Luna Pier: a Lake Erie town named after a vanished dance hall

The town used to be called Lakewood, a plain enough name for a quiet stretch of Lake Erie shore six miles north of the Ohio line. What changed it was a pier. Early in the 1900s someone ran a long wooden pier out into the lake and built a dance hall on the end of it, and on summer nights big-band music carried out over the water. A trolley line connected the spot to Toledo Beach, and dancers rode in by the carload through the Roaring Twenties and right on through the Depression.

The dance hall borrowed its name from Luna Park, a famous amusement park back in Detroit, and the name stuck to the whole place. When the community finally incorporated as a city in 1963, it made things official: Luna Pier, after a pier that was already mostly memory.

The wooden dance pier is long gone. What stands now is a big crescent-shaped concrete breakwall, roughly 800 feet of it curving out into Lake Erie, with a boardwalk and a little lighthouse-style beacon at the end. People walk it to fish, to watch the freighters track across the lake toward Toledo, and to catch a sunrise straight off the water — Luna Pier faces east, so the lake hands you the sunrise instead of the sunset most Michigan towns get.

It’s one of the smaller cities in the state, a couple of square miles wedged between the interstate and the lake. But the name keeps a whole lost evening alive: a wooden walkway, a band, and a crowd dancing out over Lake Erie with the dark water underneath.