Last year’s State of the City was delivered from the heart of a neighborhood church on Dexter Avenue—a deliberate choice that centered the people who never left. This year, Mayor Mike Duggan stood on ground with a different kind of weight: the site of the old Hudson’s department store. Once a symbol of Detroit’s peak, later a marker of its decline, and now—nearly finished—a new tower rising from the scars of the past. But before Duggan spoke, Detroit set the tone.
