The Presque Isle Marina flanks the city’s most cherished land holding, fronting the magnificence of Lake Superior, its setting is one of natural splendor. Overshadowed by the Cinder Pond, the marina is out of the boating mainstream, its infrastructure is rusting, corroding and sagging.
The facility has an interesting history, an active lifespan and a questionable future. But there is one certainty—change is on the waves.
Perhaps the seed for its creation was planted as far back as 1949. In October of that year, the Marquette area experienced a storm, the winds of which were measured to have been the strongest since 1901. A southwestern roared unchecked through the unprotected open anchorage between the Presque Isle breakwater and the LS&I ore dock. The crashing surf quickly swamped one small open boat, while others were pounded against each other. The Marquette Coast Guard felt that the only way to insure the safety of the remaining craft was to beach them. After acquiring the owner’s permission, they towed them ashore.
It was probably with this experience in mind that, in 1957, the City’s harbor committee met with the Corps of Engineers to discuss improvements that could be made to insure the safety of local small craft. Facilities to moor small boats in the City were needed. Downtown they were sparsely spread and limited; at the Island, they were exposed. And also to be considered was a national, as well as a local trend. In the booming ’50s people were buying boats at an unprecedented rate. So the need for a good marina was obvious—but where to build it?
Fast forward to 1963. During the winter, the harbor committee, under the chairmanship of George N. Spear, Sr., appropriated money to be used to study possible locations. A firm was hired, and they came up with four options, working from south to north:
• Near the new municipal steam plant, on the beach in South Marquette. This was rejected, because the plant would occupy most of the City-owned land.
• Near the City’s water plant near McCarty’s Cove. This was rejected too, because it would require the construction of an expensive T-shaped breakwater, out into the lake.
• At the mouth of the Dead River. The committee favored this site, but the Soo Line Railroad owned most of the land, and they were not open either to leasing or selling. Also, the location is subject to severe shoaling. So the harbor committee settled for the last alternative.
• Presque Isle—but not where you think.
As early as 1910, there had been a proposal to dig a swimming pool and a fishpond on the isthmus of the Island. In 1916, George Shiras donated money for a swimming pool there. And the next year a drawing entitled City of Marquette General Plan for the Presque Isle Marsh called for the construction, between Lake Shore Boulevard and Peter White Drive, of a baseball/football field, tennis courts, three lagoons, a street car loop, and a swimming pool. The water was to be refreshed from the lake by a canal run under the road and tramway bridges.
Before the site was recognized as a 10,000-year-old cranberry bog, it was considered to be “swampland.” Plans called for this to be excavated, a marina constructed and a channel entrance near the LS&I merchandise dock, dug under Peter White Drive.
Soon, however, a complicating factor arose. A corporation called Superiorland, wanted to purchase the land as part of a 500-square-mile package. Beginning at Presque Isle and stretching to Big Bay (including the Dead River storage basin), the Disneyesque mini-state was to be billed as The World’s Largest Recreation Center. The Presque Isle land was to be the site of a forty-six-building complex known as “Frontierland.”
The deal fell through. But before it did, the city commission had asked the harbor committee to find an alternative location for the marina.
In the fall of ’66, the city commission approved the harbor committee’s plan to begin construction on the present site. The plan called for a marina of 6.63 acres. Within it were to be a 506-foot-long rubble-mound breakwater, an extended boat launching ramp (built around the already existing ramp), three parallel piers offering seasonal dockage, an office and a parking lot to be built over the beach, below the Island road.
Money was appropriated, and work began on the breakwater using rock dredged from the harbor. Dredged material, rock and sand, was used as fill for the parking lot.
But the next year the fill would not stay put. A 600-foot long quay wall made of old halved gas tanks and braced by piles was planted.
Meanwhile, the breakwater was being extended out into the harbor, by the utilization of rock from the harbor, as well as stone from an unusual source. Two years previous, Marquette’s First Baptist Church, on the corner of Ridge and Front streets, had been destroyed by fire. The building had been constructed of Marquette brownstone. The remains had been razed, and George Spear had stored the blocks with an idea in mind. Their new destiny was to be the breakwater extension.
During this time, there was a noticeable increase in boating traffic (some say it doubled that year), and the harbor committee had begun to think even further ahead, toward expanding the yet-to-be-constructed facility, or even building a second marina.
The last two years of the decade saw the project crystallize—but with changes.
A proposed elbow and 200-foot inward extension of the breakwater was rejected. The idea that the north and south piers should be floating also was dropped. They, like the fixed center pier, would become permanent structures. Also the configuration of the piers was finalized: the center pier with fixed forty-two-foot and sixty-foot slips, and accompanying spring pilings; the outer piers with twenty-four-foot and thirty-two-foot detachable floating docks. The sides of the piers were to be constructed of metal bin wall, the interiors lined with material and then filled with sand and rock from the Lake. The decks were to be planked with redwood.
