Community Spotlight: Grosse Pointe Park

How community spirit goes, so goes a city. In Grosse Pointe Park, community spirit is active and the city shows. It’s one of the finer cities around. Drive it, you’ll see. The 2.2-square-mile city, bordered by Lake St. Clair in the northeastern corner of the county, with its mature urban trees making leafy tunnels along residential streets, its precisely mowed lawns and boulevards, its flowers, public gardens, its attentive business districts on Jefferson, Kercheval, Charlevoix and Mack Avenue, its two remarkable waterfront parks, is a convincing presentation of a community that cares intensely about a particular way of life.

Bill Musial, 66, is a barber. For 26 years he’s cut hair and talked with customers at his shop – The Wm. J Barber Shop — 15131 Kercheval. Right next door his wife, Cheri, has owned and operated Pointe Pet’s Supply for 16 years. The Musials built an apartment above the store and moved there13 years ago.

“A perfect community requires two things,” Bill Musial said. “Feel safe in your home and educate your children. In Grosse Pointe Park you can feel safe in your home and educate your children. And that’s the two most important things we have here. And of course the parks are great.”

The parks are great

Indeed they are. Grosse Pointe Park, with a population of 12,800, has two waterfront parks: Patterson Park and Windmill Pointe Park. Both are exceptionally maintained and used year round by the residents.

Patterson Park, located at the end of Three Mile Drive, has a splash pad, a playscape, a waterfront boardwalk, a fountain-pond that transforms into an ice rink in the winter, a warming station/tennis building by the rink, a putting green, a Bocce Ball court and a brand new gatehouse. The buildings are constructed with bricks and limestone, materials which can be found in many of the stately homes around town.

Over at Windmill Pointe Park, located at the end of Lakepointe, is a harbor with 265 boat wells, an Olympic-sized pool, a toddler pool, a community center, an activity center which includes a 140-seat movie theater, a gymnasium, a workout room upstairs with free weights and Nautilus machines, and a men and women’s locker room for the pool.

User fees for, among other things, the theater and the fitness room cover the maintenance and operations of the activity center.

Long-time mayor of Grosse Pointe Park – Palmer Heenan — couldn’t be more pleased with the direction the parks have gone since he was first elected to the top job 27 years ago, a job by the way that he nor his peers on council receive a nickel for doing.

“We have transformed … the parks, from just space and nice plantings to very active locations for people to enjoy themselves,” Heenan said. “And I’m particularly interested in committing our resources for family type activities in our parks.”

Heenan, who at 88-years-old still plays golf regularly and still beats City Manager Dale Krajniak, 52, credits the Grosse Pointe Park Foundation for the transformation of the parks.

“People give hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to the foundation,” the mayor said. “That’s what we used to make improvements. It supplemented the city.”

The Grosse Pointe Park Foundation, which celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year, has raised over $2.5 million from residents over the years and directed the donations to civic improvements, including the parks.

Foundation President Dale Ehresman, 65, an architect at Ehresman Associates Inc., said he’s satisfied with what the foundation has accomplished over the years partnering with the city, completing projects that were on budget and on schedule.

Ehresman said there are two things that residents want to know before cutting a check to the foundation: that the project will be successful; and that the project will be something the residents can be “proud to support.”

The current foundation is made up of 21 residents, which is a change from the original foundation’s staff. The early foundation was staffed with members of the city council and the mayor said that created a perception problem.

“The community was not involved,” Heenan said. “Members of the city council, well, they tax you. Therefore, why give money to them.”

Ehresman said two times a year the foundation raises money. In November, “supporters” receive a letter describing the latest project in need of support. And in the summer time, a garden party is hosted in one of the mansions on Windmill Pointe Drive. Tickets to participate range from $75 to $150. There is music, food, drinks. No silent auction, no raffle or things like that. It’s a simple affair with the expressed purpose of building community support around the next successful project.

Ehresman said often times donors give beyond the ticket price.

But the physical parks are just half of the attraction. Sketch in one of the most dedicated city employees—Parks and Recreation Director Terry Solomon—and you have a complete picture.

“Terry puts on programs that people copy all over the place,” the mayor said. “She’s just an exceptional employee.”

