Grosse Pointe, MI July 2023

Summer Fun

JULY 2023

LET’S DO BRUNCH!

Savory, sweet, or spicy? Whatever your pleasure, we have brunch preparations for you. From steak hash and cinnamon challah strata to eggs Benedict and our chicken and waffles, our brunch menu is filled with timeless classics and delicious chef creations.

July Sum Sum Summertime Fun!

It’s a summer of fun in Grosse Pointe!

The pages in our Summer Fun issue will help you plan and organize the best time of year. Sunny days and family bring about warm memories as we energize from the excitement and adventure.

We will be hitting the lake on the boat and wave riders, riding bikes along Lakeshore, strolling the shopping and restaurants in Grosse Pointe, and hitting Northern Michigan on adventures in areas where CELL PHONES HAVE NO RECEPTION! Ahhhh….after an hour or two of decompression, Mia and Ava realize they can survive without the brain-sucking devices!

Set aside Thursday, July 27th, to stop by Posterity Art and Framing Gallery as Grosse Pointe City Lifestyle hosts Art, Wine, & Design. Use the event to taste some wines, check out some local artist exhibitions, and continue shopping the beautiful storefronts in Grosse Pointe. A special thanks to Michelle Nunley, owner of Posterity Art and Framing Gallery, for co-hosting the event at her store in the Village.

In this issue, we hit some of the summertime anchors in Grosse Pointe.

Grosse Pointe has the Hill, the Village, the Park, and Mack Avenue to explore. We speak with Mary Aubrey-Rogers and Colleen Dyer, President of Avenue in the Woods to highlight what’s happening on Mack. Enjoy supporting the shops and restaurants as endless options are covered on Mack.

Local legend Mike Lefevre has the ultimate summer spot at Mikes on the Water! It’s awesome. It’s locals! It’s a world-class spot that drips with character.  Come by land or water and melt a summer day away.

Back to the Village and its time to visit Village Palm and Newport. Owner Ann Turnbull has everything you need for men and women to be stylish this summer. Village Palm, a Lilly Pulitzer Signature Store, has something for anyone and everyone. Newport brings family-run lines manufactured in the USA for men, women, and children! For years, the Turnbull family has been dedicated to keeping the charm of the Village going strong. Visit Village Palm and Newport for a shopping experience that delivers.

Time to head North as we look at the Port Huron to Mackinac race! Another world-class event where Grosse Pointers are prominent and a huge part of its legend.

It’s summertime, Grosse Pointe. Soak it all in and live the Grosse Pointe “Summer” City Lifestyle!

Don’t forget the sunscreen.

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July 2023

PUBLISHER

David Mattaliano | david.mattaliano@citylifestyle.com

EDITORIAL COORDINATOR

Paige Peabody | paige.peabody@citylifestyle.com

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Susan Baldani, Robert Musial

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Andreas Browne

Corporate Team

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Steven Schowengerdt

CHIEF SALES OFFICER Matthew Perry

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER DeLand Shore

DIRECTOR OF SOCIAL MEDIA Mindy Hargesheimer

ART DIRECTOR Sara Minor

OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Janeane Thompson

WEB APPLICATIONS Michael O’Connell

AD DESIGNER Evan Deuvall

LAYOUT DESIGNER Kelsey Ragain

1 6 8 2 2 K e r c h e v a l A v e n u e

G r o s s e P o i n t e

w w w . s a v v y c h i c g p . c o m

business monthly

A round-up of exciting news from local businesses.

Art, Wine, & Design in the Village

Grosse Pointe City Lifestyle is excited to hold an Art, Wine, and Design event on Thursday, July 27th. Stop by Posterity Art & Framing Gallery in the Village to taste some wine, check out local artist exhibitions, and get the latest in home decor and design ideas. Open all day! Come with friends and your photo may be selected to be in our City Scene section! Go to citylifestyle.com/grossepointe and follow us at @grossepointecitylifestyle.

Posterity Framing and Art Gallery co-hosting Art, Wine, & Design

Posterity Framing and Art Gallery owner Michelle Nunley co-hosts Art, Wine, and Design on July 27th with Grosse Pointe City Lifestyle.  On a mission to build community engagement, Michelle believes in promoting local artists and events while supporting Grosse Pointe businesses.  Enjoy wine tasting, browse local artist exhibits,  and find creative framing and design ideas for your home.  Located at 17005 Kercheval in the Village. Visit posterityartgallery.com or call 313-884-8105.  Follow @posterityartgallery.

99 and Counting

SAILING THE MAC

ARTICLE BY ROBERT MUSIAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHOTOELEMENT

On Saturday, July 15, more than 180 sailboats will leave Port Huron’s Black River and head out under the Blue Water Bridge to the southern tip of Lake Huron.

