Romulus: the township that grew Michigan's busiest airport

Everyone who flies into Detroit lands in Romulus, though hardly anyone notices the name on the way to baggage claim. The airport’s full title spells it out — Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport — but the world just calls it Metro, or by its code, DTW.

It started on a square mile of farmland near Middlebelt and Wick roads. The county had been hunting for a western airfield through the late 1920s, bought the land, and dedicated Wayne County Airport on September 4, 1930. In the war years it flew military duty. After that came decades of the county adding runways and terminals every time air travel jumped again, which it kept doing.

The leap people actually remember came in 2002, when the McNamara Terminal opened — named for Edward McNamara, the longtime county executive. Its main concourse runs the better part of a mile end to end, long enough that there’s a little underground tram to carry you between the far gates. Between the two halves of that tunnel is the part kids press their faces to the glass for: a long stretch of color-shifting light set to music, the one piece of an airport nobody’s ever in a hurry to leave.

Metro now handles many times the traffic of the next-busiest field in the state, Grand Rapids — not close. And the township grew up around it to match: hotels, freight terminals, cargo warehouses, all the jobs that orbit a place where a couple of farm fields turned into the front door of Michigan.