My wife, son, and I recently took a vacation to Michigan. We left from Chicago on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, turned the corner around Lake Michigan, and started heading north towards Mackinac Island. We stayed along the Lake Michigan coast for the most part, stopping in many little tourist towns along the way. I didn’t take pictures in all of them, but almost all were very charming, with what appear to be very healthy central business districts. I know the tourist money helps with the business aspect, but there were some trends and commonalities that I think are worth noting:
- Traffic moves slow in the downtown areas. There were very few multi-lane roads.
- There was lots of on-street parking. Angled parking was especially common. Drivers looking for parking is part of the reason traffic moves slowly.
- Street trees were usually abundant, large, and shady.
- Buildings on the main commercial streets were intact. There were solid street walls of buildings, not the gap-toothed building-parking lot-building-parking lot pattern.
- Parking was on-street or behind buildings in public lots.
- There was good signage directing people to main attractions and maps of the business district in many towns.
Here are some photos:
South Haven, MISouth Haven, MI
Holland, MI
Traverse City, MI
Charlevoix, MI
Petoskey, MI
Mackinaw City, MI
Mackinac Island, MI
Thanks for sharing. It’s always nice to see some love for Michigan from an Ohioan (especially one from Columbus!). I’m not sure I’d characterize any of these towns as “urban,” but they do provide a nice contrast to the urban planning disaster that is metro Detroit. Our state’s a funny place — our smaller towns have held up much better over the years than our biggest city. If it weren’t for Detroit, we’d look like a lot like Iowa with lake access.
Let’s not call it love, although it was a very nice trip
I would say Traverse City is somewhat urban. It was one of the few smaller cities I’ve been to where I could see myself living happily and comfortably.
The dichotomy between industrial southern Michigan and anything north of the tri-cities is indeed striking. I would expect a state with so many beautiful natural resources to be an attractive place to live for more people. This brings up two more lessons:
1. Jobs are a prerequisite to attract and retain population.
2. Don’t put all your economic development eggs in one (motorized) basket.
Seems so simple: if small towns most people haven’t heard of can do it, and do it well, why not our big cities? If you ever head far north I can give you a tour of Mpls which is (sadly) a big anomaly in the region. There were many population gains in neighborhoods while losses tended to be by small. Urban revitalization dollars where directed to neighborhoods where business districts were prioritized and today are the opposite of what they used to loo like (Columbus off-High urban business districts with precious little worth visiting). The amount of cycling infrastructure far exceeds what there is in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati combined, as does modern light rail infrastructure projects. With that said, there are still numerous areas here where lessons can be learned from those pictures above, not to mention other local streets that have already been pedestrianized. It’s no surprise that when you invest in small businesses and make it easy to get between them by car, bus, bike and train you get a pretty nice urban environment.