Almost 100 years ago, a multi-million-dollar amusement park was built on Lake Saint Clair, just north of 9 Mile in Saint Clair Shores, Michigan. For more than 30 years, the Jefferson Beach Amusement Park thrived as a mecca of summertime entertainment for metro-Detroit.
Opened in 1927, the park once boasted the longest roller coaster in the United States, as well as a large bathhouse and ballroom known as the Coliseum, seven rides, a beach, and other attractions that brought in people from all over the state.
Three Detroit men teamed up to spearhead the project with a vision of a grand summer attraction just outside the city.
Advertisements for the park claimed a 2 million dollar budget.
“And they really did do sort of the Jurassic Park thing. No expense spared, only the best,” said Heidi Christein, archivist of the Saint Clair Shores Public Library.
The men hired George Haas, a well-known local architect, to design the permanent buildings on the site. The largest of these structures was the two-story Coliseum, with restrooms and changing rooms on the first floor and a large ballroom on the second. The space featured what was known as a “floating dance floor.” The wooden floor was constructed with a bit of give, allowing for a bouncy, floating on air sensation for dancers.
And did we mention it was huge?
“The space was big enough that on a full Saturday night you could have maybe 3000 couples on the floor,” said Christein.
Part of what made the Jefferson Beach Amusement Park so successful, said Christein, was its all-encompassing nature. Visitors could spend their entire day working through the many forms of entertainment that the park had to offer.
“The gentleman who owned the park wanted it to be not just one experience, but several. So you could go and dance. You could come and ride the rides. There was a restaurant, there was swimming, and they lit the beach so you could go swimming at night [...] There were the usual carnival rides and games, and as time went on, they added more rides and more games,” Christein said.
As more and more people flocked to this lakeside attraction for summertime thrills, it became a significant source of seasonal employment for the community. Many of the park’s entertainers, as well as those who staffed the rides and concessions lived on site for the summer.
It was an opportunity for businesses outside the park to make some money, too. Christein said there are records of a small shack that a local man dragged every summer to a nearby spot on the beach.
“Every summer he would tow it to the sand on the beach near Jefferson Beach Amusement Park. And he would open it up, and his wife and his daughters and his nieces would sell things like hot dogs and cold drinks for the summer as a way to supplement the family’s income. So [the park] was both a direct employer and an indirect employer in the area.”
After decades of summer fun, tragedy struck. On Friday, April 15, 1955, a fire destroyed several of the wooden structures in the park, including the funhouse, archery shed, and the shooting gallery.
“For about half an hour it was a little dicey because the ammunition in that particular concession was exploding,” said Christein.
The city’s entire fire department of 27 men arrived on the scene with five trucks and 4500 feet of hose, but it still wasn’t enough. It took first responders from eight other communities to finally defeat the flames.
As they say, the show must go on, and on it went at Jefferson Beach Amusement Park. The park opened that night, save for a roped off area that had suffered damage and a few singed rides that were shut down.
The fire didn’t shut down the Jefferson Beach Amusement Park, but it did mark the beginning of the end. By 1959, just four years after the fire, “the city decided that although Jefferson Beach had been a great thing, they wanted to move more in the direction of attracting boaters from all over the Great Lakes with marina services,” said Christein.
A marina offered the opportunity to make more money and attract wealthier clientele from around the Great Lakes. While the shift to marina services may have boosted the city’s revenue, it also made for a much less inclusive form of entertainment.
“Jefferson Beach billed itself as Detroit’s Playground, so it was very much people from the Detroit area that would come. Whereas if you got boaters—Michigan has a lot of boaters, and they would come from further away. And boaters, as we all know, tend to spend a little bit more money than $0.10 on a ride at an amusement park,” Christein said.
Like many pieces of history, there isn’t much left to preserve the memory of the Jefferson Beach Amusement Park. All of its physical structures have either been destroyed by fire or torn down in pursuit of the marina.
“The name is all that remains," Christein said, "with the exception of some photographs, a few ticket stubs and some newspaper clippings.”
