They have a saying down here, in southern Michigan: “Nothing stops Detroit.” It’s a good moniker for the city. Beaten down, bankrupt, riddled with crime, Detroit was, for many years, the butt of a joke. Not any more. Recently voted by Lonely Planet as one of the hottest cities to visit in 2018, Detroit has transformed itself, and its image, into the epitome of urban entrepreneurship and resurgent city cool.

It’s a good time to visit, too. New low-cost flights launching this April, from Wow Air, will make reaching the Motor City more affordable than ever before. Cool boutique hotels are opening by the dozen – including the Foundation, where I stayed, a gorgeous former fire station converted to a hip hangout (no fire poles to breakfast though, sadly). The food and cocktail scene is exploding – a new restaurant, bar or cafe has opened every week for the past three years. And, this being Detroit – the birthplace of Motown, techno and garage – the music has never left. If you’re looking for an alternative US city break, something fresher and more affordable than the usual Chicago, New York scene, then forget the ghosts of its past and embrace the spirit of its future. They call it “America’s comeback city” but the truth is Detroit is happening right now.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rooms for growth … the Foundation, just one of many new boutique hotels to have opened recently.

I started downtown. In the first half of the 20th century, Detroit was the car-manufacturing capital of America. “We had more money than God,” my guide, local die-hard Detroiter Jeanette Pierce, said – and an echo of those glory days still remains. Detroit is an art-deco masterpiece: there’s the Guardian Building, with its vaulted ceilings hand-painted in bright Aztec patterns; and the Fisher Building, with 30 storeys wrapped entirely in marble like a caricature of capitalism.

Detroit has the second-largest theatre district in America after Broadway, and an art museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, where you’ll find Monets, Van Goghs and Picassos. An exquisite Diego Rivera mural graces the Rivera Court, once dubbed “America’s Sistine Chapel” – except here only the gods of manufacturing are honoured: giant iron machinery, men on the assembly line and a solitary red, shining car in the corner.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Riding high … skateboarders inside the Fisher Building in Detroit. Photograph: Alamy

But that infallible surge of American idealism wasn’t to last. As the car giants automated, or moved jobs elsewhere, the city, quite literally, turned to ruin. Skyscrapers and factories, those former bastions of prosperity, slowly hollowed out from within: we passed the Fisher plant where Cadillacs were once made, now riddled with vandalism; and the once-magnificent Michigan Central Station, with broken windows like open wounds. It was like seeing the American dream in reverse: the withered skin of wealth left to rot, as the march to progress marched out of town.

But in catastrophe, there is opportunity. The city’s motto (surely, one of the greatest premonitions of all time) is: “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes” – and rising it is. I browsed a shop selling guitars made by hand using wood from demolished buildings (Wallace Detroit Guitars) and another that transformed decrepit graffiti into jewellery (Rebel Nell); I stopped in the trendy new fashion boutique, Detroit Is The New Black; got drunk with people from local arts and urbanism mag Grand Circus (set up to showcase Detroit’s blossoming creative scene); and explored the Aladdin’s cave of locally made curios in City Bird and the Ponyride Market. Home-grown brands, and fresh new craftspeople and artists seemed to be springing up everywhere, like flowers growing in the cracks of a broken pavement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Good vibrations … Wallace Detroit Guitars, which uses wood from demolished buildings in its handmade guitars

Far from the downtrodden wasteland so often depicted, the city felt optimistic and determined to prove the world wrong. And because it’s being driven by small, creative business rather than big commercial stores, it was authentic and original, too – a garden of unique treasures rather than a homogenised mass of chains.

Then there’s the music. Detroit is the birthplace of Motown (an abbreviation of the city’s nickname, Motor Town) and you can’t come here without visiting the studio (now the Motown Museum) where it all began: the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops and more got their start in this unassuming two-up, two-down residential home they called “Hitsville USA”. I toured its gallery of old photographs and gold records, saw the piano where they perfected those iconic harmonies and ended up in the basement recording room, untouched since the doors closed in 1972, stacks of master tapes, huge analogue equipment and the microphone where Marvin Gaye sang What’s Going On: sorrow and pain in every lyric, but hope and spirit, too – just like Detroit.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Motown Museum. Photograph: Alamy

But, in the end, this city is about having fun. So, on my last night, I decided to go big. I started in Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the oldest jazz club in the world – established in 1933, graced by Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald. After that, I had one of the best meals of my life in Grey Ghost: posh wagyu beef with the ghosts of derelict mansions all around. Later, I wound up in what is surely the coolest drinking den in the world: Bad Luck. Down a dark dirty alley, with no sign on the door, it’s the kind of place that makes the hairs bristle on the back of your neck, though it is gorgeous inside with speakeasy-style decor. It also serves the smoothest, most elaborate cocktails you’ll ever drink. Try Mysticism, served in an elaborate puff of smoke, like a magician’s trick.

But I wasn’t done yet. Detroit has another musical child: techno was born here in the 1980s, when illegal raves were thrown in abandoned factories. “It was an audio assault,” Sam Fotias, a pioneer of the genre, told me. “It was almost like you were in a cathedral.” Music from the ruins: there is, perhaps, no better metaphor for the city.

I finished the night old-school style: in a blacked-out room with lasers, dancing into the dawn. And, yes, for those of you who remember the Fedde Le Grand hit of 2006, I did put my hands up for Detroit. And, yes, I do love this city. Nothing stops it.

Way to go

Wow Air has return flights from London to Detroit via Reykjavik from £350. Doubles at the Detroit Foundation hotel cost from $219. For a free tour of the city, visit detroitexperiencefactory.org. Entry to the Motown Museum costs $15. More information at visitdetroit.com