For eighty years the “pocket park” stretching between Main and Market Streets, across from the Arnold Dock, was home to the Mackinac and New Mackinac Hotel.
The hotel started life as the “Lake Superior House,” built sometime before 1854. In 1859 it was sold to P.A. Smith and renamed “The American House.” By the 1860s it was being managed by John and Justine Becher and renamed the “The Mackinac Hotel.”
The building was a two-story, gable-roofed structure, the long side paralleling the street. By the 1870s a two-story covered porch had been constructed across the front, the roof of which was surrounded by a solid balustrade and accessible by a dormer added to the attic story.
It is not known how long the Becher’s managed the hotel, but by 1881 it was under the management of Mrs. David Carson. In 1885 Frederick Emerick (b. 1862) acquired the property. Two years later, on February 1, 1887, the hotel burned to the ground. The neighboring Murray Hotel, Highston Store (owned by Emerick’s step father, Siegfried Highston) and the Chambers building were also lost in the blaze.
Emerick rebuilt the hotel, calling it the “New Mackinac,” the name it would bear for the next forty years. It was considerably larger than the original. In the Italianate Style with a bracketed cornice, the building was a full-three stories with a flat roof. It was set back from the street, fronted by a three-decker porch with access to the uncovered top level via the third floor. A narrow three-story wing, housing the dining room on the ground floor, stretched north behind the hotel nearly to Market Street, and was extended all the way to Market Street by 1895. Attached to the back wing was a two-story section that housed the kitchen. At the very rear of the property was the hotel’s ice house, located where the Veterans’ memorial is today.
The hotel was sold to the Bogan brothers in about 1910. They operated it until it closed in the early years of the Great Depression. In 1938 the derelict structure was purchased by the city and torn down.
