68. Dancing at the Water’s Edge

Location: North of the West-side Chain Ferry landing, Saugatuck

The Pokagon Inn and its riverside dance pavilion.

In the early 1900s, ballroom-style dancing was a socially acceptable way to mix, mingle and handle the opposite sex. Most large resorts and hotels had dance floors. The lavish but short-lived Pokagon Inn offered dancing in both a water’s edge pavilion and on the rooftop of the hotel.

The Pokagon Inn was destroyed by fire in 1901 but the dance pavilion survived. Eventually it was dragged across the frozen Kalamazoo River for creative reuse as Albert H. Krehbiel’s AK Studio art school in the 1940s and Ox-Bow’s Village Studio in the 1950s.