1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die (58 page)

Suburban Auburn Hills is home to DaimlerChrysler headquarters and the Walter P. Chrysler Museum. A railroad mechanic, Chrysler got his start in the auto industry when he became smitten at an auto show with a $5,000 Locomobile. He had it shipped home, where he immediately took it apart and reassembled it. Along with a gleaming collection of DeSotos, Hudsons, and muscle cars, this museum does a good job of explaining the evolution of auto engineering and design with a variety of hands-on displays about aerodynamics and other advancements. A time line illustrates the endless string of start-ups and mergers that track the worldwide auto industry, with Motor City at the helm.

T
HE
H
ENRY
F
ORD
: Dearborn. Tel 313–271-1620;
www.thehenryford.org
.
A
UTOMOTIVE
H
ALL OF
F
AME
: Dearborn. Tel 800–298-4748 or 313–240-4000;
www.automotivehalloffame.org
.
W
ALTER
P. C
HRYSLER
M
USEUM
: Auburn Hills. Tel 888–456-1924 or 248–944-0001;
www.chryslerheritage.com
.
When:
closed Mon.
B
EST TIMES
: Jan for the North American International Auto Show (
www.naias.com
); mid-Aug for the Woodward Dream Cruise (
www.woodwarddreamcruise.com
).

Where Homegrown Talents Turned the World on Its Ear

Detroit, Michigan

When it comes to creating and nurturing musical legacies, few American cities have proved as fertile as Detroit. The birthplace of Aretha Franklin and Madonna, rockers Bob Seger, Ted Nugent
, and Kid Rock, Detroit is also where you’ll find both the Gospel Hall of Fame and Eight Mile, the road dividing city and suburbs that the rapper Eminem put on the map. A never-ending stream of talent pulses in its blues bars like the Carriage House and jazz clubs like the Harlequin Café, but the Motor City music scene will always be most identified with two
modest row houses in downtown Detroit that now contain the Motown Museum. It was here that Berry Gordy Jr. founded a record company and virtually created a new genre of music. In the early 1960s, the “Motown Sound” reverberated across America, shaping Western music for decades to come.

From 1959 to 1968 (when Motown Records moved to larger quarters nearby), Gordy and his fledgling record company ignited the careers of one talented singer after another: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and so many more. Most of them were local talent; it was Gordy, a shrewd manager, strict disciplinarian, and astute businessman, who channeled their talents into his well-orchestrated, star-making machine known as “Hitsville, U.S.A.”

The Motown Museum is really two museums in one. The west house focuses on memorabilia: photos, press clippings, gold records, and album covers, along with artifacts like the original sequined glove Michael Jackson wore for his famous “moonwalk” and the 32-pound beaded dresses worn by the Supremes.

Studio A has been restored to look just as it did when all those early hits were recorded here.

A passageway connects to the east house, permiting visitors to step into a time warp. Upstairs is Gordy’s apartment, complete with 1960s furnishings. Downstairs is the Motown headquarters, looking as if Smokey Robinson walked through there yesterday. The reception area, telephone switchboard, tape library, and control room are all original, down to the 35-cent cigarette machine. Guides tell behind-the-scenes stories and point out fun details: The control room’s floor is worn through in spots from the endless tapping of feet to the music.

Also original is Studio A, nothing more than a renovated garage where all those Motown hits began. Guides explain how artists were invited to meetings here, where new recordings were played and Gordy asked his routine question: “If you were down to your last dollar, would you buy a sandwich or this record?” If they hesitated, Gordy figured the record was worth releasing.

Motown Records eventually moved to Los Angeles in 1972. But its glory days are perfectly preserved here, where it all began.

M
OTOWN
M
USEUM
: 2648 W. Grand Blvd. Tel 313–875-2264;
www.motownmuseum.com
.
C
ARRIAGE
H
OUSE
: Tel 313–535-3440.
H
ARLEQUIN
C
AFÉ
: Tel 313–331-0922.
B
EST TIMES
: mid-July for the Ribs ’n’ Soul Festival (
www.ribsnsoul.com
); early Sept for International Jazz Festival (
www.detroitjazzfest.com
).

The Unfathomable Wealth of the Captains of Industry

Detroit and Environs, Michigan

One of the best ways to grasp the remarkable wealth, power, and affluence created by the auto industry (see p. 526) is to catch a glimpse of the royalty-like lifestyles of the early 20th-century auto barons. A trio of their
estates, architectural and artistic marvels all, are open to visitors for an intimate look at how the other half lived.

John Dodge died of influenza at age 56 in 1920 before he could enjoy the vast riches that the auto company he and his brother founded would yield, but his widow, Matilda, made out quite nicely. She was the wealthiest woman in the nation when she remarried a successful lumberman and decided to create a country estate like those she had seen in Europe. The result was Meadow Brook Hall, a lavish 88,000-square-foot Tudor Revival castle on a rolling farm estate 15 miles north of Detroit. Matilda Dodge Wilson celebrated American craftsmanship in every room, from Tiffany art glass and Stickley furniture, to 39 individually designed fireplaces, even custom doorknobs for each of the 110 rooms. Completed in 1929, it cost an unthinkable $4 million. In 1957, the Wilsons donated the 1,500-acre estate and $2 million to found Oakland University on the site.

