.png)
Made on the Bay is a monthly series I write for the New Baltimore Arts & Culture Commission's newsletter. I serve on the Commission as treasurer, and the series is part of that volunteer role. Each installment runs here as well.
There is a two-story brick building on Washington Street that has been standing since 1881.
Its foundation is limestone, and that limestone did not come from around here. It was cut on Kelly's Island in Lake Erie, off the coast of Ohio, loaded onto a boat, and carried up through the lakes to our shoreline. Someone decided that ordinary stone would not do. Then local bricklayers — men whose names most of us will never know — laid the walls by hand.
That building is the Grand Pacific House. It went up for Frederick C. Losh, and it is the last hotel still standing from the era when New Baltimore was a place people traveled to on purpose.
I want to start this series there, because the Grand Pacific House answers a question that comes up almost every time a small town starts talking about art.
The question is usually some version of: is this really for us?
In the late 1800s, New Baltimore was where Detroit came to exhale.
Visitors rode out on the Rapid Railway or came across the water by steamer — including the Tashmoo, a name that still turns up in this town. What waited for them were rental cottages, hotels, and mineral baths. A shoreline. A place to walk slowly.
By the end of that century, tourism had become the single largest driver of the local economy. Not lumber. Not shipping. Not manufacturing, though we had all three.
People came here because it was beautiful, and then they spent money.
Sit with that for a second, because it reframes everything. The argument for arts and culture in New Baltimore is not a new idea that a commission dreamed up in a meeting. It is the oldest business model this city has.
Here is where I want to widen the definition, because "art" is a word that makes some people fold their arms.
The choice to ship limestone from another state for a foundation nobody would ever see — that is an aesthetic decision. The ornament on a storefront cornice is an aesthetic decision. So is the shape of a porch, the lettering on a hand-painted sign, the width of a sidewalk, the fact that our downtown faces the water instead of turning its back on it.
Somebody chose all of that. Somebody with taste, and pride, and an idea about what kind of place this ought to feel like.
Even the street grid was a design. When Alfred Ashley platted his first sixty acres on both sides of Washington Street in 1845, he laid it out in the gridiron pattern that was standard across American towns at the time. But that grid ran into the older French ribbon farms along the water — long, narrow parcels that ran back from the shoreline as far as a man could plow in a day. The two systems never fully reconciled. The irregularities where they collided are still in our street map today.
You have driven through the seam between two competing ideas about how a place should look, and you probably never noticed.
That is what design does. It becomes invisible, and then it becomes home.
The first real settlement here started with a sawmill and a dock. Ashley came out from Mount Clemens in 1845 and built both. Village of Ashley, then Ashleyville when the post office opened in 1851, then New Baltimore in 1855, then an incorporated village in 1867, then a city in 1931.
That is the official timeline. But underneath it is a less official one, made up of the people who did the actual work: the millwrights, the boat builders, the bricklayers, the sign painters, the seamstresses, the church choirs, the piano teachers, the women who quilted, the kids who scratched their initials into wet concrete.
None of them called themselves artists. Every one of them was making something, on purpose, with care, in a place that had not existed the day before they got there.
And long before any of it — before Ashley, before the French trappers who arrived in 1796 — this shoreline was already occupied. Indigenous communities lived along Anchor Bay for thousands of years, and into the 1800s the land here still held burial mounds and constructed earthworks. Human hands shaping the ground into meaning. Most of those sites are gone now, dug up or built over.
The first art made in New Baltimore was made by people whose names we did not write down. That is part of our history too, and this series is going to say so out loud.
The New Baltimore Arts & Culture Commission is new. The thing it exists to protect is not.
We are a city of roughly twelve thousand people on a bay that Detroiters once paid good money to look at. We have a historic downtown, a public beach, a waterfront park, a working festival tradition, and a hotel that has been standing for one hundred and forty-five years.
We also have real competition. Every community in Macomb County is trying to figure out how to get people to stop, park, walk around, and come back. The towns that win at that are not the ones with the best parking. They are the ones that feel like somewhere.
Feeling like somewhere is not an accident. It is built, deliberately, by people who care what things look like and how they make you feel. That is the entire job description of an arts and culture commission.
Once a month, we are going to look at one piece of that story.
Some months it will be history — the resort era, the festivals, the year the Detroit Institute of Arts hung masterpieces on buildings in our downtown. Some months it will be a person: a working artist, a musician, a craftsman, a teacher who lives here right now. Some months it will be a single object. A building. A sign. A boat.
The thread running through all of it is simple, and it is the thing I want you to take away from this first installment:
New Baltimore has never been a town that art happened to. New Baltimore is a town that art happened for.
We just stopped saying it for a while.
Let's start saying it again.
If you have a story, a photograph, a family memory, or a building you have always wondered about, the Commission wants to hear it. This series will be better with your help than without it.
We think local history should show its work. Every installment of this series ends with where the facts came from, so you can go read further, correct us, or fall down the same rabbit hole we did.
A note on the record: New Baltimore's early history is better documented in some places than others. Where sources disagree or where a claim rests on a single account, we will say so rather than smooth it over. Corrections are genuinely welcome — send them to the Commission and we will run them.
Want to go deeper? The Grand Pacific House Museum is operated by the New Baltimore Historical Society at 51065 Washington Street. Go stand in it. It is a very different experience than reading about it.
.jpg)
The businesses winning in Michigan aren't chasing trends. Jonathan Petrous shares a practical 2027 marketing playbook built specifically for the Michigan small business market.
Read More
Great local businesses in Marysville, Chesterfield, and Macomb Township are invisible online — and it's fixable. Jonathan Petrous explains the three most common causes and exactly what to do about them.
Read More
Tight marketing budget in Port Huron or the surrounding area? Jonathan Petrous shares the highest-leverage moves local businesses can make right now — most of them free or nearly free.
Read More
Before you go
Call or send a message. Tell me what you're working on and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit.