On a bluff looking west across to the Mackinac Bridge nearly half a mile from town. Grand Hotel is a living Victorian resort on a grand scale indeed, one of only a dozen remaining in the United States.
 | | The Grand’s famous 800’ porch, promoted by W. Stewart Woodfill as the world’s longest porch, overlooks master Gardener Jennie Shanku giving a garden tour. She discusses landscaping styles and cultivating on a massive scale spring bulbs, roses, perennials, zinnias and dahlias of formal carpet bedding, wildflowers on the embankment, and the porch’s famous geraniums. Seven gardeners plant over 300 flats of bedding plants. On a rock island, everything is composted: clippings, weeds, branches, sticks, wood chips, coffee grounds, and limed horse manure all stay on the property. | Architectural historian Kathryn Eckert, seldom inclined to hyperbole, writes in Buildings of Michigan, "The Grand Hotel exceeds all superlatives ever written to describe its stately majesty and festive quality. . . . [Its] classical columned façade is one of the most enduring images of Mackinac Island." She goes on to describe how, in 1882, a wealthy lumberman from Kalamazoo, Senator Francis B. Stockbridge, "purchased the site of the hotel and formulated a scheme to finance its construction." He talked up the project to the two railroads and steamship line that served the island. The transportation consortium built and ran the hotel. (Northern Michigan railroads and ship lines became developers of most all Lake Michigan's resort colonies from Harbor Springs south to Grand Haven. They sought to develop tourism to replace business lost as the pine forests were giving out and lumbering faced a sudden decline.)
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 | | Concierge Bob Tagatz and staff dispense tidbits about Grand Hotel activities, services, and history, even suggesting itineraries and customized stops for the trip home. The woman to the right is Dixie Franklin, well-known Michigan travel writer, now on the Grand Hotel staff. To the left rear, the Manoogian Gallery displays changing selections from one of the nation’s outstanding collection of late 19th century and impressionist American art. In the center, the entrance to the nightclub, with dancing every evening. | The construction firm of architect-builder Charles Caskey, familiar to old house buffs in Bay View and Harbor Springs, used Michigan white pine in erecting the hotel. Hotel operators from the Eastern seaboard operated the Grand. "Among the wealthy Midwesterners assembled at the Grand Hotel for its opening in 1887 were the lumber barons the Algers, Newberrys, and Blodgetts; the Potter Palmers and Marshall Fields; and the meat packers, the Armours and Swifts," notes Eckert.
Grand Hotel is so much a tourist destination in its own right that the hotel charges a $10 entrance fee ($5 for children), partly to reduce the numbers of daytime tourists. (Non-guests can come in the evening to its restaurants and nightclubs, provided they meet the dress code: coat and tie for men, dresses or pantsuits — or something similarly dressy — for women.) For the fit, it's a nice walk up to the hotel along a romantic lane past the front "Grand Nine" golf course, as carriages ferry guests and their luggage. Go in the side carriage level door.
 | | Grand Hotel historian and concierge Bob Tagatz gives riveting “porch talks” to visiting groups and, usually a few times a week, to individuals. An irreverent, knowledgeable, and appreciative social historian, he reveals the hotel’s business and resort history, Victorian love of display, and endless efforts to amuse guests, including cleverly concealed gambling and drinking during Prohibition. Bob, a fan of Florida’s last wood resorts, convinced the Grand management that they needed a historian. He chronicles the ongoing drama of keeping a seasonal 19th century resort hotel solvent into the 21st century. Talks and garden tours are posted each morning by the lower level main desk. | The $10 admission fee can be applied to the $45 Grand buffet at lunch. (It is not included as a meal in hotel guests' room prices.) But visitors can eat less, for less money, at Carleton's Tea Store inside the hotel or at the Jockey Club by the golf course opposite the side entrance. (It has very pleasant outdoor seating with a view.) Or they could, for $25, have 4 o'clock tea in the parlor (with tea, champagne, or sherry, plus finger sandwiches and pastries) while chamber music is played. (This wasn't as delightful as it sounds.) Grand guest rooms are rented on the modified American plan including breakfast and dinner, but the impressive dining room is free at lunch for tour groups and others. As a result, midday is busier and more hectic than morning and evening.
