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Detroit
The Motor City, on the strait between two lakes
Detroit stands on the Detroit River — actually a strait, as its French name says — that connects Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, part of the chain linking the upper and lower Great Lakes. Founded by the French in 1701, the strait made it a strategic fur-trading and military post and, later, a shipping point for ore, grain, and lumber moving through the lakes. It is one of the few major U.S. cities that looks south across the water to Canada.
That position on the lakes, with cheap water transport for raw materials, helped make Detroit the cradle of the American automobile industry in the early 1900s — the "Motor City" — and one of the country's great industrial centers. The surrounding land is the flat lake plain of southeastern Michigan. The city anchors a metro of more than four million on the Great Lakes.