Sarah Efron is an editor in The Globe and Mail’s Opinion section.
The blue waters of the Detroit River rushed by as I sat in my car, anxiously waiting to see if the deckhand would let me onto the ferry. I wasn’t on her list of approved visitors so she said she’d try to phone the resident on Boblo Island I was scheduled to meet. But instead, she flagged the other cars to drive onto the small ferry, and within a minute, it pulled away, leaving me on the shore. I wondered if I would ever make it to this storied island – the former home of a much-loved amusement park, and current site of a controversial development – that I’d heard about for so long.
When I was a kid, my mom told me stories about Boblo – its official name, Bois Blanc, is rarely used – a 272-acre island on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. The island is located in Amherstburg, Ont., 30 kilometres south of Windsor, Ont., where my family had lived around the time of my birth. My mom described the exciting 90-minute boat ride from Detroit to a vast, magical amusement park.
In the early years after my parents’ arrival in Canada in the late 1960s, Boblo also served as a backup plan in case my father, a Vietnam War draft dodger, was ever refused entry back into the U.S. and needed to get home temporarily. The amusement park was connected to both the U.S. and Canada via ferries, and there was practically no border control there in those days. This scenario didn’t end up happening, but it remained in my family lore.
I never visited the amusement park, which was open from 1898 to 1993, but in the past few years, during visits to Detroit where my friends and I gawked over the magnificent abandoned buildings, I started hearing again about Boblo.
Most of the shuttered amusement park’s rides had been sold off, but “urban explorers” posted photos of the remaining structures, such as the decaying theatre, the crumbling bumper car track and the Sky Tower, a ride which took passengers up 214 feet to wonder at the view along the river.
Fascinated, I was keen to see what was left on Boblo, which had been partly transformed into a luxury residential community, but by this time, access to the island had been cut off except for residents and their guests.
Previously visitors had been able to pay a fee to use the ferry, which is run by Amico, a large development and construction firm that owns most of the island through a series of related companies. (In recent years, it cost $20 per vehicle, or $6 if you ate at Boblo’s marina restaurant.) But when Amico started construction on a new development on the south part of the island in 2020, it closed the restaurant, and said that for safety and environmental reasons, non-residents couldn’t visit. There’s currently no way to get there unless you have an invitation from a resident or your own boat.
Vehicles disembark the Ste. Claire V ferry, which takes residents and guests from Boblo Island across the Detroit River to the mainland.
I was intrigued. Was anything left of the amusement park, or had the island been completely transformed? And what is lost when a site of historical significance that so many people hold dear is remade into what marketing materials describe as an exclusive island resort?
Back at the dock, I waited around 10 minutes until the ferry had returned from Boblo. This time, the deckhand nodded and flagged me on, so I drove my car onto the ferry, which is dubbed Ste. Claire V, after one of the two iconic steamships that brought passengers to Boblo during its heyday. After a crossing of just four minutes, I was finally on Boblo Island.
On Boblo’s shore, lined with maple and oak trees, a single condo building juts out. Shorebirds hovered overhead as I drove down the quiet main road – to the right are castle-like waterfront homes, complete with turrets. One has its own tennis court while another, owned by former Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment chief executive Richard Peddie, has a private pond.
While some of these properties are worth upward of $3-million, the more modest homes currently under construction, mainly duplexes, sell for around $1-million (units in the sole condo building sell for around $400,000). It’s an affordable price for people leaving the Toronto area in search of a quiet refuge, but out of reach for many locals, given the average home sale price in Amherstburg is around $600,000. There are currently around 150 homes on the island (including 40 or so condo units), with a population of around 375 people, many of them retirees. If Amico’s development of 220 lots on the south side of the island moves forward as planned, the population could rise to roughly 925.
