In Motown, Stop in the Name of Hope

When Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan priest, first visited the area now called Detroit with French explorers in 1679, the lush landscape inspired him to write that "Nature alone could not have made, without help of Art, so charming a prospect."

Settlers, led by a man named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, agreed, turning the region into a French outpost and major fur trading port. In the early 19th century, Detroit's leaders chose to model the city's streets after Pierre L'Enfant's hub-and-spoke design for Washington. By the turn of the century, Henry Ford had built his first automobile, setting in motion a revolution that would alter the lives of people everywhere and turn Detroit into a world-class city with a rocketing economy.

For a while.

In 1950, Detroit had a population of 1.84 million; today, fewer than 834,000 people live in the city. The number of autoworkers in the area has been halved in the past 30 years, contributing to its 7.9 percent unemployment rate in April. The comparable national rate that month was 4.8 percent. Along with that violence rate (1,251 crimes annually for every 100,000 citizens), Detroit carries the weight of 135 Superfund sites.

Forbes didn't feign the city's anguish.

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After decent omelets at the Brooklyn Street Grill, we hustled up the city's main artery, Woodward Avenue, toward the Motown Historical Museum.

Which we missed. Which is easy to do, because it's really just a house (okay, a cluster of houses) with a second-story sign declaring the place "Hitsville U.S.A."

It's the right name for the place. The Commodores, the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson. "My Girl," "Baby Love," "Just My Imagination," "You Can't Hurry Love" and on and on. In less than a decade, so much of that greatness came through these walls, Berry Gordy's factory of singing sensations. Here's the desk where Diana Ross worked as a secretary to support her singing career. The basement recording studio where the Temptations practiced their moves. The square echo chamber cut into a second-story ceiling to generate perfect vocal reverberations.

"Can I get a volunteer?" asked our guide, who led the 50-minute tour with all the panache Gordy would expect of a performer being groomed for the spotlight. And when one brave lady stepped under the hole and belted it out -- " Ain't no mountain high enough . . ." -- the room seemed to quake.

"The teenagers were just ready for it," a disc jockey from the era recalled in a documentary on Motown shown at the end of the tour. The first time she'd heard the music, she walked away with a singular assessment: "This," she said, "was happy singing."