Cruise drops dreams of Detroit

Annual car event to stay north of Eight Mile after '08 Motown tryout falls short

Catherine Jun / The Detroit News

ROYAL OAK -- A year after making its first reach into the Motor City, the Woodward Dream Cruise will be pulling back from Detroit this summer.

"We're going to go back to basics," said Dale Dawkins, board president and CEO of Woodward Dream Cruise Inc., the nonprofit that runs the annual classic car cruise. "We have no plans to do an event south of Eight Mile" this summer, he said.

That's because a lack of revenue and poor attendance prompted cruise organizers to part ways with Motorcities National Heritage Area, a federally-funded group based in the Renaissance Center that coordinated new events last year in the days leading up to the cruise at the Detroit Opera House, Michigan State Fairgrounds and outside Comerica Park.

Motorcities, which operates under the auspices of the National Park Service, courted Dream Cruise organizers in 2007, offering to bring the Dream Cruise party officially to Detroit for the first time as well as raise the visibility of the one-day event.

The cruise, held on a Saturday every August, draws more than 1 million spectators to watch some 40,000 muscle cars and classic vehicles roll or park in nine Oakland County communities along the historic avenue.

Both groups said the parting was amicable.

"Motorcities is all about the region and auto tourism and they're going to continue to focus on that," said Bud Liebler, spokesman for Motorcities.

A charity fundraiser at the Opera House days before the cruise was hailed as a success, drawing crowds and raising substantial dollars for the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy

But other events had thinner crowds. Only several dozen cars turned out at an event outside Comerica Park that same day. And new VIP passes offered to cruisers fell flat. Cruise organizers saw none of the $10,000 promised in revenues.

It was "a tough year to start something new," said Chris Baum, spokesman for the Detroit Convention and Visitors Bureau. He said the flurry of new festivities downtown were competing against events spun off the 100th anniversary of General Motors Corp., as well as the centennial of Model T.

"An awful lot of people in the car community did not hear of them because there was so much going on," Baum said.

Baum said that Motorcities, for which he serves as a board director, would continue to promote Autopalooza August, a monthlong slate of automotive events in Michigan that kicks off with the Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance.

Karl Komajda said he would have taken his sonic blue 2003 Mustang Cobra to events in Detroit had he known about them.

"I hadn't heard anything going on," said Komajda, 37, of Warren. "Anything that's going on that's (about) cruising, I would have been there for sure."

The expected crowds didn't materialize at the fairgrounds, where famed rock 'n' roll artist Chubby Checker performed and cruisers were invited to a classic drive-thru by Bob's Big Boy Restaurant.

"The problem was trying to get over people's fear of coming to the fairgrounds," said Jack "Doc" Watson, a legend in muscle car circles for his work while at Hurst Performance Co.

Watson is suing Motorcities for $150,000 in non-payment for merchandise.

Cruise organizers say the pullback will enable them to focus on finding new sponsors. Two major sponsors, Eaton Corp. and GM withdrew their funding in recent months. Together, they contributed $100,000 to the event.

Sponsorship dollars help pay for police overtime and clean-up and thousands of porta-potties along Woodward.

"These are nervous times," said Dawkins, the Woodward Dream Cruise officials.