Hamtramck: a city inside Detroit that keeps reinventing itself

Hamtramck is a whole city you can drive across in five minutes, and you never leave Detroit to do it — Detroit wraps around all two square miles of it. (Highland Park, its smaller neighbor, is landlocked inside Detroit the same way.) It started as German farmland. Then the Dodge Brothers opened their plant here in 1914, and Polish immigrants poured in to work the line, and the place changed for good.

For most of the last century, the streets ran on Polish Catholic time. Parishes on every few blocks, bakeries that sold paczki by the dozen on Fat Tuesday, signs you could read only if you’d grown up speaking the language at the kitchen table. Then Dodge Main shut down in 1980. The neighborhood around the old plant was cleared, and the city started turning over again.

By the 2000s the new arrivals were coming from Yemen, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. In November 2015 Hamtramck made the national papers by electing the first Muslim-majority city council in the country. A few years later every seat on it was held by a Muslim. The call to prayer now carries down the same blocks where church bells used to ring on Sunday morning, and nobody who lives there finds that strange.

It’s a place where you can get pierogi and Yemeni saltah within a block of each other, where a Polish butcher and a halal market keep hours on the same street. Two square miles that have managed to become a national first not once but twice — once for who came to build cars, once for who came after the cars left.