The Detroit River is not a river at all. Hydrologists classify it as a strait — a 24-mile connecting channel carrying Lake St. Clair down into Lake Erie, moving roughly 188,000 cubic feet of water every second. The French who arrived in 1701 named it plainly: le détroit, the strait.
The city took its name from the water, not the other way around.
For three centuries that current dictated everything. Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac chose the narrows for their defensibility. British and American gunboats contested them through 1812. By the 1920s the same channel had become the busiest commercial waterway on earth, carrying more tonnage annually than the Suez and Panama canals combined, while Prohibition rum-runners crossed the three-quarter-mile gap to Windsor in rowboats and, in winter, on foot across the ice. Ore boats still pass, 1,000 feet long, riding low toward the Rouge steel works.
A detroit river boat dinner cruise threads directly through that history. The route slides beneath the Ambassador Bridge, a 1929 suspension span that held the world's longest-span record for two years, and past Belle Isle, the 982-acre island park laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1883. The Renaissance Center rises from the north bank in seven cylinders of dark glass, its central tower reaching 727 feet. To the south sits Windsor, Ontario — the only place in North America where a traveler looks due south from the United States into Canada.
The modern excursion fleet works from the foot of Hart Plaza, where the Detroit Princess Riverboat berths at 1 Civic Center Drive. The vessel is a four-deck former Mississippi gaming boat, rebuilt for dining service and moored where the Savoyard Creek once emptied into the strait. Windows on the enclosed decks give an uninterrupted sightline across the international boundary; open promenades above catch the west wind that arrives off Lake St. Clair each evening.
What distinguishes the Detroit riverfront cruise tour today is restoration. Fifty years of industrial retreat left the shoreline in ruin. The RiverWalk, begun in 2003 and now running 3.5 miles from Gabriel Richard Park toward the bridge, reversed that. Herons returned. Sturgeon spawn again near Zug Island. Sunset sailings and detroit river boat dinner cruise tours now cross water that once carried the entire industrial output of a continent, and they cross it slowly, in the direction the current has always run.
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