Things to Do in Detroit: A First-Timer’s Guide

Detroit rewards the visitor who arrives with an open mind. For decades the Motor City was shorthand for industrial decline, and the people who have not been still picture empty streets and abandoned factories. What they find instead is a downtown that has filled back up with restaurants, hotels and people, a riverfront that has been turned from parking lots and silos into one of the best urban walks in the country, an art museum with a collection that rivals any in America, the studio where Motown was born, the city that invented techno, and neighborhoods whose food, from Coney Islands and square pizza to Yemeni coffee and Mexican bakeries, reflects more than a century of migration. It is also a city built by and for the automobile, and the story of the car, from the Model T to the modern pickup, is told here better than anywhere on earth. This guide covers the sights that earn a day, the neighborhoods worth a half-day, the music, the sports, the food, the day trips across the river and into the suburbs, and the practical details that make a first visit easy.

If you are still comparing cheap flights to Detroit, read this alongside our guides to the best time to fly to Detroit and whether to rent a car or rely on transit (in the Motor City, the answer is more nuanced than you might expect). Between the three you can plan the whole trip.

Detroit at a glance for first-timers

• Airport: Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW), in Romulus, about 32 km (20 miles) southwest of downtown, is one of Delta’s largest hubs, with nonstops across North America and long-haul flights to Europe and Asia. The drive downtown on I-94 takes 25 to 40 minutes. See our DTW airport guide.
• Getting around: downtown, Midtown and the riverfront are walkable, the elevated People Mover loops around downtown and the QLine streetcar runs up Woodward Avenue to Midtown and New Center. Beyond that core, Detroit is a car city, and our car-versus-transit guide explains when a rental earns its keep.
• Money: US dollars. Michigan’s sales tax is 6 percent, added at the register, with extra taxes on hotel rooms. Tipping 18 to 20 percent in restaurants is expected. Canadian dollars are sometimes accepted near the border, at a poor rate; use a card.
• Weather: four distinct seasons: cold, gray and snowy winters, a short spring, warm and humid summers, and a crisp, colorful fall. Our month-by-month guide has the detail.
• Where to stay: downtown around Campus Martius for walking access to the riverfront, the stadiums and the theaters; Midtown for the museums; Corktown for the restaurants; Dearborn or the northern suburbs if you have a car. Our Detroit hotel search covers them all.

Downtown: Campus Martius, Woodward and the Art Deco towers

Downtown Detroit is laid out like a wheel, a plan drawn up by Judge Augustus Woodward after a fire destroyed the town in 1805, with the great avenues radiating from a set of central squares. The hub is Campus Martius Park, the city’s living room, where office workers eat lunch among the fountains, a sandy urban beach appears in summer, and an ice rink and a towering Christmas tree take over from November. Woodward Avenue runs north from here toward Grand Circus Park and the theater district, and south to the river. Detroit’s 1920s boom left one of the finest collections of Art Deco skyscrapers in America, and several have lobbies you can walk into. The Guardian Building, completed in 1929 and nicknamed the Cathedral of Finance, has a vaulted banking hall covered in Pewabic and Rookwood tile in shades of orange and gold; step inside even if you see nothing else. At the foot of Woodward, the Spirit of Detroit, a large bronze figure holding a gilded sphere, sits outside the municipal center, and across Jefferson Avenue Hart Plaza hosts the big summer festivals. The glass towers of the Renaissance Center, long synonymous with General Motors, dominate the riverfront to the east; the ground-floor atrium leads straight out onto the RiverWalk.

The riverfront: the RiverWalk, the Dequindre Cut and Belle Isle

Twenty years ago most of the Detroit riverfront was cement silos, parking lots and fences. Today the Detroit RiverWalk runs for more than three miles along the water from near the Renaissance Center east toward the Belle Isle bridge, with gardens, fountains, a carousel and benches facing Windsor, Ontario, which sits directly across the river to the south; this is one of the few places where Canada lies south of the United States. Rent a MoGo bike-share bike and ride east along the river, then turn north up the Dequindre Cut, a former railroad line sunk below street level and turned into a greenway lined with murals and graffiti, which brings you out at Eastern Market. At the eastern end of the RiverWalk, the MacArthur Bridge crosses to Belle Isle, an island park of 982 acres in the middle of the Detroit River, larger than Central Park in New York. It has been run as a Michigan state park since 2014, and it holds a surprising number of treasures: the Belle Isle Aquarium, opened in 1904 in a building by Albert Kahn with a green-tiled vaulted ceiling; the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory, a glass-domed botanical house; the James Scott Memorial Fountain, a marble extravaganza that runs in the warmer months; the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, which tells the story of the freighters that still pass the island; and a beach and a giant slide for summer afternoons. Walking and cycling onto the island are free; vehicles need a Michigan Recreation Passport, which non-residents buy as a day or annual pass at the entrance.

