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Detroit is Famous for Cars

Mention MICHIGAN and most people think of cars, heavy industry and inner-city Detroit. Midwesterners prefer to focus on its magnificent scenery. The beaches, dunes and cliffs along the Long shoreline of its two vividly contrasting peninsulas - bordering four of the five Great Lakes - rival many an oceanfront state.
Lake Michigan shore drive passes through likeable little ports before reaching the stunning Sleeping Bear Dunes and resort towns such as Traverse City in the peninsula's balmy northwest corner. The desolate, dramatic and thinly popu lated Upper Peninsula.

Although its population just tops 100,000, ANN ARBOR , 45 minutes' drive west of Detroit along I-94, offers a greater choice of restaurants, live music venues and cultural activities than most towns ten times its size. The University of Michigan has shaped the economy and character of the town ever since it was moved here from Detroit in 1837, providing the city with a very conspicuous radical edge.

Much the best thing to do in Ann Arbor is to stroll round downtown and the campus, which meet at South State and Liberty streets. Downtown's twelve blocks of brightly painted shops and sidewalk cafés offer all you would expect from a college town, with forty bookshops and more than a dozen record stores. Don't miss the huge flagship store of Border's Books at 612 E Liberty St or Encore Recordings, 417 E Liberty St (tel 313/994-8031).

Though the huge university campus doesn't look particularly appealing, it does emanate a sense of excitement, especially around the central meeting place of the Diag . Worth a look are the Museum of Natural History , 1109 Geddes Ave (Mon-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; free), packed with huge dinosaur skeletons, rare Native American artifacts and a planetarium, and the small but eclectic Museum of Art , 525 S State St

DETROIT , the birthplace of the mass-production car industry and the Motown sound, has long had an image problem. It boasts a billion-dollar downtown development, ultramodern motor-manufacturing plants, some excellent museums and one of the nation's biggest art galleries. But since the 1960s, media attention has dwelt instead on its huge tracts of urban wasteland, where for block after block there's nothing but the occasional heavily fortified loan shop or food store. Although cities like Atlanta, Newark and Washington, DC post much worse crime statistics, the press has seemed intent on painting Detroit as some kind of war zone.

Such views incur the wrath of many Detroiters, who claim that the press has magnified the city's problems because blacks run Detroit and account for 75 percent of its population. That assertion certainly carries weight, but Detroit - which has lost nearly half its citizens, almost a million people, in forty years - has unarguably suffered. However, following the resurgence of Cleveland, Pittsburgh and other Rust Belt cities, Detroit, under the leadership of Mayor Dennis Archer, showed signs of turning the corner. The Detroit Tigers opened Comerica Park, and Ford Field was opened in August 2002 for the pro football Lions. Three big-time casinos opened and plans are afoot to enhance the waterfront. While these developments won't wipe out the city's problems in one fell swoop, they're an exciting start.

Founded in 1701 by Antoine de Mothe Cadillac , as a trading post for the French to do business with the Chippewa, Detroit was no more than a medium-sized port two hundred years later. Then FordOlds , the Chevrolets and the Dodge brothers began to build their automobile empires. Thanks to the introduction of the mass assembly line, Detroit sped into high gear in the 1920s, expanding into the countryside and booming like a mining town - fast, compulsive and indifferent to the needs of its population. The auto barons sponsored the construction of segregated neighborhoods and unceremoniously dispensed with workers during times of low demand. Such policies created huge ghettos, and the city came to a boil in July 1967 in the bloodiest riot in the USA for fifty years. More than forty people died and 1300 buildings were destroyed. Nothing was solved, and little even improved. The inner city was left to fend for itself, and the all-important motor industry was rocked by the oil crises and Japanese competition.

Between Ann Arbor and the Lake Michigan coast there's not a whole lot worth stopping for, though Kellogg's new Cereal City USA , 171 W Michigan Ave (tel 616/962-6230), in Battle Creek is a fun diversion that traces the history of cereal - and of course, magnate Kellogg's impact on it (summer Mon-Fri 9.30am-5pm, Sat 9.30am-6pm, Sun 11am-5pm; call for winter hours; $7.95). Further west, St Joseph is just the first of many small ports on the 350-mile trip north along Lake Michigan's eastern shore, the northwest reaches of the peninsula attracting sportspeople and tourists from all over the Midwest. Within striking distance of Traverse City are the beautiful Sleeping Bear Dunes and the charming towns of Charlevoix and Petoskey . At the northern tip, a revitalized Mackinaw City is the departure point for the state's major tour-bus attraction, old-world Mackinac Island .

Upper Peninsula , separated from the rest of the state by the Mackinac Straits , to be part of Wisconsin. However, when Michigan entered the Union in 1837 (eleven years before Wisconsin), its legislators, keen to tap the peninsula's huge mineral wealth, incorporated it into their new state.

Before then the UP, as it's commonly known, figured prominently in French plans to create an empire in North America. Father Jacques Marquette and other missionaries made peace with the native people and established settlements, including the port of Sault Ste Marie in 1688. The French hoped to press further south, but before they could get much past Detroit, the British inflicted a severe military defeat in 1763.

Vast, lonesome and wild, the Upper Peninsula is full of stunning landmarks, exemplified by the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore . Most of the eastern section is marked by low-lying, sometimes swampy land in between softly undulating limestone hills. The northwest corner is the most desolate, especially the rough and broken Keewanaw Peninsula , and Isle Royale National Park fifty miles offshore. The UP's only real city is Marquette , a college town with a quiet buzz - a good base from which to explore the UP's rugged terrain. Until 1957 you could get to the UP from lower Michigan only by ferry. Today, the five-mile Mackinac Bridge ($1.50 toll), lit up beautifully at night, stretches elegantly across the bottleneck Straits of Mackinac.