Welcome To Detroit SAFeDATA

In 2007, Detroit ranked as the US` eleventh most thickly settled city, with 918,849 residents. At its peak, the city was the fourth largest in the country, but it has steadily declined in populus since the 1960s. The name Detroit sometimes refers to the Metro Detroit area, a sprawling region with a populus of 4,468,966 for the Metropolitan Statistical Area and a populus of 5,410,014 for the nine-county Combined Statistical Area as of the 2006 Census Bureau estimates. The Windsor-Detroit area, a critical commercial link straddling the Canada-U.S. border, has a total populus of about 5,900,000.

Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the seat of Wayne County. Detroit is a major port city on the Detroit River, in the Midwest region of the US. Located N of Windsor, Ontario Detroit is a geographical oddity as it is the only U.S. city that looks south to Canada. It was founded in 1701 by the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.

The city name comes from the Detroit River (in French le détroit du Lac Erie), meaning "the strait of Lake Erie," linking Lake Huron and Lake Erie, in the historical context the strait included Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River. Traveling up the Detroit River on the ship Le Griffon (owned by La Salle), Father Louis Hennepin noted the N bank of the river as an ideal location for a settlement. There, in 1701, the French officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded a settlement called Fort Détroit, naming it after the comte de Pontchartrain, Minister of Marine under Louis XIV. Francois Marie Picoté, sieur de Belestre (Montreal 1719–1793) was the last French military commander at Fort Detroit (1758–1760), surrendering the fort on Nov 29, 1760 to the British.

Detroit`s many Gilded Age mansions and buildings arose during the late 1800s. The city was referred to as the "Paris of the West" for its architecture, and for Washington Boulevard, recently electrified by Thomas Edison. Strategically located along the Great Lakes waterway, Detroit emerged as a transportation hub. The city had grown steadily from the 1830s with the rise of shipping, shipbuilding, and manufacturing industries. In 1896, a thriving carriage trade prompted Henry Ford to build his first automobile in a rented workshop on Mack Avenue, and in 1904, the Ford Motor Company was founded. Ford`s manufacturing — and those of automotive pioneers William C. Durant, the Dodge brothers, and Walter Chrysler—reinforced Detroit`s status as the world`s automotive capital; it also served to encourage truck manufacturers such as Rapid and Grabowsky. The industry furthered the city`s spectacular growth during the first half of the twentieth century as it drew many new residents, particularly workers from the Southern US. Strained racial relations were evident in the trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black Detroit physician acquitted of murder after he shot into a large mob when he moved from the all-black part of the city to an all-white area. With the introduction of prohibition, the river was a major conduit for Canadian spirits, organized in large part by the notorious Purple Gang.Cass Ave. at Amsterdam St.

Labor strife climaxed in the 1930s when the United Auto Workers became involved in bitter disputes with Detroit`s auto manufacturers. The labor activism of those years brought notoriety to union leaders such as Jimmy Hoffa and Walter Reuther. The 1940s saw the construction of the world`s first citified depressed freeway, the Davison and the industrial growth during WW2 that led to Detroit`s nickname as the Arsenal of Democracy. The city faced major challenges during the war as tens of thousands of workers migrated to the city to work in the war industries. Many of these migrant workers were blacks and whites from the U.S. south. Housing was difficult to find. The "color blind" promotion policies of the auto plants resulted in racial tension that erupted into a full-scale riot in 1943.

The gasoline cgoes up of 1973 and 1979 shook the U.S. auto industry as small cars from overseas makers made inroads into the traditional dominance of the domestic automakers. High-paying manufacturing jobs became scarce. Acute heroin and crack cocaine use afflicted the city with the influence of Butch Jones, Maserati Rick, and the Chambers Brothers. Drug-related violence and property crimes rose, and many left homes were demolished as they had become havens for drug dealers. Sizable tracts have reverted to a form of citified prairie with wild animals spotted migrating into the city. "Renaissance" has been a perennial buzzword among city leaders since the Twelfth Street riot and was reinforced by the construction of the Renaissance Center in the late 1970s. This complex of skyscrapers, designed as a "city inside a city," slowed but was unable to reverse the trend of businesses leaving the city`s Downtown until the 90`s.