Detroit is America's motor city. It was the first city in the US to have a paved road (1909), the first to sport traffic lights (1915) and the first to have a modern highway (1945). It's the corporate and historical home of the Big Three car makers - Ford, GM and Chrysler - not to mention numerous other less resilient brands they've long carved up between them.
These companies are not only the powerhouses of the global motor industry, they also represent the heart of America's economy and the epitome of capitalism. Henry Ford, a farmer from just up the road in Dearborn, was the man who put America on wheels, so you'd expect the birthplace of the modern automotive age to be a fancy, towering celebration of American excess. But Detroit is anything but. In fact, it's one of the grimmest places you're ever likely to set foot in.
Detroit may have been the first US city to have a proper road, but it hasn't been resurfaced since. Downtown Detroit is grey, oppressive and dirty, more like what you'd expect in the old East Germany than glitzy, 21st-century America.
Located on Lake Erie, Motor City has long and bitter winters which only compound the run-down, neglected look of the place. Its streets abound with homeless people and hustlers trying to wrangle a buck by flogging dubious jewellery or "helping" you park.
In the mid-1800s, Detroit was a refuge for abolitionists and black slaves fleeing the southern states, many trying to make it to Canada just across the river. These new arrivals brought with them jazz and blues music, which, over time, evolved into the unique Motown sound that still influences music today. That made it one of the few places a black person could make it big in a country still very much racially divided in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The emergence of a prominent and influential black society in Detroit had businesses fleeing to the suburbs, where many remain to this day. Indeed, Detroit was a racial flashpoint - tensions erupted into race riots in 1967.
The recession of the early 1970s, corporate corruption, shoddy products and the explosion in popularity of imported vehicles led to widespread unemployment, with black men once again feeling the brunt. Detroit - and the American car industry - is showing modest signs of improvement lately, but it's not the industrial giant it once was.
Car building in the US has been farmed out to Alabama or Texas, or over the border to Mexico, designers prefer to live in California and many import distributors base themselves in nicer locales such as San Diego or Atlanta. Unfortunately, they can't have the Detroit Auto Show anywhere else but here, so it's back to its murky greyness again in 2006 I'm afraid.