If you must know, I stayed at the Hollywood Casino Hotel in Greektown. I don’t know why it has the “Hollywood” name; I never noticed any connections with Hollywood. “Greektown”, on the other hand, is a small neighborhood that was settled by Greek immigrants in the early 1900s (after the Germans who arrived in the early 1800s moved out). It’s a very small neighborhood – maybe four blocks, at most – but there’s a very high concentration of Greek restaurants and bars. And not your basic “Hellenic” diner places; these are real honest-to-Zeus Greek restaurants. Don’t let the tourist propaganda fool you – if there’s no festival or event happening, the place is fairly ordinary.

It does happen to be rather centrally located in “downtown” Detroit, within easy walking distance of a lot of attractions.

The view from my hotel room window. Note that I’m too lazy to make a proper panoramic image.

And the place where everyone goes to party on the weekend nights…..

Detroit itself is laid out on an odd plan. The first city went with streets radiating from a town square – then a major fire at the beginning of the 19^th century wiped the place out (all those wooden buildings….). The city fathers decided to keep those main roads, but slap a grid pattern on top of it. When the interstates came around, “slum clearance” plowed a bunch of highways on loops and rectangles in the city proper. It makes getting around rather messy; especially when there’s not much in the way of mass transit.

Yes, there are buses. But from what I saw, they aren’t on frequent schedules. I suppose the locals have things figured out to their satisfaction.

Visitors can make use of two rail options.

The “People Mover” is an elevated train that makes a loop around downtown. Technically, it’s NOT a monorail, but it functions as one. A single track, with automated trains running in one direction. Worth noting is that each “station” is decorated in a different style by a different artist. Also worth noting is that many of the stations are hard to access from street level – they are often entered through buildings, and there’s little in the way of signage directing you to the actual entrance. Normally, the fare is 75 cents – it was free during my visit. I suppose it’s worthwhile for zipping around Downtown; provided you are going in the same direction that it is.

The other rail option is the “Q Line” (link 1, link 2), a streetcar that runs along Woodward Avenue.

That will bring you to pretty much everything you might want to get to that the People Mover misses – sports and concert venues, museums, theaters…. It’s about as run down as any other major city’s mass transit rail line: the on-board station information often gets stuck; things like that. Like the People Mover, it was free while I was there. I suspect it was due to some corporate sponsorship, since each of the station announcements included a company name: “This is. Mack Street. Brought to you by. Chevrolet.”

Let’s hope this sort of thing doesn’t spread. Lower fares are nice, but we’re bombarded with enough advertising already.