Troy: Oakland County's biggest city keeps a village in its pocket

Troy is Oakland County’s largest city and metro Detroit’s polished corporate address — the Big Beaver corridor’s glass towers hold headquarters and regional offices by the dozen, and the Somerset Collection is Michigan’s flagship luxury mall, famous for the glass skywalk that ferries shoppers over eight lanes of traffic between its two halves. Add schools that perennially rank among the state’s best and a regular spot on national safest-city lists, and you have the suburb that families across the region measure others against.

What outsiders miss is that Troy keeps its memory on purpose. The Troy Historic Village preserves the crossroads settlement this all grew from — a one-room schoolhouse, an 1830s church, a print shop and general store, staffed with costumed interpreters and mobbed by school groups — and the city’s older corners still hold century farmhouses between the subdivisions. A city of 90,000 that was farmland within living memory, run carefully enough to top quality-of-life lists: that’s the Troy trade, and residents take it.