clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Name Games

The vast majority of Chicago's street name origins are well chronicled by the 1988 book Streetwise Chicago. Some continue to elude, one of which is Garfield Park's Woodward Drive. WBEZ's John R. Schmidt surmises that it's probably linked to an egomaniac who gave himself the name Augustus Brevoort Woodward after the first Roman emperor. Woodward was a lawyer, judge and a big wig in the Michigan Territory, helping to rebuild Detroit from the ashes in the early 1800s and drawing up a college that would later become the University of Michigan. But he probably never set foot in fledgling Chicago. [WBEZ]