Motown Museum

Here’s the thing about Hitsville U.S.A.: it’s a two-story house on West Grand Boulevard with a hand-painted sign, and inside it Berry Gordy built a record label that rewired American popular music. Studio A — the actual room where the Funk Brothers cut the basslines you know by heart — is still in there.

You can’t get into it right now. Guided tours paused in January 2026 while the museum finishes a $75 million expansion, and the doors don’t reopen until spring 2027. We’re listing it anyway, because it’s the anchor of the whole Motown story and because the campus hasn’t gone dark. The Motown Museum Campus Store is open regular hours, which explains the people out front holding shopping bags. And through September 27 there’s a real exhibit running at the Esther Gordy Edwards Centre for Excellence — Psychedelic Soul, covering the 1967-75 stretch when producer Norman Whitfield pushed the label past love songs into harder, stranger, more political territory.

So: not the full pilgrimage yet. But if you’re already tracing the map — the Berry Gordy house, the Smokey Robinson childhood home — the boulevard is worth the drive, and 2027 is worth the wait.