Woodward Street-Widening in the 1930s
We just passed the 200th anniversary of the abandonment of Judge Woodward's plan for Detroit. One of the benefits of that plan would have been a Woodward Avenue that ran straight and true, 120 feet wide, all the way out of town.
Instead, thanks to more freewheeling "planning," Detroit got a main thoroughfare that narrowed to 66 feet wide a little more than a mile from downtown. To correct this, the city embarked on an ambitious project to finally widen Woodward Avenue in the 1930s.
I have read that the destruction it wrought was significant. It resulted in the demolition of scores of storefronts and facades on either side of the thoroughfare. It accounts for the slight crooks in Woodward, where a different side of the street was set back. Especially disfigured were the houses of worship along the main drag. As a local website notes, "Almost all of the impressive religious structures facing Woodward from St. John's Protestant Episcopal to the Cultural Center lost much of their attractiveness when Woodward was widened."
It must have been quite a sight, the fronts of the churches and temples being removed, the stones carried down to Belle Isle as landfill in dump trucks [[which were patented by Detroiter Gar Wood in 1918.)
You can see the damage of it today. On one side are historic facades, lending their century of continuity to the road. On the other side are parking lots, cold, institutional buildings, showy could-be-anywhere lofts, and absolutely no ornament. The automobile reformed Detroit like Haussmann reformed Paris, with its fair share of destruction.
Don't get me wrong. Sometimes a bit of demolition is needed. I guess the shame of it is that abiding by Woodward's original plan would have made such destruction unnecessary.
