Few North American cities reveal themselves so well from the water. On the Detroit River, a liquid boundary between the United States and Canada, the Renaissance Centre towers rise on one side, Windsor's docks on the other, and the ship moors in the heart of it all, at the cruise terminal next to Hart Plaza. Great Lakes cruises have put Detroit back on the port-call map, and the automobile city proves far richer than its industrial legend.

A Terminal at the Foot of Skyscrapers

The cruise terminal, opened in 2011, places passengers steps from the urban heart. Hart Plaza opens immediately at disembarkation, with its monumental sculptures and the Dodge Fountain with its hundreds of jets. From there, the riverfront promenade, the RiverWalk, runs along the water for several kilometres, punctuated by parks, carousels and benches facing Canada. Walking east to Milliken State Park, with its small lighthouse, offers an excellent sense of the waterfront's renewal. Weekends, runners, families and anglers share the promenade, a sign of a city that has relearned to love its river.

The Golden Age Carved in Stone

The business district testifies to the automobile's heyday. The Guardian Building, an Art Deco cathedral from 1929, dazzles with its hall of flamboyant mosaics, freely accessible to visitors during business hours; the orange-tinted brick earned it the nickname "cathedral of finance." Around it stand restored theatres, neo-Gothic façades and plazas animated by midday workers. Architecture lovers can chain discoveries on foot, map in hand, between Campus Martius and the financial quarter, before returning to the water via Woodward Avenue.

Motown and the Museums

Music is the city's other great story. In a modest house on West Grand Boulevard, the Hitsville U.S.A. studio birthed the Motown sound: Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes recorded their first hits there. The Motown Museum, housed in the very place itself, is toured in small groups, original studio included; you sometimes hum a few bars where the Temptations laid their harmonies. Further north, the Detroit Institute of Arts preserves Diego Rivera's celebrated frescoes devoted to industry, among the continent's most important murals. These sites require a short taxi ride or organised excursion. Food lovers will add Eastern Market, historic halls where farmers and artisans set their stalls under great brick sheds.

Port-Call Bearings

The Automobile's Epic

For many cruise passengers, the inescapable excursion leads to Dearborn, in the suburbs, where the Henry Ford Museum gathers a century and a half of American innovation: presidential cars, locomotives, planes, plus the bus in which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in 1955. The neighbouring village of Greenfield, an open-air museum, reconstructs historic workshops and homes, including Thomas Edison's laboratory. Allow half a day to enjoy it without rushing.

Casting Off Between Two Countries

At departure, the ship glides between the two shores, saluting in the same motion the United States and Canada. Detroit recedes with its glass towers, its murals, its legendary studios and its recovered energy. Those who saw only a name on an industrial map leave with quite another image: a port-call with character, one that owns its past and reinvents itself before its visitors' eyes.