Charlevoix: Mushroom Houses and a Drawbridge Downtown

Charlevoix occupies a narrow spit of land between Lake Michigan and Lake Charlevoix, threaded together by a channel narrow enough that the town's main drawbridge stops traffic dozens of times a day each summer to let sailboats pass. It is a resort town in the old-money Michigan tradition — understated, seasonal, and built around a body of water rather than a boardwalk.

The Mushroom Houses

Local architect Earl Young spent decades building a cluster of whimsical stone-and-cedar cottages throughout Charlevoix, their curved roofs and boulder foundations earning them the nickname 'mushroom houses.' Young, who had no formal architectural training, designed roughly thirty of these structures using local fieldstone and salvaged timber, and a self-guided walking tour past the surviving homes remains one of the more distinctive small-town attractions in northern Michigan.

The Round Lake Channel

Downtown Charlevoix sits directly astride the channel connecting Lake Michigan to Round Lake and, beyond it, Lake Charlevoix, and watching the drawbridge rise for passing sailboats has become a genuine spectator activity, with onlookers gathering along the channel rail each time traffic backs up. The arrangement gives Charlevoix a working-harbor energy that towns built purely around a beach often lack.

Fishtown's Northern Cousin and Beaver Island

Charlevoix serves as the mainland ferry departure point for Beaver Island, the largest island in Lake Michigan and, for a strange stretch of the 1850s, the site of the only monarchy ever established on American soil, when religious leader James Strang crowned himself king of a Mormon splinter colony there. The island today is a quiet, sparsely populated retreat reachable by a roughly two-hour ferry crossing, offering a degree of isolation that Charlevoix itself, for all its charm, no longer quite provides in peak season.