Shorpy: Grand Circus 1919 from Madison Ave

[DetroitPlanner]

It looks like they were about to unviel Alex Pollak's Monkeybars!!

[Gistok]

Bump.... this is a cool collection of images from 6 years ago, that newbies [[and old timers alike) would find interesting.

[EGrant]

I could look at these all day. Love Shorpy.

[Hermod]

My mother worked for United Artists. They had quite a suite of offices on an upper floor where an army of clerks [[including my mother) ran a dispatch service moving reels of UA film around the area to out of town
theaters.

[Atticus]

Great pic.

Man what I would give to have the Statler back.... And to think we still had that structure just over 10 years ago too. No doubt that it would be renovated and occupied today. Such a shame.

[gnome]

Bump.... this is a cool collection of images from 6 years ago, that newbies [[and old timers alike) would find interesting.

Agreed.

I loved discovering Detroit history at the feet of such luminous forum members as MikeM.

[gnome]

Just out of curiosity, I've always wondered where the origin of the name Grand Circus Park came from?

I believe when Augustus Woodward replicated the Washington DC street plan for Detroit he named Grand Circus with the intention that it would actually be a really big circle. Hence the name, Grand Circus.

However, it isn't a circle. It's a half circle, but Grand Half-Circus doesn't sound that spiffy. The reason it is a half-circle is because Woodward's hub-and-spoke street plan feel victim to disagreeable land owners. One of which was a guy named John R. Williams.

Williams was a political rival of Woodward as well as land owner. Williams put a huge stick in the hub-and-spoke plan by refusing to sell his land. As a result we have a series of competing street plans.

As side points, Williams is the John R of John R. fame as well as the namesake of Williams Street and the father of a sweet lass named Elizabeth who had her name applied to a street.

[Detroitdave]

This is what I found

[EastsideAl]

This is what I found

It also bears to keep in mind that Woodward conceived Washington Blvd. [[or "Washington Grand Avenue" as it says here), which was oriented towards the cardinal directions, as the main north-south street of his plan. Woodward Ave. itself, although it was designed to link up with the main trail out into the northern woods [[hence the Woodwardian pun on his own name), was conceived as a secondary road. The hub of the whole scheme, as shown here, was supposed to be Grand Circus, not Campus Martius. But the old fort that stood at what is now the corner of Fort and Shelby until 1827, and, as gnome explains above, recalcitrant land-owners to the north, stymied Woodward's plan. So only the short stretch between Michigan Ave. and Grand Circus Park was ever built of Judge Woodward's intended main street.