Ask someone who lives in Grand Beach where they're headed on a summer evening and the answer is almost always "the beach," as if there's only one. There isn't. The village maintains four named access points down to Lake Michigan, and if you read the village's own beach page closely, you'll notice something residents rarely say out loud: the four are not being rebuilt at the same pace, and the one you use without thinking might be the one still waiting its turn.
Four Names, Four Different Stages of Repair
The Village of Grand Beach's beach page lists the access points by name: Ely, Pine, Walnut, and Lake. That page also says, plainly, that the village has added new lookout platforms and stairs at Ely and Pine, that Walnut already has a very large stretch of sand on its own, and that a platform and stairs are still planned for Lake. Read as a status report rather than a brochure, it breaks down like this:
| Access Point | Current State (per village) |
|---|---|
| Ely | New lookout platform and stairs already built |
| Pine | New lookout platform and stairs already built |
| Walnut | No upgrade mentioned, naturally has a large beach |
| Lake | Platform and stairs not yet built, described as forthcoming |
Two of the four have already been re-engineered. One doesn't need it, at least for now, because the sand there has held. The fourth is still on the list. If your regular walk to the water ends at Lake access, you're using the one entry point the village hasn't finished catching up on.
Why the Village Is Rebuilding Its Own Shoreline
This isn't cosmetic upkeep. The village's own shoreline erosion page states that the beaches along the Great Lakes were hit hard by the near record high water levels of recent years, and that Grand Beach lost sand along with the rest of the Michigan shoreline. That high-water stretch, which peaked around 2019 and 2020, is the reason the beach page now talks about adding access points back "as the level of Lake Michigan returns to normal." The platforms at Ely and Pine aren't new amenities. They're replacements.
Grand Beach didn't try to fix this alone. The village is a formal member of the New Buffalo Shoreline Alliance, a coalition formed specifically to address sand loss on the beaches south of New Buffalo Harbor, which includes Grand Beach's own shoreline. The village names its own representatives on that alliance: Brian Byrnes and council member Steve Slater. That's a level of specificity you won't find on a generic Harbor Country beach guide, and it tells you something real: a village of one square mile still sends people to sit at a regional table because the sand under Ely, Pine, Walnut, and Lake isn't something any one town controls on its own.
What's Under the Sand Near Walnut and Lake
The same beach page carries a safety warning that's easy to skim past: metal and concrete obstructions are exposed on the beach and underwater, and swimmers are told to stay clear of the old pier structure. Grand Beach's Wikipedia entry fills in what that pier actually was. In the 1920s, an entertainment pier ran out into Lake Michigan, hosting dining and dancing, connected by a footbridge over the creek to the Golfmore Hotel just across the line in Michiana. The pier is long gone, but the same entry notes that its support posts are "sometimes visible when the lake levels are low." Put those two village-published facts side by side and the obstruction warning on today's beach page is very likely describing the same remnants: what's left of a hundred-year-old dance pier, still down there under the water near the beach you walk to on a Tuesday.
The Golfmore itself burned on November 19, 1939. A local history talk covered by the Harbor Country News recounted that the 175-room hotel was vacant for the season when a passing motorist spotted the glow and sounded the alarm, and that the cause of the fire was never determined. The village hasn't let the story fade. Right now, the Grand Beach homepage is promoting a local history podcast episode on that same hotel, calling it the "jewel of the dunes" and describing its rise and the night it burned. That's not archival trivia buried in a museum newsletter. It's on the village's own site this season, sitting next to the holiday schedule and the fire department sign-up form.
The Reminders You End Up Giving Every Guest
If you've had a houseguest for more than one weekend, you've probably already had some version of this conversation, because the village's rules aren't the kind that get repeated in every listing description. There are no lifeguards on any Grand Beach beach. The village says this directly on its own beach page, citing budget limits and the difficulty of finding lake-certified lifeguards, which is a problem plenty of small Great Lakes towns share but few post about this openly.
Beach fires require an actual permit, issued by the Police Department or the Village Clerk-Treasurer's office, and whoever pulls the permit is responsible for cleaning up afterward. Dogs are allowed on the beach only between May 1 and October 1, and only starting in the evening, from 6 p.m. on. And the pier area that's still down there near the shoreline is flagged as genuinely dangerous. Diving or swimming near it isn't a minor caution on the village's site. It's the first thing the beach page tells you, ahead of anything about sand or sunsets.
The Same Instinct Shows Up at the Golf Course
Grand Beach manages its water access carefully because it manages almost everything that way. Half a mile from the shoreline sits the village's nine-hole golf course, designed in 1911 by Tom Bendelow, the same architect behind hundreds of early twentieth century American courses. It plays to a par of 36 across 2,955 yards, short by modern standards, with blind tee shots and small greens that one golf reviewer called "quirky" and left largely alone by a century of remodeling.
Access to it works the way access to the beach works. Cart stickers, sold weekly or seasonally, are only available to Grand Beach homeowners, capped at two per household, and any rental company that wants to drop off carts needs its own agency sticker first. Even the building tells the story: the golf pro shop and Grand Beach's Village Hall share the same structure at 48200 Perkins Boulevard, a detail confirmed by more than one golf directory describing the same old 1940s-era building housing both. One address, one small staff, two different jobs. That's not an accident of a tiny budget. It's the same philosophy that shows up at Ely, Pine, Walnut, and Lake: nothing here is treated as unlimited, and the village would rather manage it in public than pretend otherwise.
Know Which Beach You're Actually Walking To
The next time someone asks where the beach is in Grand Beach, the honest answer has four parts. Ely and Pine have already been rebuilt. Walnut never needed the help. Lake is still on the list. Knowing which one you're standing on, and why, is the difference between visiting a beach and understanding a shoreline that a very small village has spent years working, alliance meeting by alliance meeting, to hold onto.
If you're weighing a move to Grand Beach, or you already call one of these four access points your regular walk and you're curious what your property is worth in a shoreline market that shifts as much as this one does, Shoreline Advice works this stretch of Harbor Country closely with Rob Gow and Chris Pfauser. Reach out any time to request a free home valuation and talk through what's actually happening on your end of the beach.
