Walk north on Bay Road in Macatawa Park today and you will not get far. Since 2021, a guardhouse has sat on that private road, staffed by security who turn back anyone heading toward North Walk and the lighthouse beyond it. At the far end of North Walk itself, a red sawhorse with a "No Trespassing" sign does the rest of the work. Most people who live in or around Macatawa already knew the path was closed. What fewer people understood, until the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled on it this past April, is exactly why a community that has shared these paths for over a century lost the legal right to keep doing so.
The short version: litigation between the Macatawa Park Association and VA Properties, the entity tied to the Van Andel family, ended with the Ottawa County Circuit Court and then the Court of Appeals agreeing that no cottage owner south of a specific 1935 subdivision line has a right to walk Bay Road, North Walk, or Lakeside Way. The longer version explains something more useful to anyone living on this peninsula: how a neighborhood that has functioned like one resort for 150 years can lose a fight over a right of way, and why the losing argument had more to do with how the paths were maintained than who built the fence.
The Fence That Never Came Down
The dispute has a specific starting point. In 2015, the property owners in a small subdivision called Heneveld's Supervisor's Plat No. 31, known locally as HS31, put up a temporary fence across the north end of Lakeside Way while they built a new residence. Once construction wrapped, the fence stayed. For a few years that was the extent of it, an inconvenience rather than a legal fight.
Tensions moved to a different level in 2021. Before then, Macatawa Park Cottagers Association had an informal agreement with the lighthouse's neighboring landowner that allowed cottagers to walk the paths toward the historic Holland Harbor lifesaving station and the lighthouse known locally as Big Red. That agreement had been paused over high water levels and COVID-era concerns, and by the summer of 2021, according to the association's court filings, it still had not been restored. VA Properties staffed the guardhouse on Bay Road and, per the association's allegations, had security turn people away before they could reach North Walk. The sawhorse barricade went up at the same time.
The Macatawa Park Association, which had by then absorbed the old Cottagers Association, sued in 2022 along with two individual cottage owners, Gronberg and Krissoff, both of whom live south of HS31 and had used the paths for decades. Their claim was straightforward: every property owner in Macatawa Park, not just those inside HS31, had a right to walk these paths recreationally, because the whole peninsula had always functioned as a single resort community.
What Ninety Years of Deeds Actually Say
That argument ran into a problem the association could not paper over: geography and platting history. Macatawa Park was established as a resort in 1881, with its first formal plat recorded in 1888 and additional sections platted in 1890, 1895, and 1909. The land at the very tip of the peninsula, including the lighthouse and the old lifesaving station, followed a different path entirely. Private owners conveyed that northern parcel to the federal government starting in 1873, and the government operated a lifesaving station there until about 1955. Because it was federal land, it was never part of the 1888 plat. It was not platted at all until 1935, when it became HS31, the same subdivision now controlled by VA Properties.
The association's core argument leaned on a 1943 Michigan Supreme Court case, Unverzagt v Miller, which recognized that Macatawa Park owners had an easement to use the resort's original platted roads for ingress, egress, and deliveries of groceries, milk, and ice. The Court of Appeals rejected the idea that this reached North Walk, Bay Road, or Lakeside Way, for two reasons. First, the 1943 case only covered roads within the 1888 plat, and these paths sit inside HS31, a subdivision that did not exist yet. Second, and more pointed, the court found no basis to treat a recreational walk to see a lighthouse as equivalent to a grocery delivery. The standard the court applied was whether the use was "reasonably necessary for the use and enjoyment of the easement," and a scenic walk did not meet it.
The association tried to close that gap with history rather than deeds: local history books, an 1876 atlas once owned by the original landowner, and an 1891 promotional flyer that advertised the lifesaving station and lighthouse as attractions of the resort. It was a genuinely impressive stack of material, and it lost anyway. The trial court noted that the historical materials did not reflect the intent of the parcel's actual owners at the time it was conveyed, and the Court of Appeals agreed.
The Twist: Good Maintenance Worked Against the Cottagers
The more interesting part of the ruling, and the one worth understanding if you live in Macatawa Park, involves the second claim the two individual owners raised on their own behalf. Gronberg and Krissoff argued they had personally built a prescriptive easement through decades of use, Gronberg since buying his property in 1989. According to Mi Condo Law, Michigan law requires a use that is "open, notorious, adverse, and continuous" for fifteen years to establish that kind of right.
The Michigan Court of Appeals concluded that their claim failed on the word adverse. The evidence at trial showed that the HS31 owners had spent years improving the very paths in question, repaving sections, building seawalls and stairs, stabilizing the dunes, while generally tolerating recreational walkers and only turning away people who caused problems.
What Big Red Still Offers, and What It Never Did
It's worth separating two things that get blurred in casual conversation about this case. The lighthouse itself, sitting on land owned by the Holland Harbor Lighthouse Historical Commission, has never been open to the public, regardless of who controls the paths around it. What this ruling actually closed off was the walk through Macatawa Park to get near it on foot, not entry to the tower. The photograph most people associate with Big Red, taken from across the channel, is still available exactly as it always has been, from Holland State Park on the north side of the channel. That view requires no permission from anyone on the Macatawa Park side.
Where This Leaves the Neighborhood
The Court of Appeals issued its decision in April 2026, and as of this writing it is not clear whether the Macatawa Park Association intends to ask the Michigan Supreme Court to take the case. Michigan's highest court agrees to hear only a small fraction of the cases submitted to it each year, so absent that long-shot review, the guardhouse and the barricade are likely to stay exactly where they are. For anyone renting a cottage in Macatawa this season or planning a visit, the practical guidance has not changed since 2021: Bay Road, North Walk, and Lakeside Way run through private property, and the paths that once connected the peninsula's southern cottages to its northern tip are staffed accordingly.
None of this changes what makes this stretch of the lakeshore worth paying attention to, a gated cottage community of more than 200 homes that has kept its own gatehouse, its own parking rules, and its own sense of itself since 1881. It just means the story of Macatawa Park now includes a Court of Appeals opinion alongside the old atlases and promotional flyers, and a reminder that in Michigan, a century of feeling like one resort does not substitute for what the plat actually says.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of the lakeshore, or trying to understand what a specific address actually comes with before you write an offer, The Ron Webb Real Estate Team has spent decades sorting exactly this kind of local detail from the general noise. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics, or get your instant home valuation to see where your Macatawa-area property stands today.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
