On a recent trip to Detroit, I did the one thing that I would never attempt in New York: I stood on a busy sidewalk and looked up at a skyscraper.

The skyscraper was the First National Building, an attractive 26-story Neoclassical limestone structure near Campus Martius Park in downtown Detroit. To the outside world, Detroit is known less for its architecture than for its revitalization efforts, which are spreading farther into the city from the downtown core. But as someone who likes to dig a bit deeper, I put the building’s address into my phone to see what would appear. Names like Cadillac Place and the General Motors Research Laboratory appeared in my search results, and I sought out the connection.

For much of the early 20th century, Michigan was the industrial capital of the United States. The development of the Ford Model T, regarded as the first affordable automobile, and the images of men building cars on moving assembly lines captured the public imagination. As the automotive industry transformed Detroit’s economy, the city’s population grew, increasing from roughly 285,000 residents in 1900 to more than 1.6 million residents by 1940.