Belle Isle and the Olmsted Plan

Belle Isle is a thousand-acre island in the Detroit River, connected to the city by a bridge and positioned in the narrow channel between Michigan and Ontario. On a clear day you can see Windsor from the north shore. The island sits in the middle of an international border, which gives it a geographic peculiarity matched by very few urban parks in North America.

Frederick Law Olmsted prepared the design for Belle Isle in eighteen eighty-three, commissioned by the city to transform what had been a hunting ground and picnic destination into a fully designed public landscape. Olmsted's plan called for winding drives, naturalistic plantings along the shores, a canal system through the interior of the island, a conservatory, an aquarium, and a beach on the south shore facing the river. Several elements of the plan were built. Others were modified over the decades as the city added a zoo, a Coast Guard station, a football stadium, and various other structures Olmsted had not included.

The island was used by Black Detroiters as one of the few recreational spaces in the city accessible to them during the Jim Crow era. It was also the site of the triggering incident of the nineteen forty-three race riot, when fights on the island spilled onto the bridge and escalated into two days of citywide violence.

Detroit leased Belle Isle to the state of Michigan to run as a state park in twenty fourteen, a move that generated significant community controversy about whether a Detroit public park should require a state recreation passport to enter. The island is still there, still in the river, still between the two countries. On summer weekends the bridge backs up for half a mile.