Switch on your television late at night and you’ll likely find yourself vicariously cruising to Al’s for a burger with Fonzi, listening to the jukebox and admiring those classic cars from the 1950s and 1960s on television reruns of the popular 1970s show “Happy Days”.
But if you’re looking for more than a vicarious thrill, rev up your engine and visit the Detroit area during the third weekend in August to relive those “happy days” with more than a million other folks during the Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise—a celebration of vintage vehicles, classic music and those carefree cruising days billed as the “world’s largest one-day celebration of classic car culture” by organizers.
Links and info within this story updated 2020
Special events like car shows, classic music performances, sock hops and parades stud the official 16-mile cruise route running from Ferndale in the south to Pontiac in the north.
Woodward Avenue, an eight-lane boulevard extending from the Detroit riverfront to the city of Pontiac in neighboring Oakland County, became known as a cruising strip as early as the late 1940s when the road’s northern sections cut a straight path through Oakland countryside to form the perfect drag strip.
My father remembers cruising Woodward as early as 1949, driving a 1948 Ford and only losing races to a “hopped up” 1940 Ford, modified in the rear so it would accelerate more quickly. There wasn’t even a speed limit on the road north of Birmingham (about 7 miles north of Detroit’s northern border), so it was a racer’s paradise.
Cruisers in the late 1940s and early 1950s stopped at places like the Hollywood Drive-In or the Totem Pole along Woodward, much as the “Happy Days” gang frequented Al’s. Cruising the parking lot, maybe stopping for a shake, seeing who was out cruising and being seen were the major activities and remained so throughout Woodward’s cruising heyday during the 50s and 60s, until its death at the hands of the gas crisis in the late 1970s when carmakers quit making the gas-guzzling “muscle cars”.
My own days cruising Woodward came in the mid-1970s, when I cruised the well-traversed strip through southern Oakland County, just north of Detroit, between 9 Mile Road in Ferndale and 14 Mile Road in the northern end of Royal Oak in a 1968 Pontiac Firebird. Many cruisers from that era used their citizens’ band (CB) radios to hook up with friends and make arrangements to meet at the “O.S.” (or “oil slick”, which was the unpaved, oil-covered parking lot on the north east corner of Coolidge and 13 Mile).
While the CBs lent a new twist to cruising, the appeal of checking out the cars, the kids and the drive-ins and diners up and down the strip remained staples of the cruising experience, just as they did in my dad’s days cruising Woodward.
The official Woodward Dream Cruise evolved out of a fundraising effort among Ferndale residents for a youth soccer field. The committee nixed the initial suggestion to stage a classic car show as a fundraiser in 1994 because they felt a car show required too many expenses to be successful.
However, the idea evolved into a proposal for a nostalgic “cruise” and found an enthusiastic audience among Ferndale city council members, and eventually city officials in the neighboring suburbs of Birmingham, Royal Oak, Huntington Woods, Berkley and Pleasant Ridge.
The cities geared up for the first Dream Cruise in 1995. The event exceeded organizers’ expectations, drawing an estimated crowd of nearly 100,000 people to watch thousands of classic cars cruise Woodward. Organizers expect this year’s (2008) 14th annual cruise to draw over a million spectators and 40,000 classic cars and other unusual vehicles.
The Dream Cruise is officially a one-day affair, taking place the third Saturday in August, but cruisers often begin circuits of the route earlier. This year (2008), cruisers began congregating at hot spots along Woodward in late spring, and a trip up the boulevard Monday evening of this week found it choked with bumper-to-bumper traffic through Royal Oak. As with any big event, some area residents see it as a great opportunity to throw a party, while others see it as the best time to flee the traffic, crowds and exhaust fumes by spending a weekend out of town.
Even as many official events did not happen during the Dream Cruise in 2020, there were plenty of cars cruising along Woodward, and the informal cruising that year actually made it feel like the early days of the cruise when the emphasis was totally on the cars and just driving along Woodward!
© Dominique King 2008 (updated for current links in 2020)
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