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Like the gristly patellar tendon that obstructs Dan Campbell’s kneecap theory of football, Woodward Avenue is Detroit’s inescapable, ungnawable sinew. Since 1805, it has bound the city through dire challenges and moments of glory. From Isamu Noguchi’s “Pylon” at Hart Plaza to the grand-finale Pontiac loop, a distance of 27 miles, Woodward Avenue has served as not only a transportation corridor but also a nexus for social activities. It has fostered industrial innovation and production as well as becoming the location of monuments and landmarks.

The name came about because Elias B. Woodward, who was born in New York in 1774, studied too much Latin and renamed himself after an emperor. While starving in a private Washington, D.C., law practice, Augustus B. Woodward became friends with President Thomas Jefferson, passing along to him a pamphlet called Considerations on the Substance of the Sun. Dazzled, Jefferson appointed Woodward, then 30 years old, as a justice of the new Michigan Territory.

Woodward arrived in Detroit less than three weeks after the Great Fire of 1805. The gangly, hawk-nosed judge set to work as caesar. According to writer Malcolm Bingay’s rancorous take, he “pushed the other two judges out of the picture and decreed himself the chief justice, without warrant in law.” Adapting Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s radial plan for Washington, D.C., Woodward transposed the hub-and-spoke pattern over a pleasant but gridded peninsula. Name-checking Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe with new byways, he christened the main drag after himself. The Roman obsession showed with his incorporation of the “circus.” This ambitious ring at the intersection of streets was ideal for chariot racing if ultimately not for strip malls.

“Uniformity of plan, amplitude of avenue, of square, of circus, free circulation of air,” Woodward expounded, “are not to be hoped for if one age shall determine on its limited and contracted view of things that a city can never reach beyond a certain limit.”

All along the avenue’s route, square-minded landowners snubbed circuses — and prevailed in thwarting their construction, except for Grand Circus. The Detroit Gazette taunted Woodward upon his 1824 farewell, calling him “disgusting” and stating, “It is really a matter of curious speculation how or by what strange fatality such a man should have been palmed off on this territory.”

Despite ill will toward the tyrant, his plan (minus the circuses) proceeded. The right-of-way to Pontiac — laid out in 1817 — followed the path of a Native trail named the Saginaw Trail by settlers. Logs were placed together, with sand and clay filling the gaps. In his book Magic Motorways, industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes records, “By mid-century it had become a plank toll road for horses and buggies.” The roadway remained narrow, just 16 feet wide.

Despite the avenue’s inadequacies, it was the natural location to establish a business. In 1866, Hervey Parke joined Dr. Samuel Duffield in a small drugstore at the corner of Gratiot and Woodward avenues, with George Davis stepping in the next year. Duffield eventually bowed out of the picture, and Parke-Davis and Co. became for a time the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. When James Vernor returned to Detroit from the Civil War, he opened a pharmacy with Charles L’Hommedieu at 235 Woodward Ave. and resumed experiments interrupted by war. The scientific breakthrough was Vernor’s ginger ale, otherwise known as “Detroit’s Drink.”

The transition from cedar planks to other paving materials — bricks, stone blocks, concrete — first culminated in asphalt.

The contractors were accused of colluding on rates while delivering an inferior product. Chuckholes appeared in 1893 just months after a Woodward paving project. “And yet this is the quality of pavement which is submitted to the consideration of Detroiters,” the Free Press lamented.

By some miracle, on March 6, 1896, the surface met the purpose of test track when Charles Brady King grasped the tiller of his homebuilt, gas-powered wagon and made the first demonstration of an automobile in Detroit after officials restricted his secret tests on Belle Isle.

At this time, streetcars had operated for decades. When the Detroit United Railway consolidated existing companies in 1900, it offered 187 miles of local and more than 400 miles of interurban lines, including the journey over Woodward Avenue to Pontiac. Thanks largely to the output of Ford Motor Co.’s Highland Park assembly plant after 1910, motor vehicles clogged the avenue and jitterbugged around weaving streetcars.

It was a circus of immobility at Grand Circus Park. The city commissioned a 1915 feasibility study for a subway beneath the avenue, but investigation showed Detroit was “peculiarly a city of individual homes” and the low population density couldn’t support a subway.

