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Motown, its Jazz Roots, and the West Grand Boulevard Empire
Learn more about Detroit and the Motown Sound The story of Motown’s empire on West Grand Boulevard is inseparable from Detroit’s history — its urban planning, its jazz scene, and its entrepreneurial drive. Understanding how the company that became known worldwide as Motown came to be starts with the boulevard and the neighborhood that shaped…
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Catch a Tour in Celebration – Detroit Jazz Festival
The Detroit Jazz Festival is coming on Labor Day weekend, September 4-7, 2026. It’s the largest free jazz festival in the U.S. In celebration of this event, Detroit Legacy Tours is offering special days and times for its jazz-focused Detroit history walking tour, including Sunday morning, September 9 at 9 a.m. and Monday morning, September…
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Discover Detroit’s Forgotten Downtown Architects
Detroit’s Forgotten Downtown Architects and a Walking Tour to Learn More Walk up Griswold Street in Detroit and you’re walking through an open-air museum of early American skyscraper design — the “alphabet buildings,” so named for the light-and-air-maximizing floor plans that traced the shapes of letters long before air conditioning made such techniques unnecessary. Most…
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Exploring Detroit’s Jazz Legacy
Exploring Detroit’s Jazz Legacy How a Midwest auto town became one of the most important cities in American jazz. Detroit rarely gets top billing in the story of American jazz, yet the city was a working laboratory for the music at nearly every turn, from the swing era through bebop and into Motown. Its jazz…
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Griswold Street: The Wall Street of Detroit
Griswold Street: The Wall Street of Detroit How a single downtown street became the financial engine of a Midwest industrial capital, and one of the finest collections of early American skyscrapers. Walk down Griswold Street in downtown Detroit today, and you pass beneath a wall of early twentieth-century skyscrapers, terra cotta cornices, arched windows, and…
