If you drove down to Chinook Pier this month expecting your usual Saturday morning of fresh popcorn and heirloom tomatoes, you probably noticed something was off. The pier itself looks the same from a distance, boats still tied up, the pavilion still standing, but the vendor tents are gone. That's not a scheduling hiccup. It's the first visible sign of the biggest change to come to Grand Haven's waterfront in years, and it happened faster than the city's own timeline suggests it should have.
The market didn't skip a season. It skipped a location.
The Grand Haven Farmers Market opened its 2026 season at Chinook Pier on Saturday, May 2, right where it's always been. The plan, laid out months in advance, was to run a normal season through the Coast Guard Festival and then relocate once construction crews moved in. Coast Guard Festival wrapped July 24 through August 2, and true to that plan, the market packed up and reopened in a temporary lot just east of the playground at Mulligan's Hollow, the same spot that hosts the city's summer pickleball tournament.
Matt Vander Velde has sold popcorn at Chinook Pier for 15 years and now co-manages the market. He knew the move needed careful handling because of how long the market has occupied that pier. Depending on which local account you read, the market is either just over 35 years old or closing in on 40. Vander Velde, who has more skin in the game than most, put it plainly: after nearly four decades in the same spot, an unannounced move would be "a little bit of a shock to people." So the team spent the spring getting the word out before the tents actually came down.
Where the timeline gets interesting
Here's the part that generic coverage of this move tends to skip. The market relocated on schedule, timed to construction starting right after the festival. But the Grand Haven Tribune reported on August 21 that the Planning Commission had only just approved the special land use permit for the $10 million Chinook Pier redevelopment, and that the project, led by CopperRock Construction, is now expected to break ground next spring, not this fall.
In other words, the vendors moved out before the developer got the final green light to move in. That gap matters if you're the kind of resident who assumes "temporary" means a matter of weeks. The market's new home at Mulligan's Hollow was built around an assumption that construction would start almost immediately after the festival ended. With groundbreaking now pointing to spring 2027, that parking lot east of the playground is likely to be the market's address for considerably longer than anyone expected when the move was first announced.
What's actually going in at the pier
The redevelopment itself is worth understanding on its own terms, because it explains why the disruption is worth the wait. The approved plan calls for three buildings at the pier, located at 301 N. Harbor Dr.: a restaurant, a mixed-use office structure, and a multi-purpose facility built specifically to house the farmers market and other events year-round. Around those buildings, the plan includes green space, a controlled gas fire pit, parking, fishing infrastructure for the charter boats that work out of the harbor, and a redesigned mini-golf course to replace the one currently on site.
That last detail matters to longtime residents more than it might seem. Public feedback on earlier versions of the project pushed hard to keep the mini-golf course, a small but telling sign of how much sentimental weight this stretch of waterfront carries in a town where a lot of people can point to the exact spot they learned to putt as kids. The market itself is set to move from open-air pier stalls into an actual enclosed building once construction wraps, a real upgrade from decades of folding tables and pop-up tents.
Two changes landing in the same summer
The physical move isn't the only shift happening to the market this year. For decades, the Chamber of Commerce Grand Haven, Spring Lake, Ferrysburg handled day-to-day operations. Last fall, the Chamber stepped away from that role, and 2026 marked the market's first season under vendor-led management, with Vander Velde and Amy Rash of Lakeside Orchards taking over as co-managers.
That's a meaningful amount of change to absorb at once: new leadership figuring out logistics for the first time, on a site they didn't choose, while the organization that used to handle those decisions is no longer in the room. So far it seems to be holding together. Vander Velde has said the market's roughly 25 regular vendors and its usual crowd of customers should recognize the same faces and the same produce, just in a lot that's noticeably tighter on parking than the open pier ever was.
Here's a quick snapshot of what's changed and what hasn't:
| Chinook Pier (through early August) | Mulligan's Hollow (current) | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 301 N. Harbor Dr. | Lot east of the playground |
| Season | Saturdays May–Oct, Wednesdays June–Sept, 8 a.m.–1 p.m. | Same schedule |
| Management | Vendor-led (first year without Chamber oversight) | Same |
| Vendor count | Roughly 25 | Same |
| Parking | Ample pier lot | Described by organizers as "a little snug" |
| Duration | N/A | Likely through at least spring 2027 groundbreaking |
The pier's other anniversary
There's a second layer here that gives the timing some added context. Just last year, the Grand Haven Boardwalk marked its 40th anniversary with a joint celebration alongside Sweet Temptations Ice Cream at Escanaba Park in August 2025. Both the boardwalk and the ice cream shop trace their start back to the summer of 1984, and owner Kelly Larson has called her shop "a Grand Haven icon for over 40 years." Sweet Temptations itself had already been displaced from Chinook Pier once before, moving to the Depot after the pier building partially collapsed in 2020, the same structural failure that's a big part of why this redevelopment has been years in the making rather than a sudden decision.
Seen that way, the market's move up the hill this August isn't happening in isolation. It's the next chapter in a stretch of waterfront that's been quietly falling apart and slowly getting rebuilt since 2020, one storefront and one season at a time.
The rest of the late-August wind-down
The market's move is landing at the exact moment Grand Haven's summer calendar is closing out for the year, which makes it easier to read as part of a bigger seasonal turn rather than an isolated event:
- Battle on the Boardwalk returns for its 14th year on August 27 and 28 at Lynne Sherwood Waterfront Stadium, a free community event bringing high school and adult volleyball teams from Grand Haven, Fruitport, Mona Shores, and Spring Lake to the waterfront.
- Grand Haven Free Fridays, the city's free live music series, wrapped its six-Friday run on August 21.
- Music on the Grand, the Wednesday concert series at the same stadium, runs through August 26.
- Kids Nights in the downtown social district close out the summer with a Back to School STEM Night, trading face painting for science demonstrations and a paper airplane fly-off.
None of these are related to the pier project directly, but they mark the same shift the market's move does: the transition from the town's peak summer footing into its quieter fall rhythm.
What this actually tells you
The takeaway isn't that a farmers market moved lots, plenty of towns shuffle their markets around for a season. It's that Grand Haven's waterfront is in the middle of its first real physical change since a building on Chinook Pier came down in 2020, and the visible part of that change, empty pier stalls and a snugger parking lot at Mulligan's Hollow, arrived well before the formal construction timeline has actually locked in. If you've been wondering when things go back to normal at the pier, the honest answer based on what's public right now is not this fall, and probably not next spring either, since that's only when the ground gets broken.
For a longtime lakeshore team like Ron Webb, keeping track of the small civic shifts, a market's new address, a pier's construction calendar, a boardwalk's birthday, is part of what it means to actually know a place rather than just sell in it. If you're curious how changes like this one tend to ripple through property values along the Grand Haven waterfront over time, that's exactly the kind of local read our team can walk you through, starting with a quick, no-pressure look at where your own home stands today.