Neighborhoods worth a half-day

Midtown and the Cultural Center

North of downtown along Woodward, Midtown is home to Wayne State University, the city’s great museums, and a dense strip of cafes, bars and shops.

Corktown and Michigan Central

Detroit’s oldest surviving neighborhood, settled by Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, is now one of its liveliest dining districts, with barbecue, cocktail bars and bakeries along Michigan Avenue. It is dominated by Michigan Central Station, the huge Beaux-Arts railroad terminal that stood empty for decades as the symbol of the city’s decline. Ford bought it, restored it and reopened it in 2024 as the anchor of a technology campus, and the grand hall is open to visitors; check the station’s current hours and tour options before you go.

Eastern Market

The largest historic public market district in the country, with sheds dating to the 1890s, Eastern Market is at its best on a Saturday morning, when farmers, butchers, flower sellers and food trucks fill the sheds and the surrounding streets, and tens of thousands of Detroiters come to shop.

New Center

At the north end of the QLine, New Center was built in the 1920s as a second downtown. Its centerpiece is Albert Kahn’s Fisher Building, completed in 1928, whose three-story arcade of marble, bronze and painted ceilings is often called the city’s largest art object. The Motown Museum is a short walk west along West Grand Boulevard.

Southwest Detroit

Southwest Detroit, around Bagley Street and Vernor Highway in the area known as Mexicantown, is the heart of the city’s Mexican and Latino community, with taquerias, panaderias and grocery stores, and the best view of the Ambassador Bridge soaring overhead.

Hamtramck and the east side

Hamtramck, a separate small city surrounded by Detroit, was built by Polish immigrants who worked in the auto plants and is now home to large Yemeni and Bangladeshi communities as well; its main streets are a lesson in how Detroit has always absorbed newcomers. To the east, the mansions of Indian Village show the wealth of the auto age, and the Heidelberg Project, the artist Tyree Guyton’s long-running outdoor installation of painted houses and found objects, has been partly dismantled and is being transformed; check what is open before making the trip.

Museums, culture and family attractions

The Detroit Institute of Arts, in Midtown’s Cultural Center, is one of the great art museums of the United States and the essential visit of any trip. Its heart is Rivera Court, where Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, painted in 1932 and 1933, cover all four walls with the workers, furnaces and assembly lines of the Ford Rouge plant; they are among the finest works of art in the country, and many visitors come to Detroit for them alone. The rest of the collection runs from ancient Egypt to a Van Gogh self-portrait, the first Van Gogh bought by an American museum, and it is strong in African American art. General admission is free for residents of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, whose taxes support the museum; visitors from elsewhere pay a modest fee. Across the street and nearby, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, one of the largest such museums in the world, walks visitors through the journey from Africa through slavery, the Underground Railroad, which ended for many at the Detroit River, and the Great Migration to the civil rights era. In Dearborn, 20 minutes west, The Henry Ford is a destination in itself: the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation holds the bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, the limousine in which President Kennedy was shot and a hall of historic cars and locomotives; Greenfield Village, next door, is an open-air museum of historic buildings including the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory; and the Ford Rouge Factory Tour takes you above the working assembly line where pickups are built. Allow a full day for the complex. For what is on stage at the Fox Theatre, Orchestra Hall and the Detroit Opera House during your dates, our Detroit events page lists concerts, shows and games.

Motown, techno and jazz

Detroit’s gift to the world is its music, and no visit is complete without a pilgrimage to the Motown Museum on West Grand Boulevard. This modest house, which Berry Gordy named Hitsville U.S.A., is where the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Jackson 5 made the records that defined the 1960s, and the guided tour ends in Studio A, the small basement room where the hits were cut; tours sell out, so book ahead. Motown moved to Los Angeles in 1972, but the music never left. Detroit is the birthplace of techno, created in the 1980s by a group of young producers from the suburb of Belleville, and the Movement electronic music festival draws fans from around the world to Hart Plaza on Memorial Day weekend. Jazz has deep roots too: Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, on Livernois Avenue, claims to be the oldest continuously operating jazz club in the world, and the Detroit Jazz Festival on Labor Day weekend is one of the largest free jazz festivals anywhere. The grand old theaters are part of the experience: the Fox Theatre, a 1928 movie palace with about 5,000 seats and one of the most lavish interiors in America, hosts touring shows and concerts, and the Masonic Temple, the largest in the world, has a theater of its own.

