Motown Museum

When Bing moved to Detroit in the 1960s, he came as a basketball player, a celebrity of sorts. He slipped right in to the nightlife of the time, and that meant Motown.

"The athletes, we always thought we were entertainers, and the entertainers thought they were athletes," he said. "We really got together quite often."

Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes -- he said he knew them all well.

"You fell in love with them because they were true entertainers," he said.

He's too busy now to sing, but anybody who comes to town should know that history, he said. Some of it is kept up at the Motown Museum, a music-studio-turned-museum known as Hitsville, U.S.A., founded in 1985.

"People don't realize how Motown got started, where it got started. I mean, it was a little house," Bing said. "For all the success they had out of that one little place, people need to see that."

Detroit's Tigers, Lions, Red Wings -- and Pistons?

Bing is proud to call Detroit home to four professional sports teams -- the Tigers, Lions, Red Wings and Pistons. He loves the energy of a game, the pride teams bring to the city and the crowds in stadiums and restaurants.

But as an NBA Hall of Famer who came to Detroit for basketball, he'd rather the Pistons move back to the city from their suburban home, the Palace of Auburn Hills.

He didn't lay out a plan for how to make it happen, but he said it's a goal.

"My whole career in basketball was downtown, and I think that's where it belongs, and I'll do everything I can to try to get it back downtown," he said.

The future

"There are several very strong neighborhoods in our city," he said, the areas around Midtown and Detroit's downtown, especially. But he's optimistic about what comes next.

Here's his prediction for what visitors and residents will see in a decade:

"Instead of seeing the vast amount of empty land where there's nobody there, I think we've got to do some different things. Urban farming is something we've been talking about for some time. We will probably see some of that.

"We would see people living out in neighborhoods where there's only one or two homes. We're not going to see that. We're going to try to convince those people to move so there's density in all of our neighborhoods, so we can really look out for each other, we can help protect each other, we can bring people and families back together again like it used to be. Where we care for each other, where we support each other. That's the kind of city I see."