Dossin Great Lakes Museum (The Strand, south shore)

You're on The Strand now — the south shore, and from here on that far bank across the water is Canada, Windsor, Ontario, a mile off. The low riverfront building easing up along the island shore is the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, the story of the inland seas that made this city. Step inside and you can take the wheel of a real ship's pilothouse — the whole forward end of the freighter William Clay Ford, lifted off the boat and set down here, the brass and the gauges and the long view down a make-believe river. There's the Miss Pepsi too, a sleek wooden unlimited hydroplane the Dossin family raced right out here on the Detroit River back in the early nineteen-fifties, one of the first boats anywhere to break a hundred miles an hour. And tucked deeper in is the Gothic Room — the carved, dark-paneled smoking lounge salvaged whole out of the City of Detroit the Third, one of the grand Great Lakes passenger steamers that once carried travelers up the inland seas like a floating hotel, before the automobile and the airplane closed that whole age down for good. But here's the one that gives you chills, told straight: the museum holds a genuine anchor from the Edmund Fitzgerald — the ore boat Gordon Lightfoot sang into legend when she went down with all twenty-nine hands on Lake Superior in nineteen seventy-five. Most folks don't know this anchor was lost right here, in this Detroit River off Belle Isle, back in nineteen seventy-four — the chain parted one winter and it sank into our riverbed; divers raised it years later. So this island's water was holding a piece of the Fitzgerald a full year before the world ever knew her name. The bell hangs elsewhere, up at Whitefish Point — but the anchor came home to this shore. Open Friday through Sunday; the riverfront and the view are yours any day at all.