As I turned the corner and drove south, past the fields cleared for development, I finally saw signs of the island’s previous life. An abandoned stone structure that looks like a church was actually the amusement park’s power house. Next to it, behind a fence and a “No Trespassing” sign, is the amusement park’s theatre. The sprawling building still has a majestic energy, despite the fading teal paint on its wraparound porch, boarded up doors and crumbling roof. Originally called the Amusement Building, it was built in 1906 to house a carousel, and was later transformed into a roller rink and finally, a theatre. It’s wondrous to see it, but also sad. Can anyone save this magnificent structure, I wondered, or is it already too late?
I also came across the Dance Hall, an impressive building that was one of the biggest of its kind in the world when it opened in 1913. It featured soaring ceilings, stone walls and a vast hardwood floor that shone like a mirror, perfect for young Detroiters and Windsorites to practise their Charleston and Jitterbug. Today, the beauty’s façade is rusty and surrounded by overgrown raspberry brambles, but it’s still stunning.
Bois Blanc Island Park officially opened on June 20, 1898. Several decades later, the owner, the U.S.-based Detroit, Belle Island & Windsor Ferry Co., changed the park’s name to Bob-Lo. The island’s proper name, Bois Blanc, which means “white wood” in French (a nod to the trees on the island), was too hard for Americans to pronounce. The Indigenous Wyandot people had called the island Etiowiteendannenti, also referring to the island’s white birch and poplar trees.
While the island is well known on both sides of the Detroit River from its amusement park days, its historical significance stretches back centuries. The British used Bois Blanc as a planning site during the War of 1812, and it was an important stop on the Underground Railroad for African Americans escaping slavery. A key civil rights legal victory occurred in the 1940s after a Boblo ferry passenger, Sarah Elizabeth Ray, wasn’t allowed to board because she was Black.
The Bois Blanc lighthouse, built by the British in 1836, is now owned by Parks Canada.
While driving around the island, I encountered the British Blockhouse, built after the Rebellion of 1837 so British troops could fend off insurgents coming from the U.S. This historic site is on Amico’s land, although the company has expressed interest in handing it off to Parks Canada, which owns an adjacent lighthouse built by the British in 1836.
The island also houses the 1909 Maritime Monument, a tribute to Great Lakes sailors and Canadian-American friendship. Since access to the ferry service was restricted, residents of Amherstburg without their own boats can no longer see these historic sites, or visit the White Sands Conservation Area, which has a public beach. Boblo Island’s amusement park wasn’t widely known outside the region, but the memories are strong for locals. Eyes lit up in Amherstburg when I mentioned the park, and most people in their mid-40s or older are keen to share memories of working there as teens in the summers.
At the height of its popularity, in the late 1980s, 800,000 people visited the park during its three-month season, Patrick Livingston, a Detroit resident who wrote the book Summer Dreams: The Story of Bob-Lo Island, told me. The two steamships that brought people from Detroit to Boblo held thousands of people, and featured live bands and dancing, making the journey as memorable as the destination.
The park’s attractions were ever changing, but at various points featured a zoo, food court, superslide, roller coaster, antique cars, pirate ship, mini golf, haunted house and miniature railroad. Boblo was a blissful escape from real life and a symbol of cross-border friendship, and its memory remains preserved in thousands of family photo albums.
But those beautiful steamships were costly to run, and over the years, after various changes in the park’s ownership, a bankruptcy and increasing competition from Ohio’s Cedar Point amusement park two hours from Detroit, Boblo fell into receivership and closed for good in 1993. The following year, an American businessman, John Oram, purchased Boblo for US$4.2-million, and began building gargantuan Victorian-style homes on the north part of the island, but after yet another bankruptcy in 2005, the island was turned over to Mr. Oram’s largest creditor, the current owner Amico.
Michael Prue, the mayor of Amherstburg, picks mulberries while taking visitors on a tour of Boblo Island.
Despite the island’s long history of development, some environmentalists, including Boblo resident and current Amherstburg Mayor Michael Prue, fought to preserve the natural habitat on the south part of the island, with some success. Less thought went into saving the amusement park’s relics, even the iconic Sky Tower was eventually torn down. In Mr. Prue’s view, former town officials were keen to transform the island into an elite development to increase the tax base and attract wealthy people to the area. This privately controlled site, which had felt like a public asset for so long, was gradually becoming inaccessible.
