Porch Notes
One Saturday a year, Woodward becomes the world's biggest car show
History and culture
In 1995, a Ferndale plumber’s idea for a small fundraiser — a nostalgic cruise up Woodward Avenue like the ones teenagers ran in the muscle-car sixties — expected maybe 40,000 people. A quarter of a million showed up. Thirty years on, the Woodward Dream Cruise is the largest one-day automotive event on earth: more than a million spectators and tens of thousands of classic cars, hot rods, and muscle machines rumbling the sixteen miles from Ferndale to Pontiac on the third Saturday of every August.
If you live in a Woodward community — Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge, Huntington Woods, Berkley, Royal Oak, Birmingham, the Bloomfields, Pontiac — the Cruise is part of the deal. Lawn chairs claim curb space days in advance, every parking lot becomes an impromptu car show, and the avenue where America basically invented cruising (and where the first mile of concrete highway in the world was poured, back in 1909) spends a week sounding like 1965. Some residents leave town that weekend; most wouldn’t dream of it.
Where to see it
Woodward Avenue from Ferndale through Royal Oak, Birmingham, and Bloomfield to Pontiac, the third Saturday of August — though the cruising starts days early.