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Up at Mackinac Island's Grand Hotel: The Esther Williams Swimming Pool Endures

July 19, 2012 at 6:47 PM | by | Comments (0)

How many US hotels do you know that've reached 125 years of business? Well, The Grand Hotel of Michigan's Mackinac Island is one of 'em, as well as being one of the last surviving wooden construction hotels. Its history is long and tumultuous, but its summers are sunny. This week, we'll take a look around the Victorian property and the features and amenities that have made it a top seasonal destination for the last century-and-a-quarter.

Today: The grounds of The Grand Hotel

There's an excellent story that The Grand's historian, Bob Tagatz, tells. Hearing him deliver it is, naturally, leaps and bounds better than reading it here from us, but we're going to share it anyway.

The Grand Hotel has always been known for offering activities to fill those summer days spent lounging on the 600-foot-long porch (largest porch in the world, they claim). Today, those activities include croquet and bocce on the lawn, vintage baseball games, weekends dedicated to jazz or ballroom dancing and, always, live music. Rewind to 100 years ago—or 125. Seasonal resorts competed to draw the summer crowds by varying their entertainment, and The Grand had to keep up.

Somewhere (Chicago?) it was overheard that dog racing was becoming the new thing, and so The Grand set out to offer dog racing. They gathered up some local dogs and invited the guests down to bet on the pooches. Well, as you can imagine, the dogs didn't much want to run in the same direction. The Grand's answer to this dilemma? Thrown the dogs in the lake and see who swims to shore first. That fared much better and the annual dog swim race became a tradition.

That tradition did end, but the manicured lawns and stately grounds where past guests enjoyed such pastimes remain. Esther Williams filmed a move—This Time For Keeps at the hotel, and the hotel thanked her by naming a suite for her, as well as renaming their freeform pool the Esther Williams Swimming Pool. The diving board is gone, but the 9' deep end is still there—giving adults somewhere to hang out, away from kids splashing nearer the free Sno-Cones on the other end of the pool. What hotels do 9' deep end pools anymore?!

Flip through our photos above, of many of The Grand Hotel's outdoor venues. There's a few we missed (like the tennis courts), but do remember that use of all these awesome areas comes included with the room packages.

Tomorrow: A fitting finale.

Disclosure: We were at the Grand Hotel as a guest of Pure Michigan while on assignment for Jaunted, but rest assured that all photos and opinions are completely our own.

[Photos: Cynthia Drescher/HotelChatter]

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