium of 1904 — the oldest in the United States — a conservatory, a maritime museum and a marble fountain, and admission is by state park pass.

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7. 

   7© Antony-22 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Ste. Anne de Detroit Catholic Church

   A parish founded on 26 July 1701, two days after Cadillac landed, and the second oldest continuously operating Catholic parish in the United States. The present Gothic Revival church of 1886 is its eighth building, and it stands in the shadow of the bridge to Canada.

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8. 

   8© Mikerussell · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament

   The neo-Gothic Catholic cathedral of Detroit on Woodward Avenue, built between 1913 and 1930 and made a cathedral in 1938. John Paul II celebrated Mass here in 1987; it was listed on the National Register in 1982.

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   9

   Detroit Zoo

   A zoo of 1928 in Huntington Woods and Royal Oak, and the first in America to use barless open-air enclosures rather than cages. Its polar bear habitat holds 1.3 million litres of water with a tunnel through it, and it stopped keeping elephants in 2004 on ethical grounds.

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10. 

    10© Patricia Drury from Birmingham, United States · CC BY 2.0

    Odette Sculpture Park

    A sculpture park along the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, running from Assumption Park to Centennial Park, with thirty-five large contemporary works by Elisabeth Frink, Sorel Etrog and others. It looks straight across at the Detroit skyline.

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1. 

   1

   Hitsville U.S.A.

   The house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard that Berry Gordy bought in 1959 and turned into Motown's offices and Studio A, where the label cut hits around the clock. Gordy moved the company to Los Angeles in the 1970s, and the property has been the Motown Museum since.

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2. 

   2© Warren LeMay · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Mariners' Church

   A stone church of 1849 at 170 East Jefferson Avenue, endowed for the sailors of the Great Lakes, and moved bodily nine hundred metres in 1955 to make way for a civic centre. Its bell rings twenty-nine times each November for the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

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3. 

   3© Brian Mulloy · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Corktown Historic District

   The oldest surviving neighbourhood in Detroit, settled in the 1830s by Irish families from County Cork, which is where the name comes from. Its brick row houses stand between the ballpark and the derelict Michigan Central Station, reopened in 2024 after twenty years empty.

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4. 

   4© Michael Barera · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Greektown

   A commercial and entertainment district northeast of downtown along Monroe Avenue between Brush and St Antoine, settled by Greek immigrants from the 1880s. It has its own station on the People Mover and is one of the few downtown blocks never demolished.

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5. 

   5© Etx313 · CC BY 4.0

   Eastern Market

   The largest historic public market district in the United States, a mile northeast of downtown between Gratiot and Mack. Sheds standing since the 1890s still hold a Saturday farmers' market; the district joined the National Register in 1978 and has been run by a nonprofit since 2006.

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6. 

   6© Andrew Jameson · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Woodbridge Historic District

   A neighbourhood of largely Victorian houses west of the cultural centre, added to the National Register in 1980. It survived the freeway building that took much of the surrounding area, and downtown, Midtown and Corktown are all walkable from it.

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7. 

   7© Elisa.rolle · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Brush Park Historic District

   A neighbourhood bounded by Mack, Woodward, Beaubien and the Fisher Freeway, built in the 1870s as the address of Detroit's lumber and shipping money and known then as Little Paris. Most of it was abandoned by the 1980s; the surviving mansions have been restored since 2010.

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8. 

   8© Crisco 1492 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Detroit International Riverfront

   A waterfront district running 8.8 kilometres along the Detroit River from the Ambassador Bridge to Belle Isle, rebuilt from industrial land since 2003. A continuous riverwalk, marinas, parks and the cruise terminal are on it, and Canada is directly across the water.

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9. 

   9© Andrew Jameson · CC BY-SA 3.0

   New Center

   A commercial and residential district five kilometres north of downtown around Woodward Avenue and Grand Boulevard, developed in the 1920s as a second city centre. The Fisher Building of 1928, faced in forty kinds of marble, is here and was called Detroit's largest art object.

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    Philip A. Hart Plaza

    Fourteen acres of open ground on the riverfront, roughly where Cadillac landed in 1701 to found the fort that became Detroit. Opened in 1975 and able to hold some 40,000 people, it centres on Isamu Noguchi's stainless-steel Dodge Memorial Fountain of 1978.

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