Development plans are mapped out in a model of Boblo Island. If Amico’s development of 220 lots on the south side of the island moves forward as planned, the population could rise from 375 to roughly 925.
Today, Boblo Island is a gated community in every aspect, but instead of gates, the Detroit River serves as a moat. The residents pay a fee of around $5,000 per household a year to fund the ferry, and many don’t see any reason others should be allowed to use it. Every now and then the idea is floated that the Town of Amherstburg should take over the ferry service, particularly last fall, when Amico’s ferry went out of service for 14 days. (Amico arranged a temporary foot passenger service, but residents were unable to travel to and from the island on their cars.) But the town has no interest in getting involved with the ferry.
Larry Amlin worked at Boblo Island amusement park in the 1970s, where he met his wife. He keeps mementos and a photo album from his time on Boblo as a child.
Larry Amlin, a 74-year-old retired paramedic who met his wife while working at the amusement park in the 1970s, believes Amherstburg residents like himself should have access to at least the north end of the island, where no construction is taking place. “We are Amherstburg taxpayers and we pay for the police, the fire service, the ambulance and sewage on the island. Those are municipal roads on the north end,” says Mr. Amlin, who has a photo album stuffed with snapshots of himself as a child on Boblo. “I understand there’s some people who live in those big houses over there who would rather not have the general public over there because they want their privacy and security, but there should be access.”
Indeed some Boblo residents, such as 77-year-old Margaret Johnson, are adamant that the island’s privacy must be preserved. “The charm of this place is it’s just us,” says Ms. Johnson, who purchased a condo unit on Boblo with her husband last year, after moving from Fergus, Ont. “It would disappoint me if they opened up access to the public again.”
Amico does plan to open up a new restaurant on the island in the next few years, which would likely result in more people getting access, although some residents, such as Mr. Prue, are skeptical it will happen. To my surprise, when meeting with Amico Properties’ vice-president Cindy Prince in its beach-style sales centre, she told me that with construction on the island reaching a new phase, non-residents are now allowed to use the ferry if they pay a fee and stay on Boblo’s municipal-owned roads. She wasn’t sure what the fee was, and nobody I spoke with, including island residents and ferry dockhands, seemed aware of the policy, so hopeful visitors would likely face a low chance of success in getting on the ferry.
“It hasn’t been communicated [to the public] because the residents enjoy the privacy of the island,” explained Ms. Prince, “So as the developer, we haven’t been prone to saying, ‘hey, come on over.’ ” The isolation could also be a plus for future buyers, which could be valuable for Amico, given that Ms. Prince admits sales of new homes on the island have been slow.
On a tour of Boblo, Ms. Prince, a blunt and charismatic businesswoman who grew up in the area and knows every inch of the island, wanted to show me the inside of the famed Dance Hall. When she couldn’t locate the employee with the key, she dispatched a pair of Amico electrical workers, who spent half an hour sawing off the metal door plate so we could get in.
Cindy Prince, VP of Amico Properties, gives a tour of the Dance Hall on Boblo Island. She says provincial environmental rules protecting the endangered Eastern foxsnake currently prevent them from doing work on the Dance Hall.
The Dance Hall illustrates the dilemma of Boblo, and how competing heritage and environmental concerns are clashing with development pressures. The exterior is beautiful, but inside, the wooden dance floor is long gone, partly removed to make way for an indoor roller coaster in the park’s latter days. The massive structure is being used to store an eerie mix of furniture from the shuttered restaurant, Amico sales material, old boats and barbecues. Water is pooling in the basement. It’s heartbreaking the building hasn’t been put to better use, but renovating the place would surely be a daunting and hugely expensive task. Ms. Prince says provincial environmental rules currently prevent them from doing work on the Dance Hall owing to efforts to protect the endangered Eastern foxsnake.
