Mackinac Island is a tourist destination famous for fudge, horse-drawn carriages and prohibiting cars. But is it also a model for those of us who dream of building a world less reliant on automobiles?
What if I told you that I moved there from New York City and discovered there were actually strong parallels between the two otherwise very different places?
Recently I had an exchange on Twitter with someone who had pooh-poohed the idea of Mackinac as a so-called “urbanist paradise.” He explained that he dismissed the place as an “inauthentic tourist trap.” Many people similarly view Mackinac as being overrun with summer tourists (aka “fudgies”), more like a Disney theme park version of an urbanist’s dream than anything worthy of studying for lessons on placemaking and designing more human-scaled, less carbon-intensive communities.
But why not?
There is little doubt that much of the popularity of Mackinac — aside from its considerable natural beauty, of course — stems from the fact that it presents a rare opportunity to leave cars, and all the ills and headaches they bring, behind. Remember how quiet things were during COVID lockdowns? How the sound of traffic just … vanished? That’s sort of what it’s like spending the night on Mackinac.
Mackinac is the only city in the US that has banned all cars and I’ve never wanted to visit a small town more pic.twitter.com/cz91M6e60v
— Sam (@samwightt) June 22, 2023
(Interestingly, several popular tourist destinations in the U.S. are walkable places that are closed to cars, raising questions about whether that is part of their core appeal. But that’s another topic.)
I spent five seasons working on Mackinac Island, so I know what it’s like living there (the long, isolated winters notwithstanding). The Twitter exchange, and a subsequent DM conversation with a friend about how life on the island compares with big-city living, validated what I’ve long thought about the life I lived on Mackinac.
Big Apple to Mackinac
I was in my 20s when I stepped off the Arnold Transit Co. (R.I.P.) ferry one day in April to begin a seasonal job on Mackinac Island tending bar in the dining room of a waterfront hotel. I had fled New York City, where I had gone broke and been mired in a deep mental funk, and was looking for some levity and a chance to reset my life and get back on my feet financially. I had signed a contract to work for six months through the end of the season in October, working six nights a week behind the bar, with my housing comped as a perk of being a manager.
To say I experienced culture shock going from the still-sketchy Brooklyn of the ’90s to Mackinac Island, a Victorian-themed island of some 500 year-round residents located off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, its cultural touchstone, is a big understatement.
It was cold, barely yet springtime in temperament and weeks before the start of the tourist season. The trees were still leafing out after the frigid winter and most of the businesses were still sprucing themselves up, fixing things damaged over a winter of dormancy and building up their inventories in preparation to open. And Lord, it was quiet — eerily quiet by comparison, with the thrum of car traffic, rumble of subways and masses of messy humanity replaced by the sounds of horse hooves on pavement and the occasional horn blast from ferry boats hauling day-trip laborers, cargo freight and smatterings of hardy visitors. I had to suppress some initial panic, fearing I had signed myself up for a summer in a backwater.
What had I done?
Density and mobility, Victorian-style
Turns out there was no need to worry. Within days, I was subsumed with work preparing the sumptuous gardens, moving furniture and doing minor handyman work inside the hotel, and my apprehension about the jarring change of scenery, culture and pace of life quickly faded into memory. There was plenty of work to be done to open the old hotel after the long winter, and hard work proved to be a healing tonic for me. So did the island’s pristine physical beauty and bracing air. Plus, I had quickly fallen in with some peers; when you’re isolated in a remote place with few others, you depend on each other for company and entertainment, and I needed that, too.
In time, the hotel opened its doors for business and the tourist season began in earnest. I quickly found other parallels between NYC and Mackinac Island (don’t laugh).
Here was a compact central business district, small though it may be, that was jam-packed with people. Much of Mackinac’s downtown is comprised of long, rowhouse-style buildings with businesses on the first floor and residential units above. You go for entire blocks without seeing a break in the buildings, each one pressed up tightly to the next. Aside from bike rental shops, there is nary a parking lot to be found.
Main Street on a busy summer afternoon is a riot of people on foot, bicycles and horse-drawn carriages or drays. The street activity can be hectic. Visitors often mistake the lack of cars for a lack of traffic, but serious accidents are rare.
Living quarters are also compact, with many seasonal employees housed in second-floor condos, row houses or purpose-built apartments. The summer population of the island balloons only to a few thousand with the arrival of seasonal workers, but the living density of those people is relatively high in the central business district, especially when you factor in the many hotels and inns. And yet, three quarters of the island remains undevelopable state parkland.
Bikes as utility
Then there are the bicycles, which may seem like the most obvious point of comparison but are also in some ways the least obvious. Because you quickly learn, when you come to the island to work, that you will want a bike not only to get around, but to haul things.
Mackinac might be a seasonal tourist destination, but it’s a real community all the same, with seasonal and year-round residents who have needs like groceries and toiletries and hardware and clothing. There’s a flourishing economy there, based on tourism and hospitality but also supporting jobs in construction, carpentry, horse-grooming, landscaping, logistics, and marine trades. Whether you buy the things you need on the island or from the mainland, you have to get it all back to your living quarters on the island sans car. And that means either loading it onto a horse-drawn carriage or dray, or the basket of your bike.
So it’s not hard to imagine how Mackinac can be a physically demanding place to live. Sure, some people choose to go the horse-and-carriage route, but that gets expensive, and even then, people do plenty of walking, biking, or both. At some point, brawn inevitably factors into hauling things. Also: There are serious hills to contend with.
Yes, it’s difficul tat times — lung bursting and thigh-burning — but I loved it. Much like living in New York, you almost can’t help but get in decent shape simply through all the walking and biking you do. The last time I checked, Americans could stand to get a little healthier.
At no point whatsoever did I miss cars or wish I had one. Riding your bicycle everywhere is a blast, and surprisingly utilitarian. Although collisions occasionally happen, I never saw any kind of serious injuries from one or road rage break out between cyclists. It’s a reminder of the toll car dependency plays on our mental and physical well being.
In the end, while I loved many things about the lifestyle there — especially the lack of cars — I moved on from Mackinac Island. But there will always be a part of me that longs to return to that lifestyle, and wonders why more places couldn’t simply choose to copy it. New York City is already doing just that with its congestion pricing plan for motorists.
But Mackinac Island is a reminder that the benefits of urbanism can be shared by communities of all sizes and types, and without sacrificing what makes them unique.
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