Mackinac Island has no cars. You walk and bike everywhere or take the odd horse-drawn taxi. This is great, and the whole place feels like you’re living in one big modern buzzword, whether that be green, sustainable, eco-viable, etc.. But, the island’s dirty little secret is that it outsources parking (and other negative externalities) at the expense of its mainland neighbors.
Assuming you don’t own your own airplane – you can get to the island two different ways; 1) from the Upper Peninsula (St. Ignace) or 2) the Lower Peninsula (Mackinaw City). From there, you’ll have to take a boat. Yet, once you get to either St. Ignace or Mackinac City, you’ll have to park – and both towns have destroyed their cores to accommodate parking for the island.
Prime downtown real estate is being used as car storage. The photo above is in St. Ignace. The town has an okay-ish traditional downtown core, but is entirely cut off from its strongest asset, the lake, by open surface parking lots. The same goes for Mackinaw City. It too has an okay, quaint downtown – but like St. Ignace, no connection to the waterfront whatsoever.
This is my car. It was parked 10 feet from the beach and had scenic harbor views. It had a better view than my hotel room.
My questions here is simple: What is wrong with our collective American psyche that we’d think it was acceptable to destroy two traditional downtowns to merely provide parking to service one traditional downtown? That isn’t to say that these places can’t offer parking for Mackinac Island – but it boggles my mind why they didn’t put these large surface lots at the edge of town, instead of knocking over existing buildings and history to put them in?
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The saddest moment of an otherwise amazing vacation was on the final day. My girlfriend and I were walking along the Mackinac City Heritage Pathway that (sort of) went along Lake Huron. Toward the end of the trek, we approached a marker plaque with an image of a busy harbor with working small shops, bars and a magnificent brick apartment building. Below the image, the text read (this is not a joke):
This was the site of Mackinaw City’s original downtown. It was founded in 184x by such and such who was from here and there. The buildings remained until the 1970s when it was turned into a McDonald’s restaurant.