Amico doesn’t have immediate plans for the building, although Ms. Prince muses she could picture it as a condo one day. The idea of such a special site becoming condos feels like a gut punch, but the reality is, without some sort of adaptive reuse, the structure will likely deteriorate until it’s beyond repair. The theatre building, where Ms. Prince vividly remembers seeing a magic show when she was a child, might already be too far gone to save, she says.
It’s undeniable that the housing developments on Boblo have been successful in creating a beautiful retreat for the lucky few. But more should have been done – and could still be done – to allow others to enjoy the island, which holds a unique place in the region’s history. The town had its eye on expanding its tax base, the provincial government protected the foxsnakes, but not much else seems to have been considered.
“Greed took Boblo from us,” Kimberly Simmons, a historian, author and community activist who specializes in the Detroit River, told me. “Our leaders on both sides lost sight of who they should be concerned about. Sure, it’s development for the future, but for who?”
Kimberly Simmons, Detroit River historian and community organizer, says the island could have been transformed into a public park similar to Detroit’s Belle Isle, rather than a private residential area.
She believes there could have been more effort put into preserving the amusement park’s buildings, and says that with more vision, the island could have been transformed into a public park similar to Detroit’s Belle Isle. In fact, there has been some discussion of turning part of Boblo into a park, but according to Ms. Prince, residents preferred their privacy and discouraged the idea. Instead, Amico paid the Town of Amherstburg cash in lieu of the parkland that would normally be required when building this type of development. Local officials should have demanded more than just money.
In terms of the ferry, while it’s understandable that the Town of Amherstburg doesn’t want to foot the bill, it could work with Amico to formalize an agreement to allow non-residents to use it for a fee. And Amico should clarify its policies – if non-residents can, in fact, use the ferry, it ought to notify the public and ferry staff and post a notice with the rules. Access should be allowed now – not after the creation of a new restaurant on some future date.
Historic sites such as the Blockhouse need to be accessible to the public, and Parks Canada should move forward with efforts to take over that site. In regards to the remaining amusement park structures, I can understand why a business like Amico is reluctant to sink money into them, but hopefully, someone in the Amherstburg community will spearhead a restoration or preservation project before it’s too late.
The buildings are currently listed on Amherstburg’s heritage register as “Properties of Interest,” which gives them some protection from demolition, Meg Reiner, the collections co-ordinator at the Marsh Historical Collection, told me. The town should take the next step and give them heritage designation, which would ensure that significant components of the building would be preserved in any redevelopment.
A postcard circa 1940-50 features the Ste. Claire., which ferried passengers from Detroit to Boblo Island.
Stephen Faraj is in the process of restoring the Ste. Claire, largely funded by his family's money. He says the stationary boat will be open to the public later this year.
Amherstburg residents could take inspiration from Detroit’s Stephen Faraj, who along with his brother-in-law Ron Kattoo, is working to restore one of Boblo’s original steamships, the Ste. Claire. After spending several years on the project, a welding accident in 2018 ignited a massive fire, which destroyed all their work, turned the boat’s mahogany woodwork and upper deck into ash and buckled the steel floor, an incident covered in the documentary Boblo Boats.
Mr. Faraj says people are constantly telling him he’s crazy to continue pursuing the restoration, which has been funded largely with his family’s money. While he showed me the progress that’s been made – the upper deck has been finished and the superstructure is nearly complete – he insists the boat will be fully rebuilt. The Ste. Claire won’t run again under its own power, but Mr. Faraj says the stationary boat will be open to the public later this year. “We want people to know that we’re here and we’re working hard,” he says. “We really want to get them on the boat.”
There is a lot of skepticism in Detroit about the Ste. Claire, and a similar project to revive its sister ship, the Columbia, has run into financial trouble. But I admire Mr. Faraj’s spirit. He knows the only way to preserve the memory of Boblo is to take it into his own hands. The spirit of Boblo may be fading on the island, but here in Detroit’s Marina District, it’s still flickering.
What about Boblo? More on The Decibel
Globe opinion editor Sarah Efron went to a gated island community on the Detroit River, and its long-abandoned amusement park, and told The Decibel what she learned about its fate. Subscribe for more episodes.