Sunday, February 26, 2012

Downtown Lake Odessa, Lake O, might be the antique mall of West Michigan.

Today, the main street of Lake Odessa has cars lining both sides of the streets. There's So Simply for home decoration, a pizza joint and the Lakes Pub for food and drink. Beside the library, the stores of main street contain antiques, some collections exceedingly deep and quirky. I saw a Whizzer from World War II in one window last visit, a half bicycle, half moped design that the war production board approved to take munitions employees from house to factory. Recently, Muskegon had a store selling Whizzers for about two grand, new production. Store closed because the owner had to sell the units on deposit and he couldn't fulfil orders. I test drove one on Terrace Street, a lot of fun. The antique Whizzer in the Lake-O window listed at 6 hundred, proudly displayed in the downtown shop's window. The deal gave me pause. What if it could still really whizz?

The best bet for food might be the Lake Pub, with a ten dollar sirloin and a seven dollar salmon plate. I did notice a Chinese and Thai place on the gleaming waters of Jordan Lake, ironically the lake of Lake Odessa. The parking lot had a full count of cars before the building that once served burgers and coneys to car cruisers in the 1950s. Asian ingenuity can repurpose any American building. I am sure if I checked old photographs in the antiques stores, I would find pictures of a swimming pavilion here that had burned down after World War Two but before Vietnam. I saw a black and white picture of such a pavilion on display at the Saugatuck Center for the Arts, the pavilion engulfed in flames on the shore of Kalamazoo Lake, part of a collection of images taken by a local journalist from the immediate post war period. Countless swimming pavilions are missing from this era of family outings and family picnics. My favorite one is made of stone and abandoned, found on the south shore of Island Lake near Brighton. It might be gone now, some locals stigmatizing it as a nuisance attractive only to squatters. It had boarded up windows when I saw it last, Summer 1995.

Lake Pub has a big clean cooler full of domestics, imports and Michigan microbrews. Opened in 2010, the pub has a good dinner business once the antique stores close. I am just loving this classic round dining room table set in the sunny dining room, enjoying full illumination from big street-facing plate glass windows.

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