Detroit

Only contiguous US city facing south to Canada

Detroit is the one major American city where you look south to see Canada. The river bends so that Windsor, Ontario sits directly across the water below the city rather than above it — a geographic quirk that made this the busiest smuggling corridor of Prohibition, when an estimated three-quarters of the liquor entering the United States crossed here. The auto industry built everything else. Ford, GM, and Chrysler turned the city into the arsenal of democracy and the birthplace of the American middle class. Its cultural exports run deeper than cars: Motown Records, the MC5, and a Belleville basement where a few Black teenagers invented techno in the early 1980s. Decades of decline hollowed out whole neighborhoods, but the comeback is real — a rebuilt downtown and one of the largest collections of public murals in the country.