At the time, a local man, now a contractor, accurately predicted what would happen. The horizontal instead of vertical bin wall sheets, he warned, were not properly secured, and would be subject to heaving and lifting. Subsequently, the materials within would flow out the bottom—even before corrosion attacked the metal.
Additional problems came with capping the piers with concrete. The utility lines beneath the caps were not accessible; it was necessary to use a jackhammer to access them.
Barry Just works for the parks department and maintains the marina’s aeration system throughout the winter.
“I put a level on it (i.e., the concrete cap), and could actually see where one side had dropped about an eighth of an inch over the winter (of 2005-06),” he said.
Cost estimates for the project rise continuously. The City went to the State and Federal governments for aid. Eventually the facility was completed for just under $430,000. Of this sum, the Michigan Waterways contributed forty percent; the Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce paid fifty percent; while the Shiras Institute donated five percent. In the end, the Marina cost the city less than $25.000.
The City hoped to complete the project in ’69, when it filed the application for Federal funding. However, all money for the 1969 fiscal year had been exhausted. This funding had to be approved before the Corps of Engineers in Duluth could review the final plans. And the bidding process could not begin until the final plans had been approved.
Despite the delay, there was building going on nearby. It was at this time that the LS&I Railroad built the well-equipped Harbor Master’s Office at the end of the merchandise dock, across from the Marina, and donated it to the City, as well as a floating dock and a patrol boat.
In Marquette, the chief of police is the harbor master. And so it was a police officer, the Marina Patrol Officer, who worked out of this building, monitoring activity on the launch ramp, as well as wake speed in the harbor. On weekends, more than 100 boats a day were launching there. The fact that there was no launch fee, contributed to busy conditions.
State representative Dominic Jacobetti, vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, had secured a sizeable sum for launch ramp improvements. A lot of volunteer time and effort also went into working on the launch ramp, breakwater and piers. Input like this, is no longer possible because of environmental regulations.
Things got rolling again in the new decade, when the City was able to award two bids—one for construction in the water, the other for work ashore.
The Marina opened on May 1, 1971, and by October all the seasonal slips had been rented. Yearly rental depended upon boat length. For those docked in twenty-four-foot and thirty-two-foot slips it was $3 per foot, and for those in forty-two-foot and sixty-foot slips it costs $3.50 per foot. The police department provided one full-time officer and two patrolmen.
On the launch ramp, which could launch two boats at a time, a seasonal pass was $15. A daily ticket cost fifty cents. Monies collected were earmarked for launch ramp improvements. However, the honor system proved to be a failure; it was estimated that only about half the launchers were paying the fees.
The remaining signs were pounded into the ground, and the last sod unrolled, just in time for the dedication on June 20, 1971.
That first winter the danger of ice damage soon became apparent, and so Spear, along with Lincoln Frazier, chipped in to purchase the facility’s first bubbler system. The idea was to force the warmer water at the bottom of the Marina upward, to melt and break the hold of the ice on the piers and pilings. The compressor ran twenty-four-seven. But the new system overheated easily, and required twice-daily inspections. Spear maintained it and, at times, even resorted to taking a chain saw out onto the ice to loosen its vice-like grip. By every account, it was a miserable job.
Apparently, the ice was not the only complicating factor in the Marina’s operations. A former slip renter, who prefers to remain anonymous, offers his memories of what the Marina was like under the management of the police department,
“The officers were uniformed and armed,” he said. “And there was one of them who, when he would walk out onto the pier, would cut square corners. They had a loudspeaker system attached to the roof of the office. This was in the days before cell phones, and it came in handy if someone had a phone call in the office. But he would get on the speaker and say, ‘Now hear this! Now hear this! This is Officer _______ in the Marina Office. So-and-so has a phone call. Marina Office out!’ And they used to play music over the loudspeakers. Usually march music. Loud. It could have been Annapolis.
“One night, I’d had enough, and so I just climbed up on the roof and cut the wires. All it took was a pair of dykes.”
The speakers were never rewired.
Also in the ’70s, the launch ramp and its parking lot were expanded and improved. In 1977, the Marina went in the red for the first time. That year, it was dredged again. Also management was relinquished by the police department and turned over to the parks department.
1988 was another low water year in Lake Superior. Half a dozen craft were unable to moor in the Marina, and the depth at the entrance was recorded at five-feet—just like in 2007. However, that year the facility was full and, indeed, the waiting list contained in excess of fifty names.
There are four different marina designs. Presque Isle is the “offshore type.” While it has the shortest land-water interface, it is vulnerable to littoral drift.
The Marina was last dredged in 2001, during an unusually mild November and December. A hydraulic dredge, vacuumed 8,000 cubic yards of sand out of the harbor. The cost of this project was more than the total price tag for the Marina’s original construction thirty years before . . .

—John Cebalo

Editor’s Note: Thanks to the John M. Longyear Research Library, the Peter White Public Library, and the City of Marquette Parks Department for their assistance, and the use of their resources.