One of the world's largest corporations once ran its empire from the building in front of you, now called Cadillac Place. Completed in 1923 and designed by Albert Kahn, this was the General Motors Building, the company's world headquarters for some seventy-five years. Its long neoclassical facade stretches an entire block on West Grand Boulevard, four wings of offices for the executives and engineers who shaped the modern automobile industry from here.
It was here that GM developed the practices that defined twentieth-century corporate America: annual model changes, installment buying, a brand for every income, decisions that reordered how the whole country lived and drove. When GM moved its headquarters downtown to the Renaissance Center in the 1990s, the state of Michigan took over the building and renamed it Cadillac Place. Picture the sheer length of the colonnaded facade, and consider that the rhythms of American driving, the new car every autumn, were largely dreamed up behind these windows.