The recreation department organizes, among other things, annual tennis and volleyball tournaments, swim meets, karate classes, boat races, gymnastic classes, fitness classes, ice skating, camp outs, Easter egg hunts, Halloween. The list is as impressive and busy as it’s varied. There’s something for young or old every month of the year.

“We make it our business to have fun if you live in Grosse Pointe Park, that’s our business,” the mayor said. “People enjoying themselves, having people who want to enjoy themselves and giving them the facilities to do that.”

Public safety model

Mayor Heenan, a Princeton graduate from the Woodward Wilson School of Public Policy and International Relations and a University of Michigan law school graduate, didn’t want to run for mayor in 1983. He didn’t want the job.

“I didn’t seek the office. But some residents who were concerned about crime and the deterioration of our community, in many respects, asked me to run,” he said. “I said ‘No’ four times. The problem is that they asked me five times and I finally said that I would do something.”

Heenan said the crime rate was unacceptable in Grosse Pointe Park and the solution, as he saw it, was to combine police and fire into a public safety department. Keep in mind this was 27 years ago when general funds weren’t like they are now. Heenan looks like a man a head of his time, someone who saw the future and positioned the city for it.

“I spent two years going around the neighborhood telling people what I wanted to do. Holding coffee klatches and so forth,” Heenan said. “I fought hard. One day we had a meeting and a fireman attended and he said to my wife ‘I hope you never have a fire in your house.’ My wife burst into tears. So I had to live with that too.”

The issue to combine police and fire into a public safety department went to the voters who approved it with 57 percent of the vote. Krajniak, the city manager, said that it has saved the city $9 million over the 25 years. “That freed up some significant resources for us,” he said.

Moreover, Heenan said, as a result of more public safety personnel on the streets patrolling, the felony crime rate dropped from 900 per year in the early 80s to approximately 350 today.

“There’s less crime, we’re just a better city,” Heenan said.

Business et al

Grosse Pointe Park’s Downtown Development Authority (DDA) footprint is along Jefferson from Wayburn to Nottingham. It’s 20 years old and has been recently active acquiring land on which a library was built and the original municipal building expanded. It’s also enhanced and beautified the Jefferson Avenue city entrance.

The little business strips in Grosse Pointe Park, particularly on Kercheval, are really service-oriented businesses that residents have come to count on. You can get a hair cut at Wm. J’s Barber Shop, pick up flea medicine at Pointe Pet’s Supply, get a beer at Rustic Cabins (and commune with the spirit of Jack Kerouac), drop off your clothes at the cleaners and eat a delicious vegetarian sandwich at the Sprout House.

“Of course that’s what makes this area great,” Musial, the barber, said. “We see the same customers all the time. You get to know everybody.”

According to statistics from the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), Grosse Pointe Park has a residential vacancy rate of nearly 12 percent. The housing market collapse has been very democratic. But Krajniak has positioned the city by reducing personnel costs. This helps offset property tax reductions. The city, he said in a written statement, also has been “diligently acquiring severely discounted bank owned properties which in part offset the reductions in equalization values.”

“Dale Krajniak, he’s very ingenious,” the mayor said. “For example, one of the other communities which is smaller than ours has 100 employees. In 1983 we had 96. Now we have 80.”

The economic reality everyone has had to sample recently makes the volunteer efforts of the Grosse Pointe Park Foundation and the volunteer efforts of the city’s leaders and residents more essential for the good of this great city.

“We are not in a position to really do much anymore,” the mayor said. “We have to rely on the foundation. We need the resources of the foundation to do the things we want to do.”

And what the mayor is really alluding to is the spirit of community in Grosse Pointe Park.

Foundation President Ehresman said probably the best thing the foundation brings to the table is its ideas. Its resources don’t hurt, neither does the professionalism imbued in its working relationship with the city’s leaders. More than one observer, for example, has noted the civility and efficiency with which the city council conducts the community’s business.

Like the old sycamore trees in Windmill Pointe Park, Grosse Pointe Park is rooted and sturdy in its self.

“The greatest satisfaction I have had in all my life,” the mayor said, “is the kindness and the support that I have had from the local residents who for the most part appreciate what we have accomplished.”

Ehresman said that the foundation will continue its efforts in the city’s two parks and also begin looking at potential projects in the business strips, like street lighting, benches, brick pavers, brick and mortar projects.

“All the residents believe that this is a special place to live and raise a family,” Ehresman said.

How goes community spirit, so goes a city.