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Since 1886, Detroit’s oldest institution, Ste. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church (founded in 1701), has been located at the corner of nineteenth (Ste. Anne’s) Street and Howard.

Up through September 27, 1999 Tiger Stadium hosted crowds for major league baseball games, serving as home field for the Detroit Tigers. Located at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, this classic ballpark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has long stood as a symbol of stability in a city that felt so keenly the major social, political, and economic upheavals of twentieth century life.

Located at the foot of West Grand Boulevard, Riverside Park is a narrow green rectangle along an industrial southwest Detroit waterfront. Michael Lauchlan uses it as the name of one poem, and it is the unnamed setting for Mary Minock' s poem "Down by the Boulevard Dock."

Nestled between Gratiot, Mack, and the I-75 Interchange, Detroit’s Eastern Market has been a tradition for the past 160 years. Buyers from miles around gather to buy produce, meat, spices, spring flowers, Halloween pumpkins, and Christmas trees. Farmers holler out prices, chiming in chorus at times with street musicians who settle under the shelters. It is a place alive with a diverse crowd of people, from recent immigrants to longtime Detroiters.

The largest solid waste incinerator in the United States, the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Facility incinerator burns an estimated 2800 tons of commercial and household waste each day. Built in 1986 during Mayor Coleman A. Young's tenure, it has had a troubled financial and political history which is captured in Ron Allen's poem, "Incinerator."

Lawrence Joseph has written of his "fascination with place" and of the "limitless-and extraordinary" material he finds for his poetry in Detroit, a place, he says, that insists that he examine his own life in the context of larger historical, cultural, and economic forces ("Our Lives" 297). In his poetry, the family grocery store, run first by his grandfather and then by his father and uncle, often functions as a focal point for this examination.

Durfee Middle School Situated on the curve of Collingwood at LaSalle on Detroit’s west side, Durfee Intermediate School (now Durfee K-8) was built in 1927 and originally served a working class population, including the children of European immigrants and a sizable number of Jewish students.

Second Baptist Church of Detroit, the oldest African-American church in Michigan, was organized in 1836. It is located at 441 Monroe Street, east of the intersection of Gratiot and Woodward Avenues, within the Greektown Historic District, which encompasses part of what was once called Paradise Valley or Blackbottom, the home, until the 1940s, of most of Detroit's black population.

Long-time Detroiters refer to the old African-American districts of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom as if they were interchangeable, but the terms actually refer to two different inner east-side areas sharing the border of Gratiot Avenue. Black Bottom, proceeding south from Gratiot as far as the Detroit River, was the older of the two.

State Street and Woodward Avenue in Downtown Detroit in the nineteen-twenties was one of the busiest intersections in the nation ("Exhibits"). Situated at that crossroads, the J.L. Hudson's Department Store, the grand old dame of Detroit retail, reigned over the heart of the city. According to the Detroit Historical Museums and Society website, in 1881, Joseph Lowthian Hudson opened a haberdashery in the Detroit Opera House, and the business grew with the city, eventually occupying the twenty-five story building on Woodward, employing twelve thousand people, serving over one hundred thousand shoppers daily, and frequently doing over $1 million worth of business in a single day ("Exhibits").

The impact of industry on the psyche of Detroit writers has yielded vivid images of factory life. The Chevy Gear and Axle plant contributed to this phenomenon. Built in 1919, the factory was located at 1840 Holbrook, in Hamtramck. Over the century, the factory evolved, remaining a General Motors property until its sale in 1994 to American Axle and Manufacturing.

At the corner of Michigan Avenue and 18th Street stands a structure that attests to rise and ruin in Detroit. Michigan Central Station, built in 1913, was the vision of architects Whitney Warren and Charles Whetmore. Once a flourishing hub, the station stands abandoned to elements of nature and humanity.

Since its construction, the Ford Motor Company's Rouge River complex in Dearborn has been seen as a sign of changing economic and social conditions in the city, region, and nation. Whether regarded as a powerful sign of American industrial growth, as the battleground between labor and management, as a symbol of U.S. wartime strength, or as a reminder of Rust Belt decline, the Rouge always stands for something larger even than itself. In the twenties and thirties, the Rouge was a self-contained mid-sized city, employing over 100,000 people. Today, it employs roughly 6,000 ("History"). The decentralization beginning after World War II resulted in a drastic reduction in automobile production at the Rouge, but in that time it has generated plenty of poetry, fiction, art, photography, and film.

After the fire of 1805, Augustus Breevort Woodward, for whom Woodward Avenue is named, developed a plan to rebuild and restore Detroit. According to Perry L. Norton, Woodward's plan for Detroit grew out of previous designs for Washington, the Nation's capital, and Versailles, a "geometric design based on equilateral triangles culminating in the intersection of 12 streets, a confluence which Woodward called the Grand Circus" (160). Norton says that Woodward's plan eventually "closed in on itself, limited in dynamics by an unending series of Grand Circuses indistinguishable from the other" (165).