Detroit Trivia
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96 free Detroit trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
51 free Detroit trivia questions with answers. Detroit is a city people think they know from headlines, and this quiz is for anyone who wants to know it better. Fifty-one questions cover the French fort Cadillac built in 1701, the fire that gave the city its Latin motto, Henry Ford's assembly line and the five-dollar day, the 1967 uprising, Coleman Young, the 2013 bankruptcy and the grand bargain that saved the art museum. There is plenty of culture too: Berry Gordy's $800 loan and Hitsville U.S.A., the Belleville Three and techno, Aretha, Eminem and the White Stripes, plus the food and drink Detroiters argue about, from the two rival coney islands on Lafayette to Vernors, Faygo and square pizza baked in parts trays. Landmarks include the Renaissance Center, the Guardian Building, the Fox, Belle Isle, the Spirit of Detroit and the Joe Louis fist, and a handful of questions cover the Lions, Tigers, Red Wings and Pistons. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other primary references, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up, so you can trust the ones you miss.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which French explorer founded Detroit in 1701 by building Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit?
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Detroit in 1701 by building Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit; the Cadillac car brand, created in 1902, took his name and his coat of arms as its logo.
Q 02The name Detroit comes from a French word meaning what?
Strait
'Strait' is the meaning of the French word détroit; the city is named for the Detroit River, the strait that links Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie.
Q 03Windsor, Ontario, sits across the Detroit River in which compass direction from Detroit?
South
South: Windsor sits on the river's south bank, so Detroit is the only major city on the border where you drive south from the United States into Canada; Windsor is Canada's southernmost major city.
Q 04About how many people lived in Detroit at its peak, recorded by the 1950 census?
1.85 million
1.85 million residents made Detroit America's fifth-largest city in 1950; the 2020 census counted about 639,000, a fall of roughly two-thirds in seventy years.
Q 05The 'grand bargain' that ended Detroit's bankruptcy shielded city pensions and blocked the sale of what?
The art museum's collection
The art museum's collection passed to an independent non-profit after foundations, the state and museum donors pledged $816 million toward city pensions; the 2013 filing was the largest by any US city.
Q 06Who was elected Detroit's first Black mayor in 1973?
Coleman Young
Coleman Young, who as a wartime Tuskegee Airman had protested a whites-only officers' club, beat police commissioner John Nichols in 1973 and held office for twenty years.
Q 07Which city replaced Detroit as Michigan's state capital in 1847?
Lansing
Lansing became Michigan's capital in 1847, when the legislature moved it inland from Detroit, partly to put it farther from British-held Canada.
Q 08Henry Ford's 1913 moving assembly line borrowed its idea of work moving past the worker from which Chicago industry?
Meatpacking
Meatpacking plants moved carcasses along a line past butchers who each made one cut; Ford's engineers turned the idea around, and building a Model T fell from over 12 hours to about 93 minutes.
Q 09Which nickname did Detroit earn in the 1940s?
The Arsenal of Democracy
The Arsenal of Democracy was Roosevelt's December 1940 name for American industry; Detroit earned it as its car plants stopped building cars and turned out tanks, jeeps and bombers instead.
Q 10In 2015 Detroit became the first US city named to which UNESCO Creative Cities category?
City of Design
City of Design status came in 2015, with UNESCO pointing to Detroit's industrial design heritage and to designers such as Eames, Saarinen and Yamasaki who worked in the region.
Q 11Which ballpark opened in 2000 as the new home of the Detroit Tigers?
Comerica Park
Comerica Park opened in April 2000 with fences so deep that one Tigers slugger dubbed it 'Comerica National Park'; before the 2003 season the team pulled left-center in from 395 feet to 370.
Q 12The Renaissance Center became a carmaker's headquarters, but its central tower, Michigan's tallest building, was built as what?
A hotel
A hotel fills the 73-storey cylinder, the tallest hotel in the world when it opened in 1977; critics said the high berms around the complex walled it off from downtown, and they were later torn down.
Q 13Which automaker bought the Renaissance Center in 1996 for use as its global headquarters?
General Motors
Q 21Faygo, the Detroit soda founded in 1907, based its original flavors on recipes for what?
Cake frosting
Brothers Ben and Perry Feigenson, Russian immigrant bakers, built Faygo's first flavors on their cake frosting recipes; decades later Insane Clown Posse made the soda notorious by spraying it over crowds.
Q 22Who owns the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, opened in 1929?
