While walking around before the Tigers game the other night on my way to Comerica Park to unburden myself of sobriety, faith in my hometown team and a lot of cash, it struck me how different Washington Boulevard looks nowadays. The old layout of the street was torn up in a Super-Bowl-inspired renovation that restored it to its pre-1970s appearance, an appearance admittedly without the overflow of functioning businesses, bustling crowds, and swank cachet it once had as an attempt to replicate the streets of Paris.

The street was originally called Washington Grand Boulevard, so named by Augustus Woodward after the great fire of 1805, when he designed the distinctive spokes-in-a-wheel pattern for Detroit’s streets that is still in existence today. In 1828 it was renamed Wayne Street after General Anthony Wayne, but was changed back to Washington once again a few decades later.

Before the economic boom of the 1920s, during which most of downtown Detroit as we know it was built, Washington was lined with homes and small businesses. In the next couple decades, it became a focus of the City Beautiful movement, which espoused the idea that beautification of a city would inspire civic loyalty, reduce social problems, bring American cities to equal cultural status with European cities, and draw the upper classes to the city center to spend money.

Wealthy Detroiters like the Book family hired noted architects such as Albert Kahn and Louis Kamper to design the Book Building, Book Tower and Book Cadillac Hotel.

Other notable buildings on the street include the lovely St. Aloysius Church, founded in 1873 and featuring elaborate stone detailing in its facade; the Chancery Building, constructed at the same time and used by the Archdiocese of Detroit; the century-old Washington Arcade Building, known as Himeloch’s department store until 1977; and the Julian Madison building, another example of 1920s architecture. The strip of Washington between Michigan Avenue and Grand Circus Park was known at the time as the “Fifth Avenue of the Midwest.”

In the 1920s, when Detroit was the nation’s fifth-largest retail market, Washington Boulevard was the place to be if you owned a business. Modeled after the boulevards of Paris, Washington featured lush landscaping, large storefronts, and wide sidewalks for window shopping at the strip’s dozens of businesses, anchored by the Book Cadillac Hotel at one end and Grand Circus Park at the other, with the David Whitney Building hosting upscale retailers opposite the equally upscale Statler Hotel across the street.

As the 60s and 70s wore on, Washington Boulevard’s fortunes began sinking with the rest of downtown’s. Businesses began closing, the Statler Hotel shut its doors, the David Whitney Building grew emptier, and the Book Cadillac Hotel started closing floors to save money. Lower-rent businesses moved into the ground-floor storefronts. The grand buildings inspired by the City Beautiful movement gave way to architecturally uninspiring structures like the massive Trolley Plaza apartment building.

By the late 70s and early 80s the City tried to revive the strip through a questionable redesign, roughly coinciding with the decision to turn part of Woodward into a pedestrian mall, a fetish of 1970s urban planners. The decision was made to tear up Washington Boulevard and make the boulevard not actually a boulevard, but rather the staging area for a giant, red, erector set designed by Birmingham-based architect Gino Rosetti, who later designed the Compuware Building and Ford Field.

Among other things, it contained James Pallas’ art installation tribute to Thomas Edison, featuring giant light bulbs arranged in large circles. Contained beneath the metal maze were large fountains, small trees, benches and tables, drinking fountains, elaborate brick patterns, and lots and lots of drab concrete, the kind of meaningless blocks of concrete that Soviet planners would’ve heartily approved of. The City also plopped down fine examples of 1970s public sculpture, mostly pieces depicting things like the artists’ agonized rendition of a blob.

By the 1990s it became a version of Capital Park North, with hobos lounging against the fountains and in the shaded benches provided up and down the strip.

This whole monstrosity stretched up and down the east side of Washington Boulevard, pushing traffic into four, distinctly non-boulevard lanes on the west side of the street. After the People Mover was built a decade or so later, the area was swarming with all sorts of overhead stuff like concrete rail tracks and red monkey bars.

All of this didn’t exactly distract from the presence of abandoned dinosaurs like the Book Cadillac or Statler, but neither did Mayor Coleman Young’s fake awnings on the latter to hide the fact that it was empty during the Republican National Convention in 1980. The concrete and red metal installation did, however, separate foot traffic from window shopping and blocked the views of the buildings you’d want to see. If the intention was to totally mess up what had been a nice area, the City did a marvelous job.

In addition, the City added a bicentennial-era trolley system which utilized nine, 100-year-old street trolleys, a reminder of the era when hundreds of streetcars operated on Detroit’s streets. The Washington trolleys had to be purchased from Spain, since Detroit’s original trolleys were sold to Mexico in the 1950s when the system was shut down for good in Detroit. The trolleys attracted only about 3,000 riders per year, and at 50 cents per rider, the City was subsidizing the system to the tune of $100 per person each year. The system became a money pit, and a couple years ago the trolleys were removed permanently.

Now with its return to planning sanity spurred by the Superbowl next year, Washington Boulevard is wide open (seen at right), with lots of space to match the gaping hole that will soon be left where the Statler stood for 90 years, right next to the hole where the Tuller Hotel stood for over 80 years, itself just across from the likely hole where the Fine Arts Building has stood for 100 years.

But beyond the demolition mania sweeping the city, at least the City recognized the planning mistakes of the 70s and 80s and acted to correct them, both on Washington and on Woodward. The addition of Bookies bar, in the ground floor of the Book Tower, has brought suburbanites back to the strip, an area most of them were hard-pressed to find a few years ago.

The demolition of ugly awnings over business storefronts on the boulevard’s east side has revealed a number of 1970s-era and 80s-era businesses like Ebony House and Downtown Fish and Seafood. But at least the building’s original 1928 stone facade is also exposed, showing it has more potential than one might’ve guessed. And foot traffic from football and baseball fans parking all around downtown and passing through Washington Boulevard on their way to the stadiums is revealing Detroit’s former “Fifth Avenue” to lots of people who were never aware of its existence.