Edsel Ford (Henry Ford’s only son) and his wife, Eleanor, chose to highlight British artisans and architecture in their Cotswold-style mansion along Lake St. Clair, 9 miles northeast of Detroit. Designed in 1929 by noted local architect Albert Kahn, the home has interior paneling and furniture imported from old English manors; Cotswold roofers were brought in to split and lay the imported stone shingles. Evident throughout is the Fords’ love of art, though copies stand in for the originals now hanging in the Detroit Institute of the Arts (see p. 525). Much of this rich estate remains as it was when the Fords lived here, down to the framed photos of family and friends like Charles Lindbergh.

Surprisingly, the least ostentatious home belonged to Henry Ford himself. Fair Lane, the 1914 estate of Henry and his wife, Clara, is remarkable for how well it reflects the inventive, detail-oriented mind of its owner. It is filled with technical innovations, including the powerhouse, designed with mentor Thomas Edison, which made the estate completely self-sufficient for heating, lighting, and refrigeration. The 72-acre grounds, designed by Jens Jensen, are one of the nation’s finest examples of natural landscape art, with waterfalls added to the Rouge River, and plantings so precise that the setting sun is perfectly framed at summer solstice.

M
EADOW
B
ROOK
H
ALL
: Rochester. Tel 248–370-3140;
www.meadowbrookhall.org
.
E
DSEL
& E
LEANOR
F
ORD
H
OUSE
: Grosse Point Shores. Tel 313–884-4222;
www.fordhouse.org
.
When:
closed Mon.
F
AIR
L
ANE
: Dearborn. Tel 313–593-5590;
www.henryfordestate.org
.
When:
closed Mon.
B
EST TIMES
: June–Sept for gardens at Fair Lane; early Aug for the Meadow Brook Concours d’Elegance, an antique and classic automobile exhibition (
www.meadowbrookconcours.org
).

A Tragic Chapter in World History

Farmington Hills, Michigan

This excellent museum in the western Detroit suburbs goes well beyond the textbook recitation of facts; it provides a thought-provoking look at the events leading to the torture and extermination of more than 6 million
Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime between 1931 and 1945. The Zekelman Family Holocaust Memorial Center deftly explains not just what happened, but how and why
such atrocities could happen too. The center begins with a circular exhibit room featuring a detailed time line that tracks the history of the Jewish people in parallel with major events in world history. An adjacent room offers insights into Jewish family and community life, religion, and cultural traditions. From there, visitors quietly descend into an ominous tunnel that tells the story of WWII, the rise of the Nazis, and the beginnings of their campaign to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe. Subsequent rooms delve further into the downward spiral of the Holocaust—deportation, confinement to ghettos, slave labor, and finally, the death camps—which expanded throughout Europe as Germany invaded country after country. All told, these deaths would account for two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of world Jewry. Of them, 1.5 million were children.

The chronology culminates in the “Abyss,” a walkway surrounded by deeply disturbing photographs and film footage of the death camps as they were discovered by Soviet and Allied troops in the mid-1940s. (Nothing is spared here; the display is not appropriate for small children.) Many of these images were shot under the orders of General Dwight Eisenhower. He insisted that they appear in the news, with the hope that such crimes against humanity would never happen again.

W
HERE
: 28123 Orchard Lake Rd. Tel 248–553-2400;
www.holocaustcenter.org
.
W
HEN
: closed Fri afternoon–Sat.

An Angler’s Bonanza of Blue-Ribbon Trout Streams

Michigan

Aweb of rivers flow clear and cold through a swath of the Lower Peninsula in northern Michigan, comprising a “golden triangle” of blue-ribbon trout streams. The exact boundaries of the triangle may be open to
interpretation (roughly delineated by the cities of Boyne City, Grayling, and Manistee, with Traverse City as its hub) but the rivers are storied among anglers: the Manistee, the Au Sable, the Boardman, the Betsie, the Jordan. Together, these and lesser-known streams make this corner of the state a premier fly-fishing destination for anglers of brown, rainbow, and brook trout.

The Au Sable River is considered to be one of the best places to fish for brown trout east of the Rocky Mountains.

Flowing east out of Grayling, the famed Au Sable runs over a pea-gravel bottom, coiling through the tall pines of eastern Crawford County. How strong is the fishing culture here? Trout Unlimited, the conservation organization dedicated to protecting trout fisheries and their watersheds, was founded along the banks of the Au Sable in 1959. Grayling is the hub for fishing activity, a town named for an indigenous game fish (which, ironically, died out in the 1930s because of
rising water temperatures from logging along the river’s banks).