A private company
A private company controlled by the Moroun family has owned it since trucking magnate Manuel 'Matty' Moroun bought the bridge in 1979; the family then fought for years against a rival public bridge downriver.
Q 23The Detroit–Windsor cable-stayed bridge begun in 2018 is named after which hockey player?
General Motors paid about $73 million for the complex in 1996, even though the drive to build it two decades earlier had been led by Henry Ford II, chairman of rival Ford.
Q 14Who lent Berry Gordy Jr. the $800 he used in 1959 to start the label that became Motown?
His family
His family agreed, after some debate, to lend the $800 from the Ber-Berry Co-op, a savings fund its members paid into; the money launched Tamla Records in January 1959, and Motown grew from it.
Q 15What name did Berry Gordy give the West Grand Boulevard house that became Motown's first headquarters and studio?
Hitsville U.S.A.
Hitsville U.S.A. was a former photographer's studio that Gordy bought in 1959; his family lived upstairs while the studio below ran almost around the clock, and the house is now the Motown Museum.
Q 16To which city did Berry Gordy move Motown's headquarters from Detroit in 1972?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles drew Gordy because he wanted Motown in films as well as records; the same year the company released 'Lady Sings the Blues', starring Diana Ross as Billie Holiday.
Q 17The 'Belleville Three', Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, pioneered which electronic music genre in 1980s Detroit?
Techno
Techno took shape after the three met at Belleville High School; Atkins borrowed the word from futurist Alvin Toffler, and a 1988 British compilation, 'Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit', fixed the name.
Q 18Where is American Coney Island in relation to its Detroit chili-dog rival Lafayette Coney Island?
Next door to each other
They stand next door to each other on West Lafayette Boulevard downtown; Greek immigrant brothers Gust and William Keros founded the pair, and each diner still claims to have opened first.
Q 19Detroit-style pizza is rectangular because it was originally baked in steel trays made for what purpose?
Holding automotive parts
The blue steel pans, made for holding automotive parts in Detroit factories, were adopted in 1946 at Buddy's Rendezvous on Six Mile Road for a pie topped with Wisconsin brick cheese.
Q 20Which Detroit pharmacist created the vanilla-tinged ginger ale that still carries his name?
James Vernor
James Vernor's company dates the drink to 1866, though a 1911 trademark filing points to 1880; the barrel-aged soda is the base of the Boston Cooler, a Detroit specialty despite its name.
Gordie Howe
Gordie Howe was a Canadian, born in Saskatchewan, who starred for Detroit for 25 seasons, so the name honours both banks of the river; he died in 2016, two years before construction began.
Q 24What has been mined from beds more than 1,000 feet beneath Detroit since 1910?
Rock salt
Rock salt lies in thick beds left by an ancient sea under the city; the mine's first shaft reached them in 1910, and today its only product is the salt spread on icy winter roads.
Q 25Detroit's 982-acre island park in the Detroit River is larger than which famous green space?
Central Park
Central Park covers 843 acres, so the Detroit island outsizes it; the same designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, drew a plan for the island in the 1880s, though only parts of it were ever built.
Q 26The 1967 Detroit uprising began when police raided what kind of establishment on 12th Street?
A hidden speakeasy bar
Police raided a 'blind pig', a hidden speakeasy bar, above a print shop at 12th and Clairmount early on July 23, 1967; arresting its patrons touched off five days of violence.
Q 27Which Michigan governor sent the National Guard into Detroit during the 1967 uprising?
George Romney
George Romney called out the Guard and then asked for federal paratroopers, but a dispute with President Johnson over declaring an insurrection delayed them; the five days of violence left 43 people dead.
Q 28Father Gabriel Richard is credited with Detroit's Latin city motto, coined after which disaster?
The 1805 fire
The 1805 fire destroyed almost the whole town on June 11 that year; the motto attributed to Richard, 'Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus', means 'We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes'.
Q 29Judge Augustus Woodward modelled his 1807 plan for rebuilding Detroit on the layout of which city?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., where Woodward had practised law, gave him Pierre L'Enfant's pattern of wide avenues radiating from circles; Detroit built only part of it, including the avenue that carries his name.
Q 30In 1909, Detroit's Woodward Avenue got the country's first mile of what?
Concrete roadway
Concrete roadway was poured for a full mile north of Six Mile Road in 1909, a national first; at Woodward and Michigan, a police officer in a tower directed traffic until a four-way signal replaced him in 1920.