Walled Lake danced to the big bands, then burned on Christmas

For about 45 years, the place to be on a summer Saturday night near Detroit was the dance floor on Walled Lake. It began modestly in 1919, when the Taylor brothers put up a bathhouse and a little dance hall on the south shore — close enough that Detroiters could drive out and call it the first real beach west of the city.

The dance hall is what made it famous. By 1925 a grocer named Louis Tolettene had built a huge new pavilion, the Casino, with a polished maple floor measuring 120 by 140 feet and a ceiling rigged with hand-painted, lit-up stars to fake a night sky overhead. He was an early showman about it — Michigan’s first mirrored disco ball, by some accounts, spun here in 1928. And the bands he booked were the biggest in the country. Over the years the Casino’s bandstand held Guy Lombardo, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, and a young Lawrence Welk, who liked the lake so much he bought a cottage on it so his family could stay near while he played.

In 1929 the shore got an amusement park to match the music: a roller coaster called the Flying Dragon went up, then a Tilt-a-Whirl and a Ferris wheel and the rest of the midway. For decades the lights and the music and the rides ran together on one stretch of beach.

The end came fast and on a strange day. On Christmas Day, 1965, the Casino caught fire — a discarded cigarette, the story goes — and the great pavilion couldn’t be saved. The amusement park hung on a few more seasons before closing in 1968, when the rides were pulled apart and trucked off to a park in Detroit. The dance floor where Glenn Miller’s band once played is houses and shoreline now, quiet on a summer night.