Quote Originally Posted by EastsideAl View Post
Like DetroitPlanner said, the unevenness of streets running across Woodward, Cass, etc. is an artifact of our local history. As you may know, Detroit was originally laid out in a series of long narrow "ribbon" farms that ran northward from the river. And the echo of that pattern can still be seen today in the southern portion of the city.

Outside of the center of downtown [[the Woodward Plan), the main "spoke" arterials, and boundary streets like Grand Blvd and Outer Dr., the street pattern in most of the rest of the city is not the result of planning, but is a relic of hundreds of subdivisions cut out of farmland and laid out by real estate speculators as the city's population grew. This is why the street layout can seem to "make no sense" in spots [[as Jason says above), streets often don't quite meet or "jog" at intersections, and sometimes you'll run into a neighborhood with streets on a different orientation from adjacent neighborhoods. So, the answer to SpartanDawg's question in the original post is that the street layout was no one's "idea."

The streets that now do run straight across Woodward north of downtown are mostly the result of 20th century planning attempts to ease automobile travel across the city. The model for this was Vernor Highway, which was cobbled together as a crosstown auto route out of several different streets in the 1920s [[the downtown portion is now under I-75). Warren and Forest were turned into one-way crosstown through streets [[Warren westbound, and Forest eastbound) for auto traffic in the 1930s. Warren was later widened into a boulevard through that area in the 1970s, leaving Forest alone as one way. The Mack - MLK [[formerly Myrtle) crosstown boulevard was linked together out of several streets through the '60s and '70s.

The superblocks of the Med Center, Lafayette Park, Wayne State, and several other such areas, are of course the result of 1950s, 60s, and 70s planning ideas about the undesirability of urbanism, congestion, and density that left similar dead areas in cities throughout the country.
I always thought that "the Woodward plan" was the reason for the spoke pattern in downtown until I read this recently:
The spoke-wheel layout of Detroit's streets is often attributed to Judge Augustus Woodward. But according to Joel Stone, senior curator at the Detroit Historical Society, that's a common misconception."The spoke-wheel plan we can attribute to the Native Americans," Stone explained. "They were here long before anyone else, and they had established trails."
These trails would take them down to Toledo, up to Port Huron, off to Grand Rapids, or up towards Pontiac. They were used for trade and travel and still stand today, just with different names than they once had: Jefferson, Gratiot, Woodward, Grand River, Michigan Avenue, and Fort Street.
The streets are the major spokes of Detroit's wheel system and their hub is Campus Martius Park.
http://michiganradio.org/post/8-mile...ht-miles-where