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Farewell to the Drawbridge
Membership bids farewell to the beloved (and cursed) staple in the Harbor
By: Katie Susko
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To make way for long-overdue Harbor renovations, the Drawbridge was officially removed from the Harbor on Saturday, December 11, 2021. A staple in the Harbor, many will remember the Drawbridge as a symbol of the good old days and a curse in the modern times. The Drawbridge will be replaced with a modern swing bridge to match its counterpart on the south end of the Harbor. The removal of the Drawbridge was witnessed from above by members dining in the Binnacle. During lunch, Commodore Jason Grobbel gave a toast to the bridge that will surely be missed in our Harbor. We asked Past Commodore James Ramsey of the Heritage Committee to shed some light on the history of this iconic structure in our Harbor.
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The Drawbridge in 2015 raised to let a boat through at sundown
Drawbridge continued
Notes on the Passing of the Drawbridge
By Past Commodore James L. Ramsey
The towering, creaking and groaning mass of steel beams and cables that boaters and pedestrians have loved and hated for decades is headed for the scrapyard. It will soon be replaced by a single-span swing bridge that will link the East Wall docks with the rest of the Club’s Harbor.
The Drawbridge was built in 1959 under Com. Robert Weber, father of Past Com. Mark Weber. It was created to access a major new addition to the Harbor that had been on the minds of Club leaders since the 1950s. Negotiations with the state of Michigan to utilize the bottomland south of the Club had begun earlier that decade. Prior to this, GPYC members could only reach the east end of the Harbor through the Shores Park, using a small swing bridge that connected their property and ours.
With Harbor expansion clearly on the horizon, Com. Weber oversaw the purchase of several Lake Shore homes west of the Club with footage on Lake St. Clair. Those homes had riparian rights allowing the owners to build on the lake bottom. Weber immediately sold off the homes, but kept the riparian rights for the Club in anticipation of a larger GPYC Harbor. The Drawbridge was the precursor of a project that would nearly double the size of the Club’s Harbor.
The Harbor footprint in the 1950s was virtually unchanged from when the Club was first built in 1929. What we now think of as the south harbor didn’t exist, and the walkway going past today’s Grog Shop and leading to the Drawbridge marked the southernmost boundary of the Harbor. That same walkway passes over the remains of the old Shores Pier, built in 1915, that was used by GPYC boaters before the Clubhouse and Harbor existed.
The growth of the membership after WWII, combined with the rising popularity of pleasure boating, created unprecedented demand for more boat wells. A dramatically larger Harbor was clearly needed, but a tight budget in the 1950s delayed Harbor expansion until the early 1960s, when an expansion plan was presented to, and approved by the membership. The cost of the new Harbor was lower than originally estimated, and loan money was more readily available. Loans were obtained; the necessary eight acres of bottomland were acquired from the state and the Shores through purchase and lease agreements; and the go-ahead was given.
William “Bill” Plante, who became our Commodore in 1977, was in charge of the Harbor Committee then. It was his committee that oversaw construction of the expanded Harbor. Once the new South Wall of the Harbor was in place, dredging commenced, and the excavated spoils were used to form the new southwest corner of the Club property, where the tennis courts, Family Recreation Center and parking lot are today. The expansion not only increased the size of the Harbor, it nearly doubled the footprint of the Club.
It all began with the Drawbridge, a structure that we have both loved and cursed, and has defined our Harbor for more than 60 years.
Crews from EC Korneffel work to remove the Drawbridge on a chilly day in December
