The Boat Launch -- Boone

Two clubs, two fortunes, one stretch of water — and friend, you can take in the whole story without ever leaving your seat. Let me start with the rowers, because they got here first. The Detroit Boat Club was founded back in eighteen thirty-nine — that's older than half the states out west, older than photographs, older than near about anything you've passed on this island today. Seven prominent Detroiters started it, and you have got to understand what rowing meant in those days. This was no quiet little hobby. In the eighteen-hundreds a big regatta on this river would pull crowds you'd expect at a championship ballgame — tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people lining the banks, money changing hands, the whole city holding its breath while its finest young men pulled their hearts out for the honor of Detroit. The Boat Club men were the bluebloods, the old families, and they rowed like the city's name was riding on every stroke. Now here's where it gets stubborn, and I do love a stubborn story. Their clubhouse burned to the ground. They built another — and that one burned too. Twice in the eighteen-nineties the river took their home from them in fire. So the third time, they got good and ornery about it. They said, fine — if it'll burn, we'll build something that won't. And in nineteen-oh-two they raised up a clubhouse out of solid concrete, a fireproof fortress set on pilings driven clear down to bedrock beneath the Detroit River. By its own count, and by the reckoning of the Detroit Historical Society, that makes the Detroit Boat Club the oldest rowing club in the whole United States — and the fortress they built out of pure spite is standing yet. Now look just past it, out to that little man-made islet with the great Mediterranean clubhouse on it. That's the new money's monument, and it came up a whole generation later, when the automobile turned Detroit into the richest boomtown on earth. When those fortunes hit — the Fords, the Dodges, the Scripps, the Fishers — they didn't want a rowing shell. They wanted a palace. By the middle of the nineteen-twenties this club had something like three thousand members, the cream of industrial Detroit, all of them wanting in. So in the early nineteen-twenties they built the Detroit Yacht Club: better than a million dollars of Mediterranean grandeur, two grand staircases, a ballroom paneled in fine wood, said to be the largest yacht clubhouse in the entire country, floating on an island they made themselves out of the mud they dredged from the river bottom. And its great character — oh, you'd have liked him — was a fellow named Gar Wood. A self-made millionaire who became the fastest man on water in all the world. Won the great Harmsworth Trophy again and again, roaring up and down this very river in speedboats he designed and built with his own hands, and he laid this club's cornerstone himself and served as its commodore besides. The fastest man on water, holding court in the biggest yacht house in America. But I'd be selling you a pretty lie if I left it there, so I won't. These were exclusive clubs, the both of them — the kind that for a long, long time kept plenty of good people out for who they were and not what they could pay. A man named Doctor Leonard Ellison had to go and win himself a lawsuit just to become the yacht club's first Black member, and that wasn't all the way back in the dark ages either — it was the nineteen-seventies. The grandeur and the gatekeeping rode in the same boat — and you can't tell one without the other and call it the truth. So here's how I leave you with it. The island itself — this ground, these trees, that beach you're rolling toward — the island was always the people's park, free and open to anybody who could walk across the bridge. But the palaces built along its edges were not. Both of those things are true at the same time, and from this one spot you can lay your eyes on both of them — the open shore and the closed door, sharing the same water.