One mile of avenue got paved with concrete in 1909, a national first. (Another first was the three-color stoplight, installed at Woodward Avenue and Fort Street in 1920.) Even with uniform paving, the budding superhighway still got snarled. Into the scene stepped Joseph Bower, the magician who was just finishing up the Ambassador Bridge. Bower now promoted, as a parallel route, an elevated, high-speed, four-lane toll road over the Grand Trunk Railway right-of-way. It would postpone the avenue’s widening, Deputy Police Commissioner Daniel Crowley told a WJR Radio audience, not to mention adding $250,000 in tax revenue for Hamtramck and Detroit “without one cent of expenditure by the people.” The ordinance won approval in the 1930 November election by 105,058 to 56,478, but the Detroit El received little mention after the Great Depression suppressed funding for science fiction projects.

In the early 1920s, Gov. Alex Groesbeck and various real estate developers expressed support for widening the avenue and placing streetcar lines in the center, as then demonstrated in orderly fashion between Six and Eight Mile roads. The widening project went on through the 1930s, when buildings such as Temple Beth El (today’s Bonstelle Theatre) were mutilated and reduced in size to make space for traffic.

With motor buses and private flivvers giving more service, the streetcars started to lose money and were out of action by 1956. Improvements to Woodward Avenue helped to realize the homebuilders’ dreams in Royal Oak, Birmingham, and other suburban towns. Writ large with this expansion, automotive culture trended to new social customs in cruising, the rise of local radio, and the tailoring of Motown’s music to sound just so in a car.

Worship

After bustling with traffic all week, Woodward Avenue murmured with reverent comings and goings on the Sabbath. Two dozen big, important houses of worship — churches, cathedrals, and temples — were established on Woodward over a period of seven decades. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants ranging from Baptist to Unitarian had their choices.

First on the scene, in 1849, was Mariners’ Church. After 106 years at the foot of Woodward, it was moved 880 feet on steel rails to the present location, 170 E. Jefferson Ave., making way for a new civic center, now known as Hart Plaza. The National Register of Historic Places has compiled a master list of Woodward sanctuaries; on this, the most recent construction, in 1929, was Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church — today’s Prayer Temple of Love Cathedral at 12375 Woodward Ave. in Highland Park.

Farther to the suburban north, in Royal Oak, the National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica was completed in 1936. It isn’t listed by the National Register but has a place in American history thanks to its founding pastor, Father Charles Coughlin, whose fractious radio broadcasts commanded an audience of millions and eventually got him taken off the air in 1939 due to his antisemitic and pro-fascist speech.

State Fair

In 1904, J.L. Hudson led the acquisition of 135 acres east of Woodward Avenue near Eight Mile, and fairgrounds were organized. The Michigan State Fair settled here in 1905 and came to include a 5,600-seat coliseum and 1-mile racetrack.

NASCAR came to town twice in the early 1950s for 250-lap races. On June 29, 1952, Tim Flock swept to victory in his No. 91 “Fabulous Hudson Hornet” to win the top prize of $5,000 — a nice posthumous tribute to Hudson, who had died 40 years earlier.

Shopping

A classified ad of May 24, 1927: “Glasses, lady’s, lost in Kresge’s dollar store or on Woodward Ave. Reward. Hickory 1956-R.” And who wouldn’t search diligently in the center of everything?

The J.L. Hudson Co. occupied 2.1 million square feet and cast a shadow to the east over Crowley, Milner & Co. (“Detroit’s Friendly Christmas Store, Where It’s Easy to Shop”). A block away, the Ernst Kern Co. (known as Kern’s) with its famous clock was a traditional meeting point on retail rendezvous and first dates.

Amid fierce competition, J.L. Hudson outdid them all by funding a namesake car company in 1909.

Parades and Demonstrations

Oh, the parades on Woodward Avenue! Victory in Europe. The Automotive Golden Jubilee. Thanksgiving. And civil demonstrations like the one in 1938 at the German consulate, located in the Hammond Building looking onto Campus Martius.

The march broke up when mounted police “rode down upon demonstrators and unconcerned pedestrians alike,” the Civil Rights Federation chairman claimed in a letter to the mayor. Much uglier scenes followed during insurrections in 1943 and 1967. Cars were Detroit’s most prestigious product, yet some people who were against desegregation turned them over and set them afire.

Cruising

Two factors make the Woodward Dream Cruise a global icon. One is the desire to show off a great car, preferably with a loud overhead-valve V-8 engine. The Michigan left is the other.

Since the 1960s, this much-safer way of turning has nixed the left-hand blind side maneuver in favor of continuing straight through the intersection — or turning right (depending on which direction you are coming from) — then making a U-turn at a median crossover. While waiting for traffic to clear, people admire the median’s pastoral landscaping.

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This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of ����vlog��׿��. To read more, pick up a copy of ����vlog��׿�� Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our will be available on April 7.��