Grand Beach: a Jazz Age resort that turned into its own village

In the Roaring Twenties there was a 200-foot ski jump on the beach at Grand Beach. That alone tells you what this place was: a built-from-scratch lakeside resort on the dunes in the far southwest corner of Michigan, an easy run up from Chicago, dreamed up to give city people somewhere to play. The resort had a 175-room hotel, dances out on the pier, and the kind of summer-long social calendar a 1920s developer could sell. The ski jump sent daredevils sailing down the sand toward Lake Michigan.

What’s unusual is what happened next. Plenty of Michigan resort developments faded or got swallowed by a nearby town. Grand Beach didn’t — the people who summered and then settled there incorporated it as its own village, a self-governing little municipality sitting inside New Buffalo Township right against the Indiana line. It stayed small. We’re talking a few hundred year-round residents on roughly 600 acres of wooded dunes, with its own beach, its own golf course, and its own village hall on Perkins Boulevard.

That gives Grand Beach a strange, pleasant double life. It’s a real Michigan village, with a clerk and a council and snow to plow, and it’s also still essentially a resort — the population balloons in summer when the cottages fill, then empties out when the lake wind turns cold and the dune grass goes brown.

The ski jump is long gone, of course. But walk the quiet streets between the cottages on a July evening, smell the lake, and the bones of the old resort idea are still there underfoot — a whole town built so people could come and have a good time by the water.