Cabacier Street/ Commuter Train

I have viewed this site for a long time but this is my first post. Does anyone know the history or reason for Cabacier street near the main Post office, it is near other continuing roads along with a bridge over what I assume was built to maintain a railroad right of way. I wish the proposed commuter train would use the Joe Louis Parking Deck as is terminus in order to connect with the People Mover along with a stop at Michigan Central Station. At MCS you can revive the connection to Toledo, Windsor [[thru Via Rail) and relocate the Chicago service before you go north to Midtown and Pontiac. The parking lot in front of the People Mover station could also be a convient location for a Windsor Detroit ferry port.

That is a very old street. At one time the Thunderbird Motel was on it. Rail was along the river where there is greenspace now and would veer to the N for the old train station.

There was a Cabacier Creek that ran around there, that later became May's Creek. I think the street may have been put in when they covered the stream.

It was once the street that connected Fort St. to the rail freight yards that were behind Union Station. So it was essentially a truck ramp, which is why it's so wide.

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Originally Posted by DetroitPlanner

That is a very old street. At one time the Thunderbird Motel was on it. Rail was along the river where there is greenspace now and would veer to the N for the old train station.

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I had always thought that it was an older street too, but interestingly that would appear not to be the case. I don't see it on any map I can find much before 1940.

Well, I've done a little more research and have come to the conclusion that I was wrong above. Cabacier St. was not a ramp into the freight yards, but was instead a part of the project that eventually destroyed them.

I based my earlier supposition on a Sanborn fire map from the early '40s that showed Cabacier going off of Fort St. and ending in the middle of the freight yards. But under the name Cabacier on the map was "[[Port-Jefferson Connector)". When I went back to earlier Sanborn maps and didn't see the street there at all that parenthetical note led me to some further research. Turns out that what that map was showing was something that was only proposed at the time. And the "Port" part was wrong - what they really meant was "Fort."

The Fort-Jefferson Connector was, in fact, part of Detroit's attempt to remake itself in the late '40s and early '50s, and was small piece of the projects that gave us the Lodge Fwy. and the Civic Center, including Cobo Hall. The connector - renamed "Cabacier" after an old Detroit family whose land had been in that area - was designed to relieve downtown congestion by taking traffic off of Fort St., and funneling it down onto W. Jefferson. This would allow the traffic to go directly into the Lodge Fwy. tunnel under Cobo, and come up onto the newly widened Jefferson Ave. just before Woodward. So crosstown traffic headed to the east side, or to the yet-to-be-built "Hastings Expressway" [[i.e. the Chrysler/I-375), could basically bypass downtown and the congestion in the City Hall/Campus Martius area.

The street itself was constructed sometime in the late '40s. I have seen a 1949 DTE aerial photo that shows a clearly brand-new Cabacier street connecting Fort to Jefferson through a landscape of fresh demolition. It was cut through the block between 8th St. and Brooklyn after several of the old industrial buildings associated with the freight yards, and some of the yards themselves, had been torn out, and viaduct was built over it for the remaining passenger tracks going into Union Station.

Interesting research results EastsideAl. I've often wondered why Cabacier [[a rather wide street compared to the surrounding n/s streets) was so close to 8th street but at the same time seemed to go nowhere. I makes a little more sence now. It's funny, I've used that same route you described many times to get from the Post Office area to I-375/I-75. Never knew that's what the road was intentionally designed for.

Only problem is it doesn't work too well sometimes during morning rush hour as traffic tends to back up under Cobo Hall from that Griswold traffic light.