Don’t believe the hype – the US city is a sleeping giant with a past shaped by Scots

DAVID TORRANCE

INSTINCT has always drawn me to places that lots of people tell me to avoid. The Albanian capital Tirana, for example, turned out to be a delightful city despite the dire warnings of almost everyone I met en route through other Balkan countries, while travelling in parts of South Africa by train is not only scenic but safe, contrary to the predictions of an untimely death I attracted in advance.

The US city of Detroit is another such place. For years I’ve wanted to visit, but whenever I mentioned this to American friends their faces would contort into an unspoken statement of “why on earth do you want to go to a dump like Detroit?” Indeed, few cities have such terrible PR, both within the United States and beyond, but then that’s what several decades of news stories about race riots (1967), white flight (1970s and 80s), urban decay (the 2000s) and bankruptcy (2013) tend to do.

I first visited in July, shortly after attending the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and wasn’t disappointed, for Detroit’s recent rejuvenation meant I could indulge in some “ruin porn” as well as experience the resurgent Downtown area.

I was back just two months later as part of a six-week pre-election road trip throughout the US. While Detroit was once a major transport hub, largely so the cars it churned out for much of the 20th century could be distributed across the country, it now boasts an inaccessible airport, intermittent trains and a sorry-looking bus terminal.

On my second visit I stayed in Midtown and felt I was in a completely different city, a much hipper, bustling environment than the often eerily-deserted Downtown. Midtown is not only home to Wayne State University, but also a plethora of museums and galleries, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, which boasts the astonishing Detroit Industry fresco by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, commissioned in the early 1930s by Edsel Ford and an artistic homage to Motor City’s heyday.

There I met a curator called Jill Best, who took me through its history in an AngloAmerican accent that also betrayed a few years studying English at the University of Edinburgh. This was apt, for I’d returned

PHOTOGRAPH: SHUTTERSTOCK The Detroit skyline is a mix of architectural styles from the19th and 20th centuries alongside contemporary buildings