Roseville, MI Indoor Activities

On November 19, 1928, the Detroit Historical Society opened the Detroit Historical Museum in a one-room suite on the 23rd floor of the Barlum Tower, earning it the nickname of highest museum in the world. These days, Detroit’s Cultural Center accommodates the museum in an 80,000-square-foot space, where interactive exhibits preserve more than 300 years of city history. Frontiers to Factories traces Detroit's transformation from French-frontier outpost to industrial city, while America's Motor City celebrates its automotive dominance with a changing display of classic vehicles and a 1903 Model T that guests can sit in. Streets of Old Detroit brings the 19th century to life with recreated cobblestone streets that wind past stores of the era such as a five-and-dime, a soda shop, and a barbershop for powdered wigs.

Thanks to recent renovations, the society has expanded its chronicle of Detroit with three new permanent exhibitions. Detroit: The Arsenal of Democracy covers the ways the city's industrial infrastructure adapted to demands of World War II, and The Gallery of Innovation includes videos about renown innovators and hands-on activities of trial-and-error. As The Allesee Gallery of Culture examines the city's cultural history, its Kid Rock Music Lab lets visitors create and share their own music using interactive displays. Outside, the Detroit Legends Plaza honors the city's sports, entertainment, and media legends with cemented handprints and signatures from stars such as Lily Tomlin and Martha Reeves.

The Detroit Opera House sprawls across an entire city block, its imposing size and elegant design belying its circuitous history. Originally opened in 1922 as a vaudeville palace—and designed by the renowned architect behind the city's Fillmore and Fox theaters—the space played host to live music and recorded films. But despite the venue’s remarkable acoustics and cheery demeanor, it sat abandoned for long stretches of time over the next few decades. Luckily, fate intervened in 1988 when the opera acquired the building, starting an ambitious remodeling project that culminated in an opening gala featuring Luciano Pavarotti. The opera house’s modern iteration mimics the design of Europe's greatest performance spaces, with an the ornate main hall adorned with vaulted ceilings and sumptuous red curtains.

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s gifted tunesmiths squeeze euphonious notes through their woodwind, brass, string, and percussion instruments, building upon a 125-year history of symphonic sounds in the Motor City. The orchestra's performance of Franck's Symphony in D Minor pollinates the air with soaring French classics, swaying back and forth to the baton semaphoring of guest conductor Hélène Bouchez and the piano mastery of 17-year old prodigy Conrad Tao. A pair of Debussy compositions inaugurates the evening with ear-swooning melodies that bounce of the antique theater's ornate, golden structure, which was built in 1919. During the evening’s main and final piece, Franck's Symphony in D Minor, Chinese-American Conrad Tao showcases his full repertoire, which has earned him ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer award for eight consecutive years, just two notches shy of earning him a free carrying case for a grand piano.

Through public science forums and more than 200 interactive exhibits, Canada South Science City hopes to foster an excitement for science that helps families understand their relationship to the universe and inspire children to work towards Science-based careers. The 30,000-square-foot facility houses attractions such as Dinosaur Alley, where a model T-Rex skeleton looms as kids dig for prehistoric bones and fossilized cassette tapes. Live snakes, turtles, and tree frogs send a symphony of hisses and warbles from the Big Lagoon, an exhibit that offers up fun facts about biodiversity. Elsewhere, models of Jupiter and Saturn overhang an open-gym area that demonstrates the properties of sound and space.

Canada South Science City also hosts special events including science panel discussions and educational programs for students. These include workshops that challenge kids to solve problems, such as keeping a dropped egg from breaking or a black hole from opening in their lunchbox.

Sifu Owen Matson trains students on the ving tsun kung fu techniques taught to him by a line of Moy Tung sifu and grandmasters. Matson's classes cultivate students' balance of body and mind through the practice of two forms: siu nim tao, a basic stance emphasizing hand techniques, and chum kiu, a shifting stance that bolsters stability in motion by focusing on footwork and encouraging students to pick fights with mailbox posts.

A well-weathered teacher, Matson began his training in 1999 under the expert tutelage of Robert "Moy Yat Tung" Squatrito, who helped him master the swift movements and powerful strikes of the kung fu discipline. After becoming a member of the Moy Tung's MY4 and ICC inner training circles, Sifu Owen traveled to Detroit to open his ving tsun studio.

The Detroit Institute of Arts takes the “s” at the end of its name seriously. The immense Beaux Arts building on Woodward Avenue isn’t only a setting for a top-tier collection of visual works that include Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes, a van Gogh self-portrait, and ancient sculptures from Africa and Asia. It also opens the doors of its lecture halls, event spaces, and auditoriums for craft workshops, wide-ranging talks from historians and people who know how to draw really good cubes, film, and music. The latter two art forms find a home in the Detroit Film Theatre, a gilded, neoclassical auditorium that preserves a sense of coziness amid the grandeur.