The Apex Bar

This modest building on Oakland Avenue, up in the North End — the northern reach of the old Hastings Street entertainment district — is where John Lee Hooker played his first Detroit gig back in the 1940s. He held down a long residency here, always arriving late, and a bartender’s nightly ribbing about it — some version of “Boom boom, you’re late again” — handed him the hook for one of his most famous songs. That’s a real Detroit-blues origin story, standing right there on the street, a short hop from the vanished Hastings Street district it once belonged to.

Be clear on what you’ll find, though: the Apex ran for decades as a beloved neighborhood bar (and, under longtime owner Marvelous Persell, reputedly the cleanest in the city), but it closed after her death in 2014. A nonprofit bought it in 2017 hoping to revive it as a cultural landmark; for now it’s a standing, shuttered piece of blues history, best appreciated from the sidewalk. On our list.