Could the Woodward Dream Cruise become Detroit's Mardi Gras? The idea has been put forth by Larry Alexander, head of the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), and was publicized by the editorial page editor of The Detroit News, Nolan Finley.
The thinking of the CVB folks goes this way: they estimate that about a third of the 1.5 million Cruise visitors come from outside the five-county metropolitan area. They fill up the area's motels and RV parks, and swamp the eateries, especially in Oakland County where the Cruise has run informally, to the north of the Detroit city limits. If you figure each visitor, say, spends a mere $100, that's $50 Million, a lot of new moola for a depressed area. The $100 figure is undoubtedly low, covering only half a typical motel room for two nights. Indeed, I'll bet the Cruise raises more than the Superbowl that Detroit hosted last winter, and with hardly a dime spent on promoting outside the immediate area.
I understand that the CVB's recent involvement was pretty much limited to contacting every collector or special-interest car club in North America that it could get a handle on, plus providing convenient parking, a tent, review stand, and lunch for media and special guests at a central spot alongside the Cruise route. Up to now, the City of Detroit, the core of Motor City , and surrounding counties have simply done their best to ignore this home-grown phenomena. Even the northside suburbs through which the route runs would have been happier not to front the extra costs of police and waste collecting.
Because the Cruise originally rose out of just one suburban community's fund-raising, low profile street fair a dozen years ago, and spread like wildfire, it has never had a chance to get organized on a grand scale. Will the big guys now getting involved, including a large, event-oriented public relations firm, be able to Mardi Gras-ize the Cruise, or will they be simply overwhelmed by events beyond their control? Time will tell.
There's no question, that the Woodward Dream Cruise has become even an international event. This year it was covered by both German and French TV, which sent news teams to Detroit. And remember, foreign cars are nothing more than an occasional curiosity at the Cruise - although a vintage French Citroën Traction Avant did pass me by before I could unholster my camera.
One of the most notable changes I observed in this year's Cruise was the much greater participation of African-Americans, both as spectators and drivers. African-American drivers showed off some very imaginative, well executed, and occasionally funny custom jobs. I particularly liked a 1932-vintage black "Capone" sedan complete with faux bullet holes; it was sufficiently customized that I couldn't decide whether it had started as a Packard or an Oldsmobile. Generally, these drivers seemed to favor Chevrolet Impalas and Cadillacs, either restored or customized, but it may have been there was an active organization of GM employees involved.
As in the past, among the huge variety of vehicles parading or parked alongside Woodward, I personally have always preferred the well-maintained originals or carefully restored cars of past decades - Memory Street for this old-timer. Station wagons seemed to be more abundant, both because they are probably relatively inexpensive to acquire and because there was an organized Station Wagon club which came to the Cruise.
There is no end to the creative imaginations that go into the cars - and occasionally trucks - in the event. I think, for instance, of the red Corvair Monza Spyder convertible with a three-foot-wide furry black stuffed spider on its rear tonneau. The bottle blonde in a pink outfit, riding shotgun in a pink mid-50s Thunderbird with a pink-and-white stuffed poodle in her lap. The tiny cars with huge blower horns poking from their hoods, in one case an English Ford Anglia so equipped and also towing a tiny house trailer. The "work in progress" cars, like the rusty Ford rod obviously driven up from Kentucky (no one would bother to trailer it!). Half-done paint jobs - guess they just couldn't get 'em finished before the Cruise.
There were several paired up cars seen this year. For example, His and Her black-and-white mid-'80s Mustang convertibles, black fastback Mustangs of '66 and '67 vintage, and two maroon Lincoln Continental convertibles, one a '66 the other a '67. A Ford thing perhaps? Not quite: get this, there were red and maroon '57 Chevrolets which had been made into stretch limousines, accompanied by an equally "stretched" Mustang of '65-'66 vintage.
It takes all kinds: a sixty-ish bearded guy riding a bicycle in the parade with a large parrot perched on his right shoulder. A biker family, Dad driving, Mom holding on from behind him and two kids in a rarely seen motorcycle sidecar. An Asian three-wheeled motorized rickshaw. A car with Hawaiian license plates - somehow I don't think he drove here. See TCC's Cruise Photo Gallery for more examples.
Really, the Cruise is more than just the third Saturday in August. In milder form, it runs all summer. It gets serious at least a week before the official day. And, weather permitting - especially if it's cool and there's no rain - every night after normal working hours, there's Cruisin' going on, with hundreds to thousands of spectators in their lawn chairs deployed along almost the entire eight-lane-wide cum grassy boulevard stretch of Woodward.
And it's gone from a modern Detroit institution to a national, even international, celebration. A two-sided, 16-mile-long Street Fair.
Now if folks would just buy Detroit 's new products as readily as they worship those of old, everything would be dandy.
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