Ford Building

We walked by, snapped a couple of photos, and looked it up on the spot — the reflex this facade demands. The Ford Building is Detroit’s second-oldest skyscraper, opened in 1908 on the corner of Griswold and Congress, and the Free Press called it the city’s “first real skyscraper” at the time — it briefly held the title of Detroit’s tallest. It’s the work of Daniel H. Burnham, the architect of New York’s Flatiron Building and director of works for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, done in his Chicago School style and wrapped in gleaming white terra cotta that still carries its original ornament. The history inside runs deep too: Clarence Darrow kept an office here while defending Dr. Ossian Sweet in 1925, a Sanders counter slung hot fudge sundaes in the lobby for nearly seventy years, and a subterranean tunnel still connects it to the Dime Building, its Burnham-designed sibling across Fort Street.

It anchors the stretch once called the Wall Street of Detroit, with the Penobscot Building right next door and the Guardian Building a block down Griswold — three eras of Detroit ambition on one walkable street, and this one started it all.