Here's what not to miss while at the Grand Hotel as a visitor or guest:
 | | Built in 1887, the Grand Hotel's verandah with its splendid hillside vista, is one of Michigan's most popular places to visit. This photo was taken in 1905. | • THE FRONT PORCH. Sit in a rocker and take in the view. Walk the whole porch, all 880 feet, and you'll follow in the footsteps of one of America's great walkers, President Harry Truman.
• THE PARLOR. On every wall here and in just about every public space is Grand Hotel history: famous visitors including presidents, Michigan political luminaries past and present, celebrities, and in many photos W. Stewart Woodfill, the Grand's longtime owner and savior. (See below.) Hotel concierge and resident historian Bob Tagatz has his desk here and enjoys fielding all kinds of questions about the Grand and its history. His own interest in historic wood hotels of the 19th century is what drew him here from his native Florida, after leading an effort to save Hotel Ormond in Ormond Beach near Daytona, one of Florida's Grand Hotels. It failed, and here he is. As concierge, he also acts as trip planner, scoping out interesting stops for guests on their trips back home. If events and scheduling permit, areas of the Grand Hotel are shown off in tours - garden tours by the master gardener, hotel history tours by concierge-historian Bob Tagatz, and sometimes kitchen tours, too. Often they are at 10 a.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, but don't count on it. Call ahead to confirm.
#IMAAGE#Hotel smoker# • Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve filming Somewhere in Time on location at the Grand Hotel will always be the most vivid historical event associated with hotel history for a huge and growing number of international fans of that cult classic.
• THE GALLERY. Just off the Grand parlor, each year the gallery shows a changing selection from the American art collections of Richard Manoogian and his company, Masco, makers of faucets and many home building products. These collections are among the most important private collections of American art, especially Impressionism.
• THE CUPOLA BAR atop the hotel, where guests can enjoy a drink and look out at the Mackinac Bridge. At night there's solo piano or guitar music.
• THE FRONT GARDENS along the lawn are relentlessly perfect because flowers are constant deadheaded to stay in bloom. Ask for a map of the grounds at the front desk. Walk down to the freeform ESTHER WILLIAMS POOL, where America's most famous swimming star was filmed in This Time for Keeps, a 1947 film with Jimmy Durante. Now a giant caterpillar floats in the pool.
• THE LABYRINTH. Stones outline the spiraling walk, a medieval design to promote meditation and prayer. (A sign explains its origins.) Here it's a 20-minute walk to the center, and another 20 minutes back out.
• SHOPS are mostly on the lower level, some tucked into corners. Here are gifts, Grand logo items, resortwear, children's books, teas and unusual foods at Carleton's Tea Shop.
 | | The owners’ personal attention to every detail has been a Grand Hotel hallmark ever since the legendary W. Stewart Woodfill, who started out as a desk clerk, took over the bankrupt hotel during the Depression. He managed to achieve what seemed to be impossible: financial self-sufficiency for a wood-frame hotel with a short season. Conventioneers and traveling groups are routinely greeted the Victorian-era dining room by Woodfill’s successors, grand-nephew Dan Musser III and his nephew and immediate successor Dan Musser II (right), who has met scores of Presidential hopefuls and five presidents on the hotel’s famous front porch. | Many of America's great summer resorts succumbed to fire, changing fashion, challenges of the Great Depression, and/or World War II. Fortunately, the Grand had a great promoter and savior in the person of longtime owner William Stewart Woodfill, who came to work as a desk clerk in 1919 and was able to purchase the hotel outright in 1933. Before the crusty, imperious, theatrical Woodfill took charge, "the hotel had never made a legitimate nickel," states historian Bob Tagatz.
The Grand Hotel had been built as a loss leader to help its transportation owners fill their trains and steamships. During Prohibition, gambling and liquor sustained the hotel. The bankers who ran it just before Woodfill said it could never make money, what with a three-month season, debt, and the maintenance of a huge wood building. To keep the hotel afloat and stave off demolition, Woodfill courted conventions large and small, and cultivated celebrities, political groups, and chambers of commerce.
One meeting at the Grand in 1943 affected the history of the world after World War II. Michigan's Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, formerly an isolationist like many Midwestern Republicans, chaired the Post War Advisory Council here. The meeting united Republican leaders in supporting the ideas behind the United Nations and NATO.
