ODS - Outer Drive Series - 197 Traditional Cache

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Hidden : 2/4/2012
Difficulty:
2 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: not chosen (not chosen)

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This series is dedicated to that little-known Gem of Detroit called Outer Drive.  This series can be done in part, or complete as a whole...whatever you choose to do, it will most definitely give you a nice tour of some special parts of the Metro Area.


Outer Drive is a bypass road which encircles both the eastern and western portions of the Metro Detroit area. It resembles a jagged horseshoe and was not originally intended to move traffic as much as to provide a pleasurable drive around Detroit. This drive would include travel through beautiful subdivisions (many of which have deteriorated badly), school sites and park areas. First proposed in 1918, it immediately won acceptance and eventually evolved into the road that exists today.

It starts and stops and starts again. It runs north, south, east and west, twisting in long curves and turning in sharp angles.

There are residential, commercial and industrial sites, sometimes all within a few blocks of each other.  Outer Drive is one bizarre road, stretching more than 40 miles in a jagged horseshoe from the East Side at Mack Avenue (the Detroit-Grosse Pointe Park border) to Jefferson Avenue in Ecorse, Downriver-area of the Metro.

Newspaper and magazine articles contained in the Burton Collection at the Detroit Public Library provide insight into what has to be one of the oddest city thoroughfares in the country.

A Detroit News article from 1922 provides this account of the road’s origins:
“With its end at the extreme east and west sides of Detroit, its route clustered with beautiful subdivisions, potential residence districts, school sites, park areas and parkways, an Outer Drive, still unnamed, is fast emerging from its state as the dream of a former Detroit mayor into a reality.

“The history of the Outer Drive is brief. A committee was appointed by Mayor Oscar B. Marx, in February, 1918, to study the advisability of such a highway. Members of the committee had no sooner investigated the project than they became interested.

Interest led to something akin to enthusiasm when a comprehensive report was filed recommending ‘a boulevard 150 feet wide to encircle the city eight miles from its center on the east and north, connecting with Oakman Highway on the west.’”

A 1929 article in Michigan Women magazine predicted: a “great pleasure boulevard” that will “lie like a necklace around Detroit…”

It was laid out as a grandiose parkway and not intended to move traffic efficiently from one place to another, but to be a picturesque drive instead.

The concept originated at the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where an urban planning model dubbed “City Beautiful” was unveiled. Conceived in reaction to the industrial age, the model provided city planners with strategies to reclaim urban areas from factories and skyscrapers by envisioning development on a more human scale.

Some folks have noted  that it was a broad, sweeping philosophy, where the intent was to create “the ultimate city for the working man.”

The best-known example of this type of planning approach is Lakeshore Drive in Chicago. It has also been noted that the problem with Outer Drive is that it was built piecemeal. To expedite construction, it was linked to  existing roads whenever possible. That explains why it suddenly becomes part of Chandler Park Drive, for instance.

South of the State Fairgrounds the stretch of road is called, appropriately, State Fair. West of Woodward, near Palmer Woods, neighborhood associations in the 1920s successfully blocked construction, claiming the increased traffic would hurt property values.

The homes along the entire stretch of Outer Drive do not have a consistent design or style throughout because construction came subdivision by subdivision.

Outer Drive also has managed to maintain it's reputation as a "status address" for many folks that live along the road.


And now...we dedicate this series of Caches to this most unique and unusual road across Metro Detroit.

 

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