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 United States. Located north of Windsor, Ontario, Detroit is the only major U.S. city that looks south to Canada. It was founded on July 24, 1701, by the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. Its name originates from the French word détroit for strait, characterizing its location on the river connecting the Great Lakes.
Known as the world's traditional automotive center, "Detroit" is a metonym for the American automobile industry and an important source of popular music legacies celebrated by the city's two familiar nicknames, the Motor City and Motown. Other nicknames emerged in the twentieth century, including City of Champions beginning in the 1930s for its successes in individual and team sport, Arsenal of Democracy (during World War II), The D, D-Town, Hockeytown (a trademark owned by the city's NHL club, the Red Wings), Rock City (after the Kiss song "Detroit Rock City"), and The 3-1-3 (its telephone area code).
In 2008, Detroit ranked as the United States' eleventh most populous city, with 912,062 residents. At its peak in 1950, the city was the fourth-largest in the USA, but has since seen a major shift in its population to the suburbs.
The name Detroit sometimes refers to the Metro Detroit area, a sprawling region with a population of 4,425,110 for the Metropolitan Statistical Area, making it the nation's eleventh-largest, and a population of 5,354,225 for the nine-county Combined Statistical Area as of the 2008 Census Bureau estimates. The Detroit-Windsor area, a critical commercial link straddling the Canada-U.S. border, has a total population of about 5,700,000. |
