22 May 2008
River City
Henry and his Car. Photo by TopSpeed
Honest to goodness, I am going to get to the Eames Chair. I swear.
To do that, tough, you have to drive out Woodward Avenue from the Detroit River almost seventeen miles to get to the Cranbook academic and arts community.
To get to Woodward, and why you would motor across all the history that led to it having the first full mile of concrete pavement in the United States, right near the Highland Park Assembly plant that cranked out Henry Ford’s Model “T” autos.
It is the site of my first moving violation in an automobile (120 in a 50 zone; it was a 1967 Dodge Charger 44RT, and a different story) and the tale of the life and death of a great city, which is entirely based on the we travel as a nation. Since we stand on the brink of having to rethink all that, it is worth a little jog back to River City.
I live in a River City, and I grew up in another one. Any town that is connected by bridges is by nature a daunting place in which to navigate. The District of Columbia has some challenges that were simply too hard to overcome.
I have told you before about the original Diamond of the District, a good chunk of which was ceded by Virginia to the new Federal City. With the Potomac providing the major transportation back in the day, it is not surprising that commercial activities faced the water. Plantations lined the Virginia side of the Potomac from the bottom of the Great Falls of the river where useful navigation of the river by deep-water craft ceased.
The real cities of Georgetown and Alexandria were the head and foot of the imaginary new town that would rise on L’Enfant’s classic grid, and of course there were disconnects and odd endings where they came together.
My home town of Detroit was a river city, and it shared the confusion caused by the collision between water transportation of colonial times and the bold new American experiment in opening a continent to settlement.
Detroit was one of the chief fur-trading posts of the Old Northwest. The French had appeared from the River as early as 1634; The area known as le détroit was ideal for settlement, since the soil was fertile and the strait between the great lakes to the north and south was a natural choke-point and easy to defend.
It was more hospitable than the much colder outposts on the northern lakes, particularly Michilimackinac at the frigid junction of Lake Michigan and Huron. We have retained some of the names of the great French explorers: Jean Nicolet, Radisson, Groseilliers, Duluth, La Salle, Jolliet, Perrot, and Cadillac are still familiar, as are those of missionaries Jogues, Dablon, and Marquette.
Some of them linger as the names for great universities, while others became luxury motorcars.
The French colonial system relied for communication and commerce on the great inland rivers that drain the midsection of the continent, and connect the great north with Louisiana. The end of the French and Indian wars in 1763 was sealed with the Treaty of Paris, which is how the British Crown obtained title to Canada and the Old Northwest.
Almost immediately after the British acquired the region, the great Ottawa Chief Pontiac led an uprising against the new masters. He is now known mostly as a mid-level performance automobile, and what with the cost of fuel, may again be forgotten.
The British authorities issued a proclamation closing the region to settlement, thus terminating the rebellions and protecting the Ottawa’s interest in the fur trade. Resentment simmered on the part of expansionist colonial capitalists and hardy frontiersmen, and the matter can rightly be considered a contributing factor to the coming Revolution against the Crown.
The Old Northwest became U.S. territory in 1783 under the terms of the next Treaty of Paris that established the United States of America. It is the direct reason that driving around the east side of Detroit is such a confusing business, assuming that you were foolish enough to do so.
It was a complex issue, and was one of the first issues of business in the new nation.
Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut all claimed parts of the Northwest Territory, which is why the University of Michigan, founded in Detroit in 1817, has a fight song that to this day proclaims it to be the “Champion of the West.” Everyone located on the left side of the Mississippi River is baffled by the claim.
The ultimate solution to the tension between “landed states” of the big four, and “unlanded” other nine was to cede all the of the Northwest to the tender mercies of the new Federal government. The practical consequence was to enhance the power of the central government, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 established the Township System for surveying, using a rectangular grid system to divide the former Indian land for distribution and sale.
That is why nothing makes sense in East Detroit.
In Cadillac’s day, every farmer wanted to have land right on the Detroit River and near the protection of Fort Pontchartrain.
Accordingly, the land was divided in a series of extremely narrow lots that t which followed the shore line for two hundred to one thousand feet and extended from the Detroit River inland two to three miles. The land scheme ran the length of the strait, from Ecorse in the south up to Lake Saint Claire. Due to their shape, these were called “Ribbon Farms,” and they lined both sides of the river, in what is now Detroit, Michigan to the north, and Windsor Ontario to the south.
The names of the original landholders have come down to us as the badly mangled French names for the streets that follow the shape of the ribbons: Gratiot, Dequindre, Charlevoix, Chene, Beaufait, Livernois, Beaubien and Cadieux.
The grandest of the streets that plows north from the river is not named for a French farmer, but for Territorial Judge Augustus Brevoort Woodward.
When fire raced through Detroit in 1805, only one building was left standing. Widespread desolation was an opportunity for bold planning, just as the vacant swamp in Washington made a grand canvas for urban planning. Michigan’s Territorial Governor William Hull, and the territorial supreme court judge, Augustus Woodward, went to Washington to seek Federal funding to rebuild Detroit.
Their proposal for the rebirth of the old French city included a snowflake pattern of streets similar to that of Charles L'Enfant’s grand scheme for the new Federal City. The main street that cut through Detroit’s Grand Circus Park was ultimately named for Judge Woodward, who quipped that it was not in honor of him, but “because it lead toward the woods north of town.”
In 1824 Governor Lewis Cass extended Woodward twenty-seven miles past the dog-leg created by the ribbon farms to the town named for Chief Pontiac. Along the way there were tollbooths, plank roads, cedar blocks, gravel, ruts, mud and manure.
In 1908, the world's first mile of concrete was poured on Woodward Avenue between Six mile and Seven mile, near the Highland Park factory where Henry Ford produced his Model T automobile on the World’s first assembly line.
The entire 27-mile length of Woodward was paved by 1916, and in 1919 the three-color traffic light appeared on the avenue.
At one time part of the avenue sixteen miles from the river became known as "Piety Hill," because of the number of churches lining the street. It was also known as Birmingham, which became its formal name. Beyond was attractive rolling terrain that was a logical place to build summer homes of the newly and ferociously rich.
All they had to do was drive out Woodward Avenue, in their cars on the concrete, from the city on the river.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com