The Metropark everyone still calls Metro Beach

Ask anyone in Harrison Township where the beach is and they’ll send you to “Metro Beach,” even though the signs out front say Lake St. Clair Metropark. The name on paper has changed twice. It opened in 1950 as St. Clair Metropolitan Beach, got shortened over the years to Metro Beach Metropark, and in 2011 the Huron-Clinton Metroparks board renamed it once more to put the lake’s name back up front. The locals never got the memo, and honestly the old name fits — the whole point of the place is a 600-foot stretch of sand on Lake St. Clair, a rare thing this close to Detroit.

It’s a county-sized day out folded into one park. There’s a 50-meter swimming pool with two water slides that drop you 17 feet, an 18-hole par-3 golf course, mini golf, and a marina tucked along the lakeshore. But the part that surprises people is how wild the back of the park stays. Behind the beach and the boat launches, the nature area runs trails through a freshwater marsh, meadows, and woods — the kind of cattail-and-redwing-blackbird marsh that once lined this whole corner of the lake before the subdivisions came. Birders have logged hundreds of species out there over the decades.

The lake itself is the draw and the reason the park exists. Lake St. Clair sits between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, shallow and warm and busy with sailboats and freighters threading the shipping channel. From the beach you can watch a thousand-foot ore boat slide past while a kid two feet away builds a sandcastle. On a hot July Saturday the parking lot fills early and the smell of charcoal hangs over the picnic shelters, same as it did when your grandparents called it Metropolitan Beach and packed the station wagon for the day.