So begins the 99th running of Bayview Yacht Club’s annual race to Mackinac Island, the world’s longest consecutively run freshwater distance yacht race.

Depending on the wind and weather, the first boat will finish the more than 200-mile adventure late Sunday with the last boats straggling in on Tuesday.

On board one of the faster boats, a Morgan 42 named Wind Toy IV and a previous winner, will be Laurie Bunn, of Grosse Pointe Farms.

She’s a second-generation Mackinac racer who first raced with her father when she was 21. Also on board will be her husband, Rob, and her 14-yearold son Charlie, a freshman at Grosse Pointe South High School, making his fourth race.

“It’s especially fun now that my son is aboard,” she said.

The start of the race is “very exciting,” she said. “You basically have to stay out of the way of a bunch of boats until it’s your turn” to sail north, said Bunn, who’s done the race 23 times.

Club officials are pleased by the number of entrants this year. “We have

boats from Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, New York and Ontario already signed up,” said Kevin Thomas, this year’s chair of the Bayview Mackinac Race.

In the event, the boats are grouped in classes by size and handicapped, with the smaller boats, down to 24 feet in length, getting the start at about 11:15 a.m. They’ll run the 234-mile shore (or short) course just off the Michigan shoreline.

Since the larger boats, up to 80 feet, are faster, they’ll get underway last. They take the longer 298-mile Cove Island course along the Ontario coast before heading for the Mackinac Island finish line.

The winners from each course get trophies. Another trophy goes to the boat with an all-amateur crew that achieves the best corrected time per mile. And the very last boat to finish? It’s dubbed the “pickle boat,” a reference to a fishing boat that stopped to pickle its catch.

In club tradition, sailors who complete 25 Mackinac races are honored with Bayview’s official designation of “Old Goats.”

This year, Bob Niederoest, a former Bayview commodore, is looking to do better than that.

CONTINUED >

The 81-year-old St. Clair Shores resident hopes to finish his 50th Mackinac race this year. If he does, he’ll achieve the rare status of “Grand Ram.” Besides bragging rights, he’ll earn a special pennant among his honors.

His second Mackinac race was in 1968. He’d just returned home from Vietnam, exhausted after hopscotching by plane for three days, from Pleiku in central Vietnam back to Detroit.

“I landed here on Friday, and we raced on Saturday, that part had been pre-arranged,” he said. “On the boat, I took the first watch for four hours and after that, I just went up in the bow and slept.”

He agreed with Bunn that the start of the race could be a little nerve-wracking.

“When the Military Street drawbridge (over the Black River) opens up, there’s a mass exodus out of there,” he said.

Boats then head towards the Canadian side because the current isn’t as strong there. “That shore is lined with people, watching about 200 boats going up shore over two to three hours,” he said.

The night before, the docks along the Black River are packed with thousands of people, celebrating the annual Boat Night. However, most crews avoid the partying and return early Saturday morning to ready their boats.

The economic impact for the communities involved is more than $30 million, according to one press release. And next year, for its special 100th anniversary Mackinac race, registration is already open, and Bayview expects its largest field ever.

Like Bunn, former commodore Brad Kimmel will be sailing with family -- his daughter Addison, 15. The co-owner of his boat, a 36-foot J-111 named Diablo, is Steve Young. Also in the crew will be Young’s daughter, Evelyn, and son Alex. It’s the first Mackinac race for all three kids.

“This is all about family and being on the water away from cellphones and all that. It’s kind of medicinal,” said Kimmel, of Grosse Pointe Farms. He adds that he’s proud to be an “Old Goat,” as is his brother, Geoff.

“To get out there on the lake and unplug, it’s wonderful,” agreed Bunn. Still, the idea is to get to Mackinac as fast as possible, pushing the boat and crew to the limit.

To accomplish this, her crew of nine will rotate in four-hour shifts, with the extra person as needed. It’s a similar deal on Kimmel’s boat.

While Bunn’s crew gets cold pizza, barbecue if the weather’s right and grilled breakfast burritos on Sunday, Kimmel’s crew will dine on lasagna and beef sandwiches out of individual plastic bags for easy preparation. “And if it’s a good night and the wind is right, we may have a couple of glasses of wine,” he added.

But provisions aren’t the point. “There’s plenty of time to eat and drink when you get to the island,” he said.

Bunn agreed. “We’ll be tired, wet and happy to see family and friends” who have made the trip by land to welcome them, “and excited to be done,” she added.

As the boats near the finish line, if the wind is from the north, “you can smell the island’s evergreens, the fudge and the horseshit,” laughed Kimmel.

And the first stop back on land for most racers? A bathroom -- and then the fabled Mackinac Island bar, the Pink Pony.