Sports

Detroit has teams in all four major leagues, and three of the venues are within walking distance of each other downtown. Comerica Park, home of the Tigers, has views of the skyline, a Ferris wheel and a carousel inside the ballpark, and a statue garden of Tiger greats beyond the outfield; Opening Day in early April is an unofficial city holiday. Next door, Ford Field, home of the Lions, was built around an old department store warehouse, and the Lions’ home game on Thanksgiving Day, a tradition that goes back to the 1930s, is one of the fixtures of the American football calendar. Little Caesars Arena, a few blocks north in the District Detroit, is home to the Red Wings, one of the most successful franchises in hockey, which is why Detroit calls itself Hockeytown, and to the Pistons of the NBA. In late May or early June, the Detroit Grand Prix brings IndyCar racing to a street circuit downtown. And a short drive west in Ann Arbor, University of Michigan football fills Michigan Stadium, the Big House, the largest stadium in the United States, on fall Saturdays. Check what is on sale in Detroit for your dates before you book flights.

What to eat, and where

Start with the Coney Island, Detroit’s signature hot dog: a natural-casing frank in a steamed bun, covered in a beanless meat chili, mustard and chopped onions. American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island stand side by side on Lafayette Boulevard downtown, each with loyalists who will not set foot in the other, and “coney islands”, the diners that serve them, are on street corners across the region. Then there is Detroit-style pizza, baked in rectangular steel pans originally borrowed from the auto plants, with cheese spread to the edges so it caramelizes into a crisp, lacy crust and sauce ladled on top; Buddy’s, which claims to have created it in 1946, is the place to start. Beyond the classics, Detroit’s best food is in its communities: shawarma, grilled meats and Lebanese pastries in Dearborn, home to one of the largest Arab American communities in the country; tacos and tortas in Southwest Detroit; Yemeni coffee houses, Bangladeshi curry and Polish bakeries in Hamtramck, where lines form before dawn for paczki, the Polish doughnuts, on Fat Tuesday; flaming cheese in Greektown; and a new generation of chef-driven restaurants in Corktown, Midtown and downtown. Saturday breakfast at Eastern Market is a Detroit ritual.

Detroit through the seasons

Winter (December to March) is cold and gray, with regular snow and occasional deep freezes, but downtown makes the most of it: the rink at Campus Martius, the holiday markets, the Red Wings and Pistons in season, and the auto show at Huntington Place in January. Hotels are at their cheapest. Spring (April to May) is short and changeable; the Tigers open the season in April, the trees on Belle Isle come into leaf, and Movement closes out May with a weekend of techno. Summer (June to August) is the best time to see the city at its liveliest: the RiverWalk, Belle Isle’s beach, the beach at Campus Martius, the Grand Prix, fireworks over the river in late June, patios across downtown and Corktown, and the Woodward Dream Cruise, when tens of thousands of classic cars parade up Woodward Avenue through the northern suburbs on the third Saturday of August. It can be hot and humid, with thunderstorms. Fall (September to November) opens with the Jazz Festival and brings crisp, clear days, color on Belle Isle and in the parks, Lions and Michigan football, the Detroit Free Press Marathon, which crosses into Canada and back, and America’s Thanksgiving Parade on Woodward. Our month-by-month guide has the fare patterns that go with each season.

Detroit with kids

Detroit is a better family destination than its reputation suggests. The Henry Ford in Dearborn is the standout, with trains, planes and hands-on invention exhibits in the museum and steam train, carousel and Model T rides at Greenfield Village; allow a full day. The Michigan Science Center in Midtown has a planetarium and plenty of buttons to push, and the Detroit Zoo, just north of the city in Royal Oak, is one of the largest zoos in the Midwest, with a polar bear tunnel and a penguin center where the birds swim overhead. On Belle Isle, the aquarium, the nature center and the giant slide keep children happy for hours, and the RiverWalk’s carousel, splash fountains and wide paths are easy with a stroller. In winter, skating at Campus Martius is a treat, and a Tigers game in summer, with the Ferris wheel and carousel inside the ballpark, is a rite of passage. For families planning to drive, our family car rental guide covers the vehicle question.

Detroit on a budget

A great deal of Detroit’s best is free or nearly so: the RiverWalk and the Dequindre Cut, Campus Martius and the downtown lobbies of the Guardian and Fisher Buildings, Belle Isle on foot or by bike, the murals of Eastern Market, the Heidelberg Project, and the big festivals, including the Jazz Festival, the fireworks and the Dream Cruise, which cost nothing to attend. The DIA is free for tri-county residents and inexpensive for everyone else. Food is a bargain by big-city standards: a pair of coneys, a square of pizza, a Dearborn shawarma or a plate of tacos in Southwest Detroit will not dent your budget. Hotels are generally cheaper than in Chicago or Toronto, especially from January to March, though they spike on big event weekends. Compare them by neighborhood on our Detroit hotel search.

