Dream Cruising

Enthusiasts pay tribute to America’s automotive heyday on Metro Detroit’s Woodward Avenue

By Phil Berg
Photos by Joe Vaughn

A small group of die-hard car enthusiasts is responsible for the escalation of what is now arguably the world’s largest one-day celebration of car culture — the Woodward Dream Cruise – which has grown from a few thousand spectators to more than one million in 13 years.

In 1994, an organized, small tour, intending to raise money for a soccer field, attracted cruisers in numbers nobody expected. The Woodward Dream Cruise became a rolling classic car show. The cars dominating the Cruise were classics pulled from area garages — prized Chevy Chevelles, Dodge Challengers, Plymouth Barracudas, Ford Mustangs, and Chevy Camaros. They were underused and itching to be unleashed at an event like this, where saved treasures were enjoyed.

This year, an estimated 40,000 vehicles crept along a 16-mile stretch of Woodward Avenue in suburban Detroit, Mich., on August 18, and the number is expected to continue to grow.

A Cruise through Time

When French architect Charles L’Enfant drew the plans for the new city of Detroit after it burned in 1805, he patterned it after Washington, D.C. (which he also designed), and Paris — a semicircle of streets expanding like waves from a single point on the Detroit River.

Exactly bisecting this semicircle is a dragstrip-straight boulevard, which today stretches 27 miles northwest to the city of Pontiac. It was named Woodward to commemorate a territorial judge who successfully got federal funding to rebuild the small city after Detroit’s fire.

In 1909, in an effort to control potholes, one mile of the road was paved with concrete, the first such surface in the world.

As Detroit solidified its Motor City standing in the 1950s and early 1960s, former GM design executive William Mitchell regularly cruised Woodward — by then the eight-lane divided boulevard it is today — to gauge public response to the automaker’s prototype cars. Other designers followed suit. In fact, the famous “screaming chicken” hood decal on the 1973 to 1981 Pontiac Firebird Trans Ams became an icon because of favorable reactions to design prototypes from car fans cruising Woodward.