Seven mirrored towers, the Renaissance Center, have defined the Detroit skyline for nearly half a century, and you're at their base on the riverwalk. The Renaissance Center, designed by John Portman and completed in 1977, rose from a campaign led by Henry Ford II to revive a downtown shaken by the 1967 unrest and the flight of business to the suburbs. Its central hotel tower, then the tallest hotel in the world, is ringed by office towers and wrapped around a vast glass atrium.
The complex became General Motors' world headquarters in 1996, and the seven gleaming cylinders have served ever since as the city's signal that it intends to endure. The riverwalk now runs along its base, part of a reborn public waterfront. The very name was a wager: that a city could be born again.
From the river's edge the glass throws the sky back at you, and in that steel you can read the stubborn idea that Detroit's best days were still ahead.