Step onto Belle Isle today and you'll cross a 2,000-foot marble bridge straight into America's most surreal urban ruin. This Victorian island paradise in the Detroit River is covered in garbage, its Olympic-class rowing club stands abandoned, and somewhere in the attic of the Detroit Boat Club, a ghostly child might be watching from the window. But the strangest thing on Belle Isle isn't supernatural—it's a massive marble fountain built by a dead millionaire who absolutely hated Detroit.
In 1910, notorious Detroiter James Scott left his fortune to the city with one cruel condition: build a giant monument to him on Belle Isle, or get nothing. His enemies called him "a vindictive, scurrilous misanthrope," but Scott knew his money would win. His smug face still looks out over the fountain today, laughing at the city that despised him. From the oldest yacht club in America to a six-hole golf course, from Renaissance Revival architecture to styrofoam cups floating in interior lakes, Belle Isle tells the story of Detroit's rise and fall in one surreal, haunted island.
Join us for a tour of America's strangest state park, where you'll lose cell service halfway across the Detroit River and enter a place that feels suspended between 1900 and some distant dystopian future.
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