Only one lighthouse in the United States is made entirely of marble, and you're at its foot. The William Livingstone Memorial Light rises seventy feet in fluted white Georgia marble at the eastern tip of Belle Isle, completed in 1930. It honors William Livingstone, a Detroit shipping magnate and newspaper publisher who spent decades championing improvements to Great Lakes navigation, including the deepening of the channels that let ever-larger ore freighters pass.
The lighthouse was designed by the Hungarian artist Géza Maróti and engineered by Albert Kahn, an unusually elegant monument for a working navigational aid. From here you can watch the long lake freighters, some over a thousand feet, slide down the Detroit River carrying iron ore and grain, the same shipping traffic Livingstone fought to make possible. Walk out to the gleaming white tower at the island's far point and look upstream, where the great boats round the bend, and you'll understand why a city built on water raised a lighthouse in marble.