“It’s a lot more fun when you’ve won your class and you’re at the Pink Pony having a beer and looking out over the harbor as your competitors come in,” said Kimmel.

“We’ll be tired, wet and happy to see family and friends, and excited to be done.”

Commodore Chuck Stormes

SHOP LOCAL THIS SUMMER

ARTICLE BY SUE BALDANI PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAIGE PEABODY

AVENUE IN THE WOODS

While shopping online may be easy, you don’t get the same personal service or the ability to develop relationships with small business owners in the community. Mary Aubrey-Rogers, a Realtor ® in Grosse Pointe Farms and co-founder of The Avenue in the Woods recognized the importance of promoting local business and set out to do something about it, just like her father, Dr. Edmund Aubrey, did in 1959.

“My Dad just passed away at the age of 97 ½, and he was one of the original members of the Mack Avenue Businessmen Association, which included all businesses in Grosse Pointe, not just on Mack Avenue,” she says. “They had 400 to 500 members. My father was a dentist, and because there weren’t many businesses on Mack Ave and a lot of vacant land back in the day, he decided to focus on Mack.”

Mary recalls her father and uncles, who were all presidents and vice presidents of the association at some point, holding meetings and going with their wives to large parties. “That

association was a big deal, but then the men became elderly, and the association fizzled out.”

Grosse Pointe Farms - especially Mack Avenue - was left without representation when that happened. “One day, I was showing some clients the map of the different Grosse Pointe areas from The Little Blue Book [business directory],” she says. “I was pointing out the Park, the City, the Shores, and the Farms, and when I went to show them the Woods, it wasn’t there! That was in November 2019, and I remember it like it was yesterday.”

She was so upset about this omission that she went to City Hall the following Monday and asked why it wasn’t there. After that, she went to the next town council meeting and told them she was starting a new business association to represent the merchants along Mack Avenue in Grosse Pointe Woods. With help from the Chamber of Commerce and co-founder Donna O’ Keefe, another Realtor, she formed The Avenue in the Woods LLC in January 2020 and assembled a Board.

“Today, we have 117 members,” says its president, Colleen Dyer. “Our mission statement and purpose is to encourage, promote and advocate for businesses and the business community on Mack Avenue in the City of Grosse Pointe Woods.”

Colleen and many other members were also members of the former association. When Mary and Donna approached them about this new organization, they were all in. “They came to us and said, ‘We want to make things better for Mack, and we want to see more people on Mack. We want the businesses to thrive so the community can thrive.’”

Mack Avenue stretches from Detroit to St. Clair Shores, and even though the business

district in Grosse Pointe Woods is only 2.5 miles, it encompasses a myriad of shops and services. Colleen explains that shopping locally also supports your neighbors since many shop owners live in the Grosse Pointe area. (She lives in Grosse Pointe and has her insurance agency on Mack Avenue.) These businesses employ many of your neighbors as well.

In addition to promoting the many businesses along the avenue with its Facebook page, sidewalk sales, and other events, the association beautifies the shopping district to attract more shoppers. “We have these really nice banners we put up on the sidewalk poles, and we just planted flowers around them,” says Mary.

Adds Colleen, “At Christmas time, we wrap the parking meters so shoppers can have two weeks without paying to park.” This year, giant snowflakes will also be hanging from the poles. Funding comes from membership dues, and these monies have also allowed them to hire a social media person recently and pay for the development of its website.

“With The Avenue in the Woods, we actually have a voice now in the city, and people love us.”

For more information, join their Facebook page.

Summer on Lake St. Clair

At

Mike's on the Water

After working in and running restaurants for most of his life, in 2004, Mike LeFevre retired and started traveling the world. He was having a great time, but his time of leisure would soon come to an end. “In 2009, I got a phone call from my brother-in-law telling me to come home right away. My sister had breast cancer.” Since Mike had fought his own battle with cancer and was one of the lucky ones, he was ready to fire her up to beat hers.

One night when he was at her house, some friends stopped by. “One of their husbands, a gentleman named Jim, asked what I was doing these days,” says

Mike. “I told him I was going to get my sister well, and then I was going back out into the world.”

Jim then mentioned that Pete Beauregard, owner of Michigan Harbor on the Nautical Mile, was looking for someone to open a restaurant in an old bathhouse and warehouse at the docks, and Mike’s name came up. The next day, he and his sister drove to the marina to look at the property. When he saw the little old clapboard bathhouse, he was hooked. “I looked at my sister, and I said, ‘East Coast, Key West Burger Bar, let’s go.’”

When he met with Pete a couple days later, Pete offered him the whole building, but Mike just wanted

that little building. He had big plans for it. That was the official end of his retirement.

Mike’s on the Water on St. Clair Shores opened on May 25th, 2011, with 130 seats. Due to high demand, Mike expanded every year, and today, there are over 360 seats. There’s a large deck out back, a floating dock in the water, an expanded bar, a large banquet room and a rooftop bar.

