The Pointes: five towns on one famous shore

The drive up Lake Shore Road — water on one side, hundred-year trees and great lawns on the other — is one of Michigan’s signature miles, and it belongs to the five small cities that share the name Grosse Pointe. French farmers named this “fat point” of land three centuries ago; Detroit’s auto aristocracy made it famous, building estates along the lake whose crown survivor is the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores — a National Historic Landmark designed like a Cotswold village, open to everyone for tours, lakeside dining, and concerts on the lawn.

What keeps the Pointes more livable than precious is the civic equipment: the cities run their own lakefront parks with pools and marinas, the War Memorial hosts everything from lectures to sailing camp in a lakeside mansion, and the walkable shopping villages — the Hill, the Village, Kercheval in the Park — function like small-town main streets stacked along one shore. Harper Woods tucks in behind as the approachable doorway to it all. Old money built it; ordinary daily life is what it’s actually for now.