The last time I rode my recumbent bike on Belle Isle — during the winter of 2019-20 — my wheels had a sign on the back urging “NO PRIX ON BELLE ISLE.”
Now I’m back — just in time to see the last Grand Prix on Belle Isle, scheduled for June 3-5 — and to observe the continuing efforts of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and its equally tone-deaf colleagues on the Belle Isle Park Advisory Committee (BIPAC) to “improve” the island, mostly with more pavement.
Then and now, it’s basically the same lovely place — unique in the continent, if not the world. Freighters squeeze through the narrows between two countries, sometimes blocking the view of Windsor high-rises. It seems impossible there’s enough water for them to draft. It’s magic. Speedboats roar off Lake St. Clair around smaller boats trawling for walleyes. When I ride as the day dawns, I see a couple of other folks jogging, walking, cycling, or just doing what visitors have always done there: sitting in their cars and looking at the water, seeking a respite from the city. The other day I saw a man with a professional camera set up to capture the bald eagle that is in the same tree where I used to spot it perching.
And also, as always, I see seagulls pecking at discarded food trash on the road, geese and goslings jaywalking, a few ducks, even an occasional swan.
But around the east end is the supposed last ugly footprint of an entitled billionaire: concrete barriers, grandstands, trucks on ten acres of concrete where there was once a memorial grove of trees for slain Detroit children. It’s as incongruous as ever.
The car race has had an indelible impact on the perception of Belle Isle: nature taking a backseat to asphalt and concrete. This misconception could only happen in the Motor City, an entire metropolis of automotive hegemony — the concrete ditches, the semi-abandoned suburban malls, the sprawling acres of abandoned middle-class neighborhoods sacrificed to the imperative of rapid escape to suburbia.
You can counter by saying Belle Isle is an urban park — which is quite an absurd concept, given it’s surrounded by an international waterway — and that we’ve got plenty of nature (if you can get out to Kensington or Stony Creek in the suburbs). But isn’t Central Park in New York much more urban, and does it sacrifice nature to pavement? No.
The geniuses who oversee Belle Isle clearly can only parse the word “park” to mean a place to put cars. So they wouldn’t even imagine they could destroy the paddock to return it to trees and grass — no, they plan to stripe it for parking spaces and make it the terminus for a gas-powered trolley to take visitors to other paved parking areas. How many folks will put their picnic baskets and swim gear aboard trolleys? I doubt enough to make any noticeable impact on summer overcrowding.
The island is still a great place to bike in early morning — but not because of anything the state or Roger Penske has done, like paving a couple of segments of what I guess is the “Iron Belle Trail” that are useless for bike riding because they start and terminate in dirt or gravel or grass.
With Penske now getting a sweeter corporate welfare package downtown, he’s moving his race back there. And he’ll get less guff from the likes of me and the other gadflies on the grass-roots group Belle Isle Concern. (We like to imagine we had some role in pushing him off the island after years of trying.)
My advice to the park advisory committee: pick up the trash and sweep the roads in the park each night. Otherwise, let it be. But that’s too mundane, and it doesn’t require spending more grant money on multi-modal transportation studies.
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