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56 2 Woodward Avenue Never teach any classification, any general law, any taxonomy, any terminology, for the sake of ensuring that students will accept it as true, unless the truth will serve their further pursuit of the inexhaustible variety of people and works. —Wayne Booth, “Pluralism in the Classroom” My mapping of Detroit begun in chapter 1 leads me to a specific representation (or sensation) along the city’s main road, Woodward Avenue. Woodward Avenue is the centerpiece of my mapping route that I described in the previous chapter; it is the road I would take to and from work every day. But Woodward, as that mapping also shows me, possesses meanings in addition to the communal understanding that it is “just a road.” Woodard, the mapping demonstrates, functions like a database within the network of Detroit. The initial part of that database that I drew from in chapter 1 was based in popular culture. The historical part of that database shows me that Woodward is named for Judge Augustus B. Woodward, the early-nineteenth-century city planner of Detroit. I learn that by 1917, the entire twenty-seven-mile distance of Woodward Avenue was completely paved. The historical part of this database also shows me that Woodward houses notable landmarks such as one of the country’s remaining movie palaces, the Fox Theater, as well as more contemporary constructions like the Detroit Tigers’ home park of Comerica and the Detroit Lions’ home at Ford Field. These elements all frame a type of historical database, one that would presumably sit within a much larger database of spatial information. Two photographs from David Lee Poremba’s collection of nineteenthand early-twentieth-century photography, Detroit: City of Industry, draw me another kind of database historical entry related to Woodward. The Woodward Avenue 57 first, a photograph of George Miller’s “Detroit Hand Made Cigars,” and the second, a photograph of the George Moebs and Company Store, depict the manufacture of cigars in Detroit, Michigan, at the end of the nineteenth century. Detroit, Poremba writes, “was once one of the largest producers of cigars and other tobacco products in the country, so much so that Detroit came to be called the ‘Havana of the North’ by 1901” (50). Moebs’s company “employed a force of skilled cigar makers, ranging from 150 to 175 in number, making brands such as ‘Flor de Moebs,’ ‘Ben-Hur,’ and ‘Detroit Slugger,’ among others” (90). Both tobacco operations , Poremba notes, were located on Woodward Avenue. By the midnineteenth century, the area where Detroit’s tobacco industry was located was also the heart of the city’s economic activity. When one spoke of Detroit and commerce at this time period in the city’s history, one would have spoken about Woodward Avenue. “In 1865,” Sidney Glazer writes in his short history of Detroit, commerce centered around the cross-streets of Jefferson and Woodward and the east and west streets south of Jefferson. This area developed as a business section as an outgrowth of the days when business activity was related to river traffic. Very gradually before the close of the century, establishments began to move north and Woodward Avenue became the established “Main Street.” The presence of the major retail stores on Woodward indicated that more Detroiters were moving to newly developed northern portions of the city “out Woodward.” (76) With such a promising beginning, one would think that this street would come to symbolize the success of the city, that, as a categorical label, Woodward would mean economic success. Yet Woodward Avenue, a major fairway in the city that runs from the Detroit River to the city of Pontiac, has often been employed as metonymic of Detroit’s failures, not as the center piece of a once fledgling American cigar industry. A 1984 Newsweek article, “Detroit’s Torn Lifeline” posed Woodward accordingly: “Every major American city has a lifeline that reflects its viability and its vulnerability, its history and its hope for the future . . . In the Motor City of Detroit, that lifeline is Woodward Avenue, eight lanes starting at the Detroit River and proceeding for eight unbending miles to the city limits .” For the editors of Newsweek, such lifelines are typically generated by commerce, retail, and related ventures. And in turn, such lifelines, when they are disconnected, lead to slow deaths. The Newsweek article makes that point clear; its author carefully chooses words from a larger lexicon of “devastation- motivated language that will describe the supposedly [52.14...

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