Category: Detroit

I’m in the middle of reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I’m at the chapter where he moves to Detroit after converting to the Nation of Islam.

Malcolm mentions the NOI’s Temple No #1, citing an address on Frederick St. That wasn’t the Temple’s first address, nor was it the final one. Temple Number 1 now stands at 11529 Linwood Street, in Detroit’s Dexter Linwood neighborhood. Although it’s formally known as Temple Number 1, it is also referred to as Masjid Wali Muhammad [1]. 

Contrary to popular perception, Detroit is great place to bike. The city’s roadways are engineered for traffic three times larger than the current population, so there are plenty of wide roadways with few cars. Because Detroit follows a grid, there are also plenty of parallel neighborhood streets that can be used to avoid busy roads. On top of that, the city has been investing in protected bike infrastructure, and is beginning construction on the Joe Louis Greenway, a 27.5 mile biking and walking trail.

You can combine roads with protected bike infrastructure and roads that are naturally ideal for cycling (wide road with little traffic) to produce long routes that are low stress. These routes aren’t often marked on maps, and are usually learned through experience. To make it easier for new cyclists, I’m going to outline one of those routes, which connects downtown Detroit to Ferndale. I call it the Cass / Hamilton / Livernois bike corridor, or the Hamilton Bikeway for short.