As you leave Harbor Springs along the bay, you're passing two of the oldest and most exclusive summer colonies in the Midwest — Wequetonsing and, out on the peninsula, Harbor Point. Grand old cottages, impossibly green lawns running down to the water, sailboats stacked at the yacht club. This is where wealthy families have summered for a hundred and forty years. And Harbor Point, the point sticking out into the bay, has one rule that I love more than almost any rule in America.
No cars. None. Not for guests, not for owners, not for anybody. Harbor Point banned the automobile and never un-banned it.
It goes back to eighteen seventy-eight, when a group of businessmen from Lansing camped out here, decided it was paradise, formed a little stock company, sold shares to nineteen members, and bought the entire fifty-two-acre point — from, of all people, a Franciscan monk up in Cross Village. They laid it out as a private community with no public streets. And when the automobile came along a
nd started ruining everything with noise and speed and exhaust, Harbor Point simply said: not here.
So here is how the richest people in northern Michigan live in the summer, to this day. They drive their expensive cars up to a gate — a gate with a checkpoint that's staffed twenty-four hours a day — and they park those cars in a lot on the outside, and then they walk in, or bike in, or wait for t
