Named for County Cork in Ireland, Corktown is Detroit's oldest surviving neighborhood, and you're at its heart. When famine drove hundreds of thousands from Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s, many landed here, west of downtown, and Most Holy Trinity became their spiritual anchor. This Gothic Revival church, with its soaring central spire, was completed in 1866 to replace an earlier wooden chapel, serving a parish of Irish laborers who dug canals, built railroads, and worked the docks.
The parish ran one of the city's first free schools and tended the sick through cholera epidemics. As Irish families prospered and moved on, the church welcomed wave after wave of newcomers, and it still serves the neighborhood today. Look at the brick and stone of the surrounding streets, some of the oldest in the city, and notice how the modest worker cottages sit in the long shadow of that single pointed tower.