It takes more than a steady drizzle and a soggy, bearish local economy to discourage lovers of Detroit cars. The Woodward Dream Cruise once again has shown through the gloom to produce the biggest free car show in the world. Further, the credit has to go mostly to the participants, who came from near and far to display their wheeled works of art, or to view them.
Promoters were predicting 1.5 million people and 40,000 cruisers, and though the crowd seemed a little thin under Saturday morning's precipitation, clearly it picked up and we were "packin' 'em in" by late afternoon.
The natural debris of such a crowd was quickly swept up by municipal and private interests along the 16-mile route of the 12th Annual Woodward Cruise, so that by church-going time Sunday morning, you'd scarcely know that a major event had ended officially at 9 p.m. the night before.
Detroit's Sunday paper introduced a new angle: Could the 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.
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