Current Exhibitions

The Gothic Room in the Polk Family Hall is the first exhibit you enter when coming into the Dossin Great Lakes Museum.  Stepping through its doors is like stepping back in time inside the reconstructed gentleman’s lounge of the City of Detroit III, with a window on the right side of the gallery set up as if you’re looking out at the Detroit shore line in the early 1900s.

Adjacent to the Allesee Gallery of Culture, visitors find the Motor City Music exhibition — an interactive, participatory space that explores the rich legacy of Detroit’s music from Gospel to Motown and all things in between.

Joseph Parent, Detroit’s first recognized brewer, arrived in 1706, just five years after the new French trading post was established. Generations of English, Irish, Belgian, Polish, German and Detroit-born brewers followed, shaping a local scene that thrives to this day. Learn more about the city’s beer barons, neighborhood breweries and beer-drinking customs in Detroit’s Brewing Heritage.

In addition to local brewing legends like Stroh’s, Altes and Goebel, the exhibit explores the smaller breweries that served as neighborhood gathering places and the brewers who played an outsized part in the city’s cultural and political scene. 

The S.S. William Clay Ford, a Great Lakes freighter, was scrapped in 1987 and its pilot house was brought to the Dossin Great Lakes Museum. 

The Detroit Historical Society is home to one of the largest collections of Great Lakes ship models in the country. Most of the more than 150 models are five or six decades old, while at least one dates to 1854. The ship models represent over 300 years of North American fresh water maritime history. In many cases, the models themselves are historic; in other cases they represent significant examples of technological advances that powered social and economic aspects of the region’s history.

Miss Pepsi, the fastest hydroplane in the Detroit River in its time, was perhaps the most famous symbol of a family that made their livelihood distributing nationally famous soft drinks to Detroiters and residents of the region. The company was Dossin’s Food Products.

As the Dossin Great Lakes Museum enters its seventh decade as Detroit’s maritime heritage center, it continues to expand accessibility to visitors from around the world.

Explore a collection of maritime artifacts on the shores of Belle Isle, including the bow anchor of the legendary Edmund Fitzgerald, naval cannons from the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, a nautical flag pole and an anchor from the USS Yantic.

Watch the river from our new observation telescope and relax on the landscaped river walk.