Daylight saving time happened again, and even though it happens every year, I am shocked at just how jarring it is for darkness to fall at 5:30 p.m. There are many good arguments for keeping the spring forward, fall back, time dance, but in Detroit the seasonal swing is just so stark. Detroit is in the Eastern Standard Time Zone, and to my east coast writers, this makes no sense. Clearly, Detroit should be Central time, and for a while it was. How Detroit, and most (but not all) of Michigan ended up on Eastern Standard Time is, predictably, very weird.
Detroit has never been a normal town. It was founded in 1701 by a guy who wasn’t even supposed to be down this way, has the busiest border crossing between the U.S. and Canada owned by one guy, and once hosted the largest factory in the world, which turned into the largest abandoned factory in the world. And when Standard Time came around Detroiters took one look at it and said “absolutely not.”
Detroit has the right time, it’s everywhere else that sucks
First, a little history; before railroads became a thing in the U.S., time was very localized. Railroads began running through every state on tighter and tighter schedules causing a lot of chaos, including a ton of wild steam engine collisions. In 1883, the U.S. and Canada standardized time zones rather than leaving it up to locals who pointed to the sky or the church clock as their measurement for time. Most cities followed suit, except for one: Detroit.
It wasn’t until 1900 that the city council even voted to join Standard Time, being the last major U.S. city to do so. The Michigan state legislator voted to join Central Time Zone in 1885, but the state’s largest city wouldn’t budge because why should Detroit change its time when it was the center of the universe?…