Travel to Detroit, Michigan

Travel with Amateur Traveler Podcast

This episode of the Amateur Traveler Podcast explores Detroit, Michigan, through the eyes of Cassandra Sugarman, a resident and self-proclai

Key takeaways

• Detroit has undergone significant revitalization since its 2014 bankruptcy, with renewed investment, restored buildings, and a thriving arts and culinary culture.
• The city's identity is deeply tied to the automotive industry, from Henry Ford's assembly line innovations to modern events like the Woodward Dream Cruise and Detroit Auto Show.

Main topics

• Detroit's automotive heritage
• Motown music history

Notable quotes

"Detroit is a city of revival. It's very unique that Detroit had the big boom of the automotive industry in the 1900s... and now people transforming that into what is the new Detroit."

Conclusion

Detroit is portrayed as a resilient, culturally rich city undergoing a powerful rebirth. With

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. You know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all things finance, like which travel cards earn their keep, and which are just heavy, shiny metal. The quick math for knowing when to pay with points or just swipe the credit card. planning group trips that won't ruin your budget or your friendships. If you haven't heard the story about friends who won't speak to each other after a one-week vacation together, buy me a Diet Coke sometime and I'll tell you. The nerds at NerdWallet know this stuff better than me, and that's why I feel great about recommending the Smart Travel podcast. After all, we nerds have to stick together. Travel smarter and spend less with the help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:00) Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Speaker 3 (1:34) Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Speaker 4 (1:50) Amateur Traveler, episode 1012. Today, Amateur Traveler talks about museums and markets, pizza and conies, automobiles and Motown as we go to Detroit, Michigan. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Let's talk about Detroit. Speaker 4 (2:10) I would like to welcome to the show Cassandra Sugarman, who is coming to us from Detroit, Michigan, and come to talk to us about Detroit, Michigan. Cassandra, welcome to the show. Speaker 1 (2:21) It's great to be here, Chris. Speaker 4 (2:23) I see you're coming to us from Detroit. You're coming to us from the Detroit area. Speaker 1 (2:27) Correct, yeah. So I live in Royal Oak, Michigan, which is a suburb just about 15, 20 minutes north of Detroit. Speaker 4 (2:37) Excellent. And you live in Detroit, so that's your connection with Detroit, so that one's fairly obvious. Why should someone go to Detroit? Speaker 1 (2:46) Yeah, so why someone should go to Detroit, and I think specifically now and in the years to come, is the story of revival of Detroit. So many people associate Detroit with the automotive industry. It definitely is the backbone of Detroit. And it really weaves in with the history of the city. Henry Ford and the creation of the assembly line really started taking off in the 1900s and really built up the city, brought in a lot of immigrants to the area. For example, the Dearborn area where Ford is headquartered has a lot of Middle Eastern population, lots of really great Middle Eastern food. So it really created the start of... this melting pot, if you will, built on the auto industry and really took off the city. But as people also know, the auto industry and the history of the auto industry has been very cyclic economically. And that has also affected the city here as well. The three, we call them the big three automotive manufacturers in the U.S. are all located here in Detroit. So you have Ford, you have GM, and then you have Stellantis. Previously, Fiat Chrysler, it's gone through a couple of mergers over the years. They all have a presence here. All of the supply base that supplies the American automotive companies are here. And so the economy of the city is very much intertwined with the automotive industry. And particularly in the... Great Recession of 2008, Detroit was hit pretty hard. Two of the three automotive companies, Stellantis now and GM, had to take government bailouts. Ford pretty much had to put most everything on the line to get through this time. And in 2014, the city of Detroit actually had to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. But the cool thing about it is that it didn't end there. There was revival. And so I moved here to Metro Detroit in 2014. And through my time here, I have just seen complete revitalization of the city. So there's been gentrification that has happened where buildings that were once completely abandoned, cities that were hit really hard or neighborhoods that were hit really hard. Speaker 3 (5:08) Artists Speaker 1 (5:08) have come in and developed wonderful murals on the sides of abandoned buildings and structures. There have been a great food scene. That's awakened in the city. Pockets of gentrification that grew into neighborhoods, lots of shops, bakeries, coffee shops. Dan Gilbert, who's founder of the Rocket Companies, like Rocket Mortgage, is also headquartered here. And he really kick-started a lot of investment in the core downtown. But then there's also, like I said, a lot of artists and things that have taken off and created the city that it is today. And so I say revival because it's very unique that Detroit had the big boom of the automotive industry in the 1900s. We had the Great Recession and kind of the abandonment that a lot of people saw pictures of. And now people transforming that into what is the new Detroit. And it's just a really cool thing to see. In addition to... revival. There's also a music history associated with Detroit. Speaker 4 (6:13) So Speaker 1 (6:14) yeah, so you can't really go on without acknowledging Motown and the birth of Motown in Detroit. In the 1960s, Barry Gordy Jr. launched the recording label Motown here in the city of Detroit. It brought to the American