Grand Circus Park, this green half-circle, joins Detroit's theatre district to its financial core. Grand Circus Park was laid out in 1850 as part of Judge Woodward's radiating city plan, a semicircular park split into two halves by Woodward Avenue, the formal hinge between downtown and the avenues running north. Around its rim rose grand early-twentieth-century buildings, hotels, office towers, and the great movie palaces of the 1920s, when this was the glittering center of the city's nightlife.
The park holds memorials and fountains honoring two former mayors, and its broad lawns have hosted rallies and celebrations for more than a century and a half. After decades of decline, the surrounding theatres and towers have been steadily revived. Stand in the curve of the park and look outward at the ring of historic facades, then up Woodward, and you can read the city's whole arc, from a frontier surveyor's drawing to a jazz-age boulevard of marquees.