Congress Street station

The Guardian Building is a landmark skyscraper in the United States, located at 500 Griswold Street in Downtown Detroit, Michigan, within the Financial District. The Guardian is a class-A office building owned by Wayne County, Michigan and serves as its headquarters. Built in 1928 and finished in 1929, the building was originally called the Union Trust Building and is a bold example of Art Deco architecture, including art moderne designs. At the top of the Guardian Building's spire is a large U.S. flag, complementing the four smaller flags atop nearby 150 West Jefferson. The building has undergone recent award-winning renovations. It was designated a National Historic Landmark on June 29, 1989, and the associated Detroit Financial District is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Guardian building includes retail and a tourist gift shop.

The Detroit City Hall was the seat of government for the city of Detroit, Michigan from 1871–1961. The building sat on the west side of Campus Martius bounded by Griswold Street to the west, Michigan Avenue to the north, Woodward Avenue to the east, and Fort Street to the south where One Kennedy Square stands, today. It stood three stories tall, and included a partially raised basement level and an attic level. An observation level was at the top of the bell tower.

The 1943 Detroit race riot took place in Detroit, Michigan, from the evening of June 20 through to the early morning of June 22. It occurred in a period of dramatic population increase and social tensions associated with the military buildup of U.S. participation in World War II, as Detroit's automotive industry was converted to the war effort. Existing social tensions and housing shortages were exacerbated by racist feelings about the arrival of nearly 400,000 migrants, both African-American and White Southerners, from the Southeastern United States between 1941 and 1943. The migrants competed for space and jobs against the city's residents as well as against European immigrants and their descendants. The riot escalated after a false rumor spread that a mob of whites had thrown a black mother and her baby into the Detroit River. Blacks looted and destroyed white property as retaliation. Whites overran Woodward to Veron where they proceeded to violently attack black community members and tip over 20 cars that belonged to black families. The Detroit riot was one of five that summer; it followed others in New York City; Los Angeles; Beaumont, Texas; and Mobile, Alabama. The rioting in Detroit began among youths at Belle Isle Park on June 20, 1943; the unrest spread to other areas of the city and was exacerbated by false rumors of racial attacks in both the black and white communities. It continued until June 22. It was suppressed after 6,000 federal troops were ordered into the city to restore peace. A total of 34 people were killed, 25 of them black and most at the hands of the white police force, while 433 were wounded (75 percent of them black), and property valued at $2 million (worth $30.4 million in 2020) was destroyed. Most of the riot took place in the black area of Paradise Valley, the poorest neighborhood of the city. At the time, white commissions attributed the cause of the riot to black people and youths, but the NAACP claimed deeper causes: a shortage of affordable housing, discrimination in employment, lack of minority representation in the police, and white police brutality. A late 20th-century analysis of the rioters showed that the white rioters were younger and often unemployed (characteristics that the riot commissions had falsely attributed to blacks despite evidence to the contrary). If working, the whites often held semi-skilled or skilled positions. Whites traveled long distances across the city to join the first stage of the riot near the bridge to Belle Isle Park, and later some traveled in armed groups explicitly to attack the black neighborhood in Paradise Valley. The black participants were often older, established city residents, who in many cases had lived in the city for more than a decade. They also looted and destroyed white-owned property in their neighborhood.

The Vinton Building is a residential high-rise located at 600 Woodward Avenue (at the northeast corner of Woodward and Congress Street) in Downtown Detroit, Michigan. It stands next to the First National Building, across Woodward Avenue from Chase Tower (currently known as The Qube) and the Guardian Building, and across Congress Street from One Detroit Center. It was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1982 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

Ally Detroit Center, formerly One Detroit Center, is a skyscraper and class-A office building located in Downtown Detroit, overlooking the Detroit Financial District. Rising 619 feet (189 m), the 43-story tower is the tallest office building in Michigan and the second tallest building overall in the state behind the central hotel tower of the Renaissance Center, located a few blocks away. Although the Penobscot Building has more floors above ground (45), those of Ally Detroit Center are taller, with its roof sitting roughly 60 feet (18 m) taller than that of the Penobscot. It has a floor area of 1,674,708 sq ft (155,585.5 m2).

Meridian Health Plan Headquarters was a planned highrise in the Campus Martius district of downtown Detroit. The skyscraper would have had 16 stories with office space, ground level retail outlets, a state-of-the-art plaza, and a 9-story, 1,000 space parking deck. Detroit-based Meridian Health Plan would have been the sole office tenant in the 16-story building on the block bounded by Monroe, Bates and Farmer streets by Campus Martius Park. Meridian planned to occupy to 300,000 square feet of space in the $111 million development. Designs for the Class A building included first-floor retail space and a nine-story, 1,000-space parking deck. The brownfield incentives would be for site preparation and infrastructure improvements at the 1.96-acre site, a 230-space surface parking lot. Meridian, which has about 620 employees in two downtown offices in One Kennedy Square, 777 Woodward Ave., and the Dan Gilbert-owned 1001 Woodward building, would move into its new headquarters in early 2017, according to Sean Cotton, the company's general counsel. By that time, the company expects to have 1,050 employees in Detroit. Meridian initiated the new building project and hired Livonia-based Schostak Bros. as the developer.