people great artists like Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye. And there's also been a lot of other great music names that have gone through the city. Aretha Franklin, Kid Rock. He's not from Detroit in of itself, but one of the suburbs. And then also Eminem. If you know the Eminem movie, 8 Mile, that is actually on the northern side of Detroit. It is the road that kind of separates the city of Detroit from the suburbs. And so that's what is being referenced in his movie. He also opened up a... restaurant in Detroit called Mom's Spaghetti, which is homage to his lyric, Lose Yourself. So you can come to Detroit and have Mom's Spaghetti and listen to Lose Yourself while you're driving down an eight mile. So yeah, with the music history, the revival, the cuisine, there's just a lot to experience here in Detroit. Speaker 4 (7:24) Excellent. What itinerary are you going to recommend for us? Speaker 1 (7:28) Yeah, so I have a seven-day itinerary planned. Just a couple of logistical things about the seven-day itinerary. I think you can definitely spend a week here in Detroit, really dive into the city, understand it, and be busy every single day. But if you did want to shorten this itinerary to something, say like three or four days, you Speaker 4 (7:49) definitely Speaker 1 (7:49) could take bits and pieces of it. and shorten it. Detroit is located in a really good location in the Midwest of the United States. So it's actually just a little over a four hour drive to Chicago. So you can pair it with Chicago if you wanted a little over four hour drive to Toronto. And you're also close to Northern Michigan and Western Michigan. I know, Chris, that you have some really great episodes around Northern Michigan, Western Michigan that you could also pair with Detroit if you wanted to. So like I said, seven days, but you could shorten it, take pieces of it if you wanted to. Also, if you wanted to align your trip with some events, Detroit does have a number of really cool events that they host every year that you could pair with this itinerary. So the Detroit Auto Show, that happens every January at the main conference center in downtown Detroit, Cobo Hall. It's now called Huntington Place. Pretty much every single automotive manufacturer around the world comes to Detroit. You can try any new car that you want, see a lot of cool concept cars. That's a fun event that you could add to your trip. In August every year, there's the Woodward Dream Cruise. So that is on Woodward Avenue. It's known as the spine of Detroit. It's like a south-north street that's angled through the city. It actually was the world's first concrete road. Speaker 4 (9:17) Okay. Speaker 1 (9:18) Yeah. And it's close by to where a lot of the first automotive assembly lines were, where Henry Ford perfected the assembly line. where they were located, like the Ford Highland Park plant. Speaker 4 (9:33) And when you say cruise here, we're not on a boat. We're cruising the streets as we would do back in the, I would say, in the 50s. But I think my friends did that in the 70s. Speaker 1 (9:45) Exactly. It's cruising in your car. We love the automobile industry here in Detroit. So everybody gets out their old Corvettes, Mustangs, and cruises along Woodward Avenue. People set out their lawn chairs and just watch and live like you're living in, like you said, the 60s, 70s. And all three of the big three automotive manufacturers take over a part of the city. So Ford takes over Ferndale, which is the southernmost suburb of Detroit on Woodward Avenue. You can go to Mustang Alley, see all kinds of old Mustangs. GM takes over Birmingham. which is a more northern suburb where you can go and see all of the old Corvettes. And then Stellantis takes more of the northern side and Pontiac. But it's a really unique experience to come in August for that. Speaker 4 (10:39) One thing before we go too much further, a clarification for our non-U.S. listeners or potentially for our U.S. listeners who are geography challenged. When we talk about Detroit as the Midwest, that might be a little confusing to someone who's not from the U.S. Because if you look at a map, it is in the eastern half of the country, probably in the middle east to west in the eastern half of the country. So the Midwest is located in the east because it used to be. the West, and it used to be the Midwest. And we still call it that to this day. Speaker 1 (11:13) Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, so I guess a couple more events in October every year is the Detroit Marathon. And this is really cool for runners because it's an international half and full marathon. You start in Detroit, you run over the Ambassador Bridge into Canada, which is really cool. Run along Windsor and then you return to the U.S. through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and actually get to run underneath the Detroit River. So that's also a very unique experience every October. And so these are just a couple of events. There's other events in Detroit that you could pair your trip with. There's also a lot of really good concert venues in Detroit. I mentioned it being a music city. The Little Caesars Arena, which hosts the Red Wings hockey team, has a lot of good concerts hosted at it every year, as well as Ford Field, which is the football stadium. But we have a lot of unique concert venues like the Detroit Masonic Temple, St. Andrew's Hall. There's a lot of really good music that comes through the city as well that you can pair with your trip. Speaker 4 (12:19) Okay. Speaker 1 (12:21) All right, so I guess diving into the itinerary. On day one, I have as kind of your travel-in day and getting settled in downtown Detroit. So as I mentioned, Detroit is a heavily automotive-focused city, so you are going to need a car for the majority of this itinerary. I do have a little bit of it where you can use public transportation. There is a free tram bus. called the Q Line, which runs up and down Woodward Avenue, which you can use for part of this itinerary. But