It reads like the tale of the Titanic times a factor of at least a dozen. Freighters thought invulnerable to the weather cracked in two. Hundreds of sailors drowned. Sad farewell messages tucked inside glass bottles washed up on Lake Superior beaches. The “White Hurricane,” a cataclysmic storm which pounded Michigan 100 years ago this week, was quite simply the biggest, deadliest natural…
Long before Motown put Detroit music on the map, country was king in the Motor City. So say the guys behind a new book about Detroit’s long-forgotten country music heritage. From the “barn dances” where autoworkers cut loose after work, to the city’s strip clubs…
Richard Bingham talks about the summer he spent building the Mackinac Bridge.
My friend’s dad had a home in St. Ignace, and the family had a cottage in the Les Cheneaux Islands, east of the Straits. And Paul, my friend, said that I should come up there and look for work…
In all the photography that’s come out of Detroit in the past few years, we’ve yet to find someone like photographer Dave Jordano. Born in 1948 into what he calls the typical “GM family,” Dave was a suburban kid who cut his teeth shooting streetlife in Detroit in the…
I can pinpoint the exact moment Michigan’s gravitational pull officially reeled us back into orbit. We were lounging on a hotel room bed during a post-Thanksgiving getaway to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and for evening entertainment, all we could focus on was hunting down a…
Why I hope to spend More Time Up North by living in Detroit
Growing up as one of the many metro Detroiters who clog up I-75 on summer weekends to get away from the swelter of city life, I developed a serious infatuation with certain places up north. It started with my…
Our return to Michigan is just nine days away, and we’re beyond ready to be home amongst our fellow Midwesterners: people who love things like Big Ten football, who don’t take themselves too seriously, and who actually pronounce R’s at the ends of words (if you hear us…
Last week we started musing about the adage “Midwest is Best,” and asked a handful of friends to let the saying inspire a piece of writing to appear here on Found Michigan. This week we finish up with the essays, with contributions from Portlandia, the Windy City…
A few weeks ago, I signed a one-year lease on a home in Detroit. The signing was a culmination of a long search — of both Craigslist and my soul — to decide where I wanted to plant my roots in Michigan. So, when I put my signature on that piece of paper, I felt relieved.