At one point, he was going to build an indoor miniature golf putt-putt course, but now its a smaller banquet room, a public living room he calls it and a museum for my special “secret” collection.

In addition to the museum, the family room will include all the awards and accolades he has won over the years, along with mementos and pictures of his family, including his sister, Susan Amine, who passed away in 2012 at 47. “It’s just memories of my life in that room.”

He wants all of these items on display because he wants to share them with others. One of the biggest reasons he went into the restaurant business is because he enjoys being around people. “I love talking to people,” he says. “I greet the people at the front door, and I make people feel comfortable. I often know what they drink if I don’t know their names. People want to be recognized. One of the greatest shows in the world was Cheers, where everybody knows your name.”

The menu in the main restaurant is very diverse, and some of its most popular sellers are the lake perch, rainbow trout, lobster rolls from the East Coast, and stuffed burgers.

“People were asking for food upstairs too, so I put a barbecue by the steps, but that didn’t work,” he says. “Then I tried to get food from the kitchen to the roof, but the buns flew off the trays and into the lake. Then I had an idea – I would put a food truck on the roof.” That’s right, a truck on the roof, and not any old truck.

“I was looking for a truck when my construction guy came in with a new truck. His old truck was the one that had carried all the lumber for the restaurant, and I asked him where it was. He told me it was for sale, and I said ‘sold.’”

When the truck was hoisted onto the roof, it made the local news. That former construction truck now serves everything from tacos and burgers to chicken and pretzel bites. It’s not the only truck on site though. Mike has an ice cream truck outside for those who want dessert.

Customers and people who know Mike aren’t surprised by his creativity. The entire restaurant is filled with unique and interesting items.

“Everything on these walls has a story,” he says. “Some of it’s from my travels - I’ve been to 129 countries and just stamped my last continent in February when I went to Antarctica – and some of it is things my customers gave me. The walls are smothered with memorabilia which adds to the character. We have the captain’s coat I wore at the front door of my first restaurant to greet and seat people because since we were on the water, I wanted to make it feel like the Love Boat.” Other things he bought

"Everything on these walls has a story," he says. "Some of it's from my travels - I've been to 129 countries and just stamped my last continent in February when I went to Antarctica – and some of it is things my customers gave me.”

at local auctions, such as the lighthouse and bench out front. There’s even a fish with a pipe in its mouth.

Mike is also passionate about giving to charities. On the restaurant’s opening day, he auctioned off all the buoys hanging on the ceiling and walls to raise money for breast cancer. “I’m involved in many other causes too, including Wigs For Kids, Angels Supporting Animals, The Helm, Cops for Kids, Kids On The Go, the Diabetes Foundation, Racing for Kids, and the Grosse Pointe Crisis Club. I was honored to be named the chairman for Full Circle Foundation in November at their gala for autistic kids. It’s not what you have… it’s what you give.”

MikesOnTheWater.com

“I was looking for a truck when my construction guy came in with a new truck. His old truck was the one that had carried all the lumber for the restaurant, and I asked him where it was. He told me it was for sale, and I said ‘sold.’”

Transcranial

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Our Vision

To empower our community to cultivate mental wellbeing and overall wellness of body, mind, and spirit

Our Mission

To provide exceptional integrative healthcare to the Metro Detroit community

events

A curated selection of the most intriguing upcoming events in our area.

JULY 11TH

All Aboard for Awards

JEFFERSON BEACH MARINA | 11:30 AM

Only 100 tickets available. Soroptimist is a global volunteer organization that provides women and girls with access to the education and training they need to achieve economic empowerment. $175 per person, Brunch and drinks included. Mail checks made payable to SIGP to Soroptimist international of Grosse Pointe, 32 Lakeshore Drive, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI 48236.

JULY 17TH

CATCH Golf Classic

RED RUN GOLF CLUB, ROYAL OAK | 7:30 AM

The CATCH Golf Classic, twice-voted “Michigan’s Best,” is supported and attended by top executives and sports and media luminaries. The Golf Classic features a scramble format with the option of a celebrity golfer in each group (fivesome) with shotgun starts at 7:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.  For more information, please call 313-8769399 or email Jim Hughes at jhughes@catchcharity.org

JULY 27TH

Art, Wine, & Design in the Village

POSTERITY ART & FRAMING GALLERY | 11:00 AM

Grosse Pointe City Lifestyle will host an Art, Wine, and Design event.  Stop by Posterity Art & Framing Gallery in the Village to taste some wine, check out local artist exhibitions, and get the latest in home decor and design ideas.  Open all day.  Come with friends and your photo may be selected for Grosse Pointe City Lifestyle’s City Scene!