Woodward Dreams

The Paczki Principle

Oh baby! A great baby powder scent!
Actually, it's better than the powder. We love this one.

Woodward Avenue, Detroit's main drag and Michigan's M-1, stretches for 28 miles from the very heart of downtown at Hart Plaza to its other terminus at one of Pontiac's weird, confusing interchanges. Throughout its history  which pre-dates European settlement  Woodward came to serve as the legendary dividing line of east-side/west-side among Detroiters, and the road that built Oakland County, too.

Woodward's route follows the old Saginaw Trail created by trade-minded Native American tribes, who cleared it to serve as a byway from Saginaw Bay to the Detroit River. At the John Almon Starr House, a state historical site on Crooks Road in Royal Oak, there is a depression in the property, running in a northwestern direction, that remains the last concrete evidence of the old Trail.

Back in Detroit, the thoroughfare had a few early, forgotten names, but the one given in honor of territorial judge and eminent urban planner Judge Augustus Woodward stuck after 1807. The automotive era began in earnest on the street in 1896, when the first car avoided a pothole on it. In 1909, the Avenue made history as home to the first rural mile of concrete pavement in the United States, when a stretch between McNichols and Seven Mile Road, in what was then known as Greenfield Township, was paved at a cost of $13,000.

In the 1920s, Woodward was expanded into the first intercity "superhighway" in the country, connecting Detroit and Pontiac. It boasted eight lanes and a forty-foot median for public transportation access. Along the way, it traversed through some ten different cities, and served as the vital artery that boosted the commercial and residential development of eight of those Oakland county communities. The last streetcar line on Woodward came to an end in 1956, but around this same time legions of suburban teens had made the capacious strip the hotspot for weekend cruising. This strange, peculiarly American and very Detroit ritual was revived in the mid-1990s as the Woodward Dream Cruise.

Woodward is a Michigan Heritage Route as well as one of the National Scenic Byways. For more information, check out http://www.woodwardheritage.com/thewoodwardstory.html and http://www.byways.org/browse/byways/13754/overview.html