Owner Woodfill did more than just schmooze with celebrities, as profusely depicted in the Grand's history galleries on walls throughout the hotel. His tireless lobbying was instrumental in building the Mackinac Bridge. Before World War II, 90% of the hotel's guests came by ship or rail. Woodfill felt automobiles were his hotel's future. For more, read about the Mackinac Bridge. The bridge story is told in the short book, Bridging the Straits: The Story of the Mighty Macby Lawrence Rubin. As executive secretary of the Mackinac Bridge Authority from 1950 to 1983, Rubin was a behind-the-scenes eyewitness to the bridge's politicking and construction. He described the Grand Hotel's "vast landscape. . . . [as] a fiefdom dominated for nearly half a century by the late William Stewart Woodfill, who preferred the British affectation, 'W. Stewart.'
"In his time, this self-styled 'Innkeeper' played host to international celebrities," wrote Rubin, and "strutted about his domain nightly, black book in hand, making notes for the next morning's instructions. His employees performed with a 'snap-to-it' discipline that would win the admiration of a suzerain. . . . Tall, erect, meticulously attired, and hair slickly 'coifed' (to use his own term), always with a walking stick, not a cane ('a cane is for the lame') . . . he had a deep resonant voice that he used with consummate oratorical, if not theatrical, skill. He was a master of persuasive argument and could readily convince skeptics sitting around a conference table. He was an equally skilled and indefatigable organizer. He needed a vehicle for his bridge legislation promotion, so he created the Mackinac Bridge Citizens Committee. It was comprised on prominent citizens from all over the state. As owner of the Grand Hotel, he was owed many favors - due bills he planned to call in."
Deferred maintenance was one of Woodfill's ways of keeping the Grand Hotel solvent. White paint was another. One travel writer in the 1950s described it as "an aged wooden frame building, held together by more coats of white paint than one can count." Guest rooms were all painted a stark white.
Woodfill's nephew, protégée, longtime assistant, and successor is the hotel's current owner, Dan Musser. In 1976, when Dan and Amelia Musser took over the reins from Woodfill, they realized that they needed to invest in the hotel, spending lots of borrowed money, if it were to survive in an era when quick getaway trips had replaced leisurely two-week vacations. Musser also moved the hotel's winter office from Chicago to Lansing to stay better in touch with the many state associations that book conferences at the Grand - often in the midweek, the off-time for weekend getaways. Conventions, tours, and theme weekends and other packages comprise nearly 80% of the hotel's business.
In an age when convention centers are heavily subsidized at great cost to taxpayers, the Grand Hotel remains without a net, in private hands, solvent and expanding — a point Bob Tagatz, the ultimate fan of old wood hotels, loves to make. Dan Musser updated the hotel's basic systems and renovated it to extend its season. Interior designer Carleton Varney, successor to the firm of interior designer/socialite Dorothy Draper, had already updated West Virginia's Greenbrier Resort while respecting its historic character. He was hired in 1976 to warm up and dramatize the hotel and make the most of its history. Drawing on his own summers in New England, Varney adopted the geranium as the hotel's symbol.
The Mussers (Dan, Amelia, and daughter Mimi) teamed up with Varney to transform the hotel with bright, summery colors. The Mackinac look and palette of intense pastels have had a huge impact on resorts in northern Michigan and can even be spotted in the western Upper Peninsula. On the Internet, you can read Len Barnes's amusing 1991 article on the Grand's need for renovations and the excitement of Carleton Varney's dramatic redo. Now at the end of each September the Grand hosts its Carleton Varney Antique and Design Fall Festival weekend ($899/couple). The Mussers continue to invest and expand, with Jerry Matthews' revamped Jewel golf courses, historical theme rooms, a new golf pro shop, and the Millenium Wing and 3,600-square-foot meeting room in 2001. Dealing with the structural challenges of the vast old hotel and its new additions are discussed on the web site of structural engineer Robert Darvas, a colorful architecture professor at the University of Michigan.
Two Grand Hotel books convey its history, one in brief two-page chapters (it's about $10 at hotel shops), another in photos.
Grand Hotel's main season is from May through October. General admission from 9 to 5 is $10, $5 for children. There's no charge for evening admission to restaurants and bars, but coat and tie are required for men, and dressier garb for women. The hotel is wheelchair-accessible via the side carriage-level entrance and elevators.
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