As a native New Yorker I have my prejudices against working class industrial midwestern towns. But spending a week in Detroit for a trade show gave me a chance to appreciate some of the city's virtues. Which include some awfully nice people, some terrific restaurants and some beautifully restored buildings. And after a visit to Atlanta a few weeks earlier it was nice to see a place that would rather celebrate its architecture than run a bulldozer over it.
Downtown is full of small ethnic neighborhoods.
My hotel was in Greektown, home to a lot of bars, restaurants and bakeries. There's also a small shopping mall that looks like it was carved out of a former warehouse. Built with a lot of Federal transportation funds, the People Mover is a modern elevated railroad that runs from downtown Detroit all the way to downtown Detroit. The plan was to run a line to the airport and then on to Ann Arbor, but the incredible expense of the thing forced them to scale back. So what we have is a single line in one direction that does a loop of downtown in about fifteen minutes.