Day trips from Detroit

Windsor, Ontario, is the day trip everyone asks about, because it is right there: across the river, reached by the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel from downtown or the Ambassador Bridge from Southwest Detroit. Its riverfront parks and sculpture garden have the best view of the Detroit skyline, and there is a casino, Canadian food and a walkable downtown. It is an international border, so the principles are simple. Everyone needs identity and citizenship documents that both countries accept: for US citizens, that means a passport, passport card, NEXUS card or enhanced driver’s license, which Michigan issues; for everyone else, a passport plus whatever visa or status you need to enter Canada and to re-enter the United States, which you should check before you go rather than at the booth. Declare what you carry, leave cannabis behind (it cannot cross the border in either direction, even though it is legal on both sides), and allow extra time for queues. The official sources are the Canada Border Services Agency for entering Canada and U.S. Customs and Border Protection for coming back. Dearborn is 20 minutes west, with The Henry Ford, the Arab American National Museum and the food. Ann Arbor, about 45 minutes west, is a lively college town with the University of Michigan campus, bookshops and an excellent farmers’ market. Frankenmuth, about 90 minutes north, is a Bavarian-themed town famous for fried chicken dinners and a vast year-round Christmas store. Across the river, Point Pelee National Park, about an hour beyond Windsor, is the southernmost tip of mainland Canada and a famous stop for migrating birds and butterflies. For longer drives, see our route guides for driving from Detroit to Toronto, about four hours on Ontario’s Highway 401, and Chicago to Detroit, then read our guides to things to do in Toronto and things to do in Chicago. Price a car on our Detroit car rental page. Visit Detroit, the official tourism site, covers the region.

Two sample itineraries

Three days, mostly car-free

Day one: Campus Martius, the Guardian Building and the downtown lobbies in the morning, lunch at the coney islands on Lafayette, then the RiverWalk and the Dequindre Cut by bike, with dinner in Corktown and a look at Michigan Central. Day two: the QLine to Midtown for the DIA and the Rivera murals, lunch on Cass Avenue, the Wright Museum in the afternoon, and a show at the Fox or a Tigers game at night. Day three: Eastern Market in the morning (on a Saturday if you can), the Motown Museum in the afternoon, and Detroit-style pizza for dinner.

Five days, with a car

Add a full day at The Henry Ford and the Rouge Factory Tour with dinner in Dearborn, an afternoon on Belle Isle, and a day in Windsor with your passport, or a drive to Ann Arbor, Cranbrook or Frankenmuth.

Practical details

• Transit: the People Mover loops around downtown, the QLine runs up Woodward to New Center, and DDOT and SMART buses cover the city and suburbs. Our transit-versus-car guide goes into detail.
• From DTW: a taxi or ride-hail in 25 to 40 minutes, a SMART express bus, or a rental from the lots near the terminals. The airport’s site has current ground-transport options.
• Weather: a serious coat, hat and gloves from December to March, layers in spring and fall, and light clothes and sunscreen in summer. NOAA’s National Weather Service office for Detroit has the forecast.
• Time zone: Eastern, the same as New York and Toronto and one hour ahead of Chicago.
• Entry requirements: international visitors from Visa Waiver Program countries need an approved ESTA before flying to the US; most others need a visa. The State Department’s travel site is the authoritative source, and a side trip to Windsor means checking Canada’s rules as well.
• Safety: downtown, Midtown, Corktown, the riverfront and the main visitor areas are busy and generally safe; use ordinary big-city awareness at night, stick to lit, busy streets, and take a ride-hail rather than walking long distances between neighborhoods after dark.

Frequently asked questions

How many days do you need in Detroit?

Three days covers downtown, the riverfront, the DIA, Motown and Eastern Market; add a day for The Henry Ford in Dearborn and another for Belle Isle, Windsor or Ann Arbor.

What is the number one thing to do in Detroit?

The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Rivera murals, followed closely by the Motown Museum. In summer, add a bike ride along the RiverWalk.

Is Detroit safe for tourists?

The areas visitors spend their time in, downtown, Midtown, Corktown and the riverfront, are busy and generally safe, especially by day. As in any big city, stay aware at night and use a ride-hail between neighborhoods.

Do I need a car in Detroit?

Not for a downtown and Midtown visit, where walking, the QLine and the People Mover cover the sights. For Dearborn, the suburbs and day trips, a car makes life much easier.

Can I visit Windsor, Canada, from Detroit?

Yes, easily, through the tunnel or over the bridge, but it is an international border: carry documents both countries accept, such as a passport, and check the official border agency sites before you go.

What food is Detroit known for?

The Coney Island hot dog and Detroit-style square pizza, plus Middle Eastern food in Dearborn, paczki in Hamtramck, Vernors, Faygo and Better Made chips.

Ready to go? Compare flights to Detroit, find a place to stay with our Detroit hotel search, and if Dearborn, Windsor or a road trip is on the list, price a rental car for those days.