In July 1910, Detroit hosted the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks for their national convention. To greet the visitors, the city raised a massive “Welcome” arch across Woodward Avenue at Grand Circus Park. Contemporary postcards call it a triumphal arch for the Elks parade, and it appears to have been built of plaster and wood rather than stone.
A One-Week Monument on Woodward Avenue
The structure looked like a smaller cousin of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. Elk statues guarded the base, medallions and garlands filled the panels, and the word “WELCOME” stretched across the top. At night, hundreds of electric bulbs traced every line, turning the arch into a glowing gateway over Detroit’s busiest street.
Woodward Avenue on Parade
By 1910, Detroit had just under 466,000 residents and ranked as the ninth-largest city in the United States. Hosting a national convention gave civic leaders a chance to present Detroit as modern, orderly, and worth visiting.
During the Elks gathering, Woodward Avenue was designated as a parade route. Photographs show streetcars, automobiles, marching delegates, and dense crowds moving beneath and around the arch. Business signs for Diamond Tires, United Cigar Stores, and Jackson Photo crowd the edges of the frame, underlining how commercial the street already was.
Grand Circus Park at the Center
The arch stood at Grand Circus Park, the elliptical green space Judge Augustus Woodward planned after the city’s 1805 fire. His design, modeled on the radial street plan of Washington, D.C., sent major avenues—including Woodward—spoking out from the park.
Grand Circus Park was, and still is, a hinge between downtown’s business core and its theater district. Putting the Elks arch here turned an everyday crossroads into a ceremonial entrance. Visitors coming up from the riverfront or the big hotels at Campus Martius likely passed through this gateway on their way to parades, meetings, and parties.
Electric Lights, Streetcars, and the Motor Age
The night postcard of the arch, credited to photographer Louis James Pesha, is a carefully staged piece of technology boosterism. A long exposure turns passing streetcars into bright streaks that slice across the dark pavement. The effect was not accidental; the caption notes those streaks as a feature of the time-lapse view.
Electric illumination itself was still a selling point. Signs for an electric company appear in the shadows of some images, and the arch is wrapped in bulbs from base to cornice. Just one year earlier, a section of Woodward between Six Mile and Seven Mile Roads had become the nation’s first full mile of concrete highway, built by the Wayne County Road Commission.
Within a decade, Woodward would also gain one of the nation’s earliest four-way traffic lights at its intersection with Michigan Avenue. These milestones made the Elks arch feel right at home: a ceremonial frame around a rapidly modernizing street.
What Happened to the Elks Arch?
Like many event structures, the arch was meant to be temporary. After the convention ended, it was dismantled, leaving only photographs, postcards, and a few written descriptions in archives at the Detroit Public Library, Detroit Historical Society, and other collections.
Yet the impulse behind it never fully left. Detroit still builds big visual statements when major events come to town. In recent years the city has even installed oversized letter signs ahead of national gatherings like the NFL Draft, echoing that 1910 urge to announce, in large type, that visitors are welcome here.
For a single summer week in 1910, the Elks arch turned Woodward Avenue at Grand Circus Park into a monumental gate. Today only the images remain, but they offer a sharp glimpse of Detroit at the moment it was stepping fully into the automobile age.