The First National Building is a skyscraper and class-A office center in Downtown Detroit, Michigan, within the Detroit Financial District. The building is located across the streets from Cadillac Tower and One Detroit Center, and stands next to the Vinton Building.

The Ford Building is a high-rise office building located at 615 Griswold Street in Downtown Detroit, Michigan. It stands at the northwest corner of Congress and Griswold Streets, in the heart of Detroit's Financial District. The Penobscot Building abuts the building to the north, and the Guardian Building is southeast across Griswold Street. Toledo, Ohio, glass manufacturer Edward Ford and his son, John B. Ford, general manager of the Fords' Wyandotte, Michigan, alkali plant, had this building—then Detroit's tallest—constructed as an investment property.

One Woodward Avenue, formerly known as the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building, is a class-A office skyscraper in Downtown Detroit, Michigan. Located next to the city's Civic Center and Financial District, it overlooks the International Riverfront and was designed to blend with the City-County Building across Woodward Avenue, Huntington Place, and the former Ford Auditorium to the south.

The Spirit of Detroit is a monument with a large bronze statue created by Marshall Fredericks and located at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan.

The Qube, previously known as the Chase Tower, the Bank One Center, and the National Bank of Detroit Building, is a high-rise office building and Quicken Loans operations center in the U.S. designated Detroit Financial District at 611 Woodward Avenue, in Downtown Detroit, Michigan. It was built in 1959 and stands at 14 floors in height. It was completely remodeled in 2011 and is currently in the process of remodeling again. It was designed in the modern architectural style, and uses a great deal of marble to coordinate with the buildings in the nearby Civic Center. It was designed by Albert Kahn Associates.

Detroit ( də-TROYT, locally also DEE-troyt; French: Détroit, lit. 'strait') is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at the 2020 census, making it the 27th-most populous city in the United States. The metropolitan area, known as Metro Detroit, is home to 4.3 million people, making it the second-largest in the Midwest after the Chicago metropolitan area, and the 14th-largest in the United States. Regarded as a major cultural center, Detroit is known for its contributions to music, art, architecture and design, in addition to its historical automotive background. Time named Detroit as one of the fifty World's Greatest Places of 2022 to explore.Detroit is a major port on the Detroit River, one of the four major straits that connect the Great Lakes system to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The City of Detroit anchors the third-largest regional economy in the Midwest, behind Chicago and Minneapolis–Saint Paul, and the 16th-largest in the United States. Detroit is best known as the center of the U.S. automobile industry, and the "Big Three" auto manufacturers General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis North America (Chrysler) are all headquartered in Metro Detroit. As of 2007, the Detroit metropolitan area is the number one exporting region among 310 defined metropolitan areas in the United States. The Detroit Metropolitan Airport is among the most important hub airports in the United States. Detroit and its neighboring Canadian city Windsor are connected through a highway tunnel, railway tunnel, and the Ambassador Bridge, which is the second-busiest international crossing in North America, after San Diego–Tijuana. Both cities will soon be connected by a new bridge currently under construction, the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will provide a complete freeway-to-freeway link. The new bridge is expected to be open by 2024.In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac and Alphonse de Tonty founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, the future city of Detroit. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it became an important industrial hub at the center of the Great Lakes region. The city's population became the fourth-largest in the nation in 1920, after only New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia, with the expansion of the auto industry in the early 20th century. As Detroit's industrialization took off, the Detroit River became the busiest commercial hub in the world. The strait carried over 65 million tons of shipping commerce through Detroit to locations all over the world each year; the freight throughput was more than three times that of New York and about four times that of London. By the 1940s, the city's population remained the fourth-largest in the country. However, due to industrial restructuring, the loss of jobs in the auto industry, and rapid suburbanization, among other reasons, Detroit entered a state of urban decay and lost considerable population from the late 20th century to the present. Since reaching a peak of 1.85 million at the 1950 census, Detroit's population has declined by more than 65 percent. In 2013, Detroit became the largest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy, which it successfully exited in December 2014, when the city government regained control of Detroit's finances.Detroit's diverse culture has had both local and international influence, particularly in music, with the city giving rise to the genres of Motown and techno, and playing an important role in the development of jazz, hip-hop, rock, and punk. The rapid growth of Detroit in its boom years resulted in a globally unique stock of architectural monuments and historic places. Since the 2000s, conservation efforts have managed to save many architectural pieces and achieved several large-scale revitalizations, including the restoration of several historic theatres and entertainment venues, high-rise renovations, new sports stadiums, and a riverfront revitalization project. More recently, the population of Downtown Detroit, Midtown Detroit, and various other neighborhoods have increased. An increasingly popular tourist destination, Detroit receives 16 million visitors per year. In 2015, Detroit was named a "City of Design" by UNESCO, the first U.S. city to receive that designation.