What Our Great-Grandparents Understood…

This postcard, featuring Clinch Park, shows the entrance and the fountain.

1940. The Great War has yet to begin and the distress of the Depression shows no sign of easing. In Northern Michigan as elsewhere, people are hungry, without support, and without hope. A few years before, Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) within the Workers Progress Administration, a government agency designed to put the jobless to work through building roads, planting trees, and erecting various structures of the civilian infrastructure. Locally some vestiges survive in red pine plantations throughout Northern Michigan and in cabins and structures found in nearby state parks. They still stand today, performing their utilitarian functions honestly, though without elegance.

In addition to the CCC, the Roosevelt administration created the Federal Writers Project (FWP), an agency charged with helping unemployed writers. FWP projects ranged from children's books, oral histories, and ethnographies to more journeyman efforts such as travel guides. One of these, Michigan, The Wolverine State , published in 1940, describes Traverse City 's Clinch Park:

Clinch Park , at the foot of Cass Ave. , between the business district and the bay shore, contains a MINIATURE OF TRAVERSE CITY. All buildings are constructed to scale, and the scores of tiny lawns are studded with Japanese dwarf trees. So exact are the details that photographers take an ‘aerial picture of Traverse City' from a height of three feet. The park also has an AQUARIUM, containing specimens of all the fishes found in local waters, and a SMALL ZOO, with an excellent collection of wild life native to Michigan . An outdoor LOGGING EXHIBIT features a locomotive of the type used on Michigan 's old logging roads. The CON FOSTER MUSEUM , in Clinch Park , the hobby of Con Foster, a retired circus man and former mayor, includes Indian handicraft, arrowheads and spearheads, beadwork, pottery, carvings, and a large collection of guns...

Traverse City's Miniature City included nearly 100 buildings and featured an operating saw mill and a flying airplane that were both coin activated. The display included nearly every major downtown business building.

Chamber-of-Commerce boosterism and hyperbole pervade the description but this is to be expected in a book intended to arouse people's interest in exploring the Great Lakes region. (Indeed, Cedar Lake in Greilickville is said to be "inhabited by monsters" and that "the water boils" according to Ottawa legend). Besides the ringmaster's tone beckoning us to behold the next wonder, something else comes across in this passage, something that needs to be identified and honored. The MINIATURE CITY, AQUARIUM, ZOO, LOGGING EXHIBIT, and CON FOSTER MUSEUM were the things city leaders were most proud of, the things they wished to show to the world. They were like Grandma's best linen, set out only for a few feast days and for invited guests. "Our Miniature City -have you seen anything like it? It's almost like you're in an airplane looking down!"

Years pass and times change. New generations come forward to shoulder the burden of community responsibilities. People become wealthier. They no longer live in the city in which they grew up. Watching television replaces the neighborhood softball game. Parents with children move to the suburbs to enjoy privacy and the luxury of four bedrooms and two baths.

Cities change, too. Clinch Park has changed. The Miniature City is packed away; the Con Foster Museum stands empty, its exhibits now carefully catalogued and stored on shelves and in drawers and paper boxes. The cages of the zoo are empty too, the inhabitants spread out in a diaspora to other small zoos throughout the United States. Clinch Park has become Open Space, a place for walking and sitting, a quiet place without the voices of children.

Every generation leaves its mark on a place. City leaders of the 20's and 30's saw Clinch Park as a gathering place for local people and for visitors, a place to learn about local things, to marvel at our past, to have fun. To capture this vision, they built a Miniature City , an aquarium, a zoo, and a museum. Indeed, they spent money for these things at a time when expenditures for cultural assets represented considerable sacrifice on the part of the townspeople. Whatever the expense, they acted upon their vision and constructed something that would last; for seventy years this was Traverse City 's waterfront; this was Grandma's best linen, this time displayed permanently for guests and the community.

Now another generation seeks change. The old things are gone, vanished before the townspeople realized what had happened. There is no clear vision of what the community wants to show off before the world. Perhaps it will take a new generation to recapture what our great-grandparents understood: the importance of community pride celebrated in the presentation of the things we value to our visitors and to our children. How do we want to present ourselves along our beautiful bay? As a place to buy gorgeous things at reasonable prices? As a place to linger over a fine meal? As a place to enjoy a play or a movie? Or, in congruence with our past--as a place that makes room for children and visitors and provides for their education and fun? Whatever we decide, let us articulate a vision and construct something that will last seventy years as our great-grandparents did. May we come to remake our city's waterfront in accord with a shared vision of the things we cherish.

Richard is a former biology teacher, artist, naturalist, student of Japanese, and a writer who constantly struggles to control the grammatical errors, abrupt transitions, inconsistencies, non sequiturs, changes in voice, and mixed metaphors that crop up into his writing like crabgrass in August.