Belle Isle: Detroit’s Island Park Is Bigger Than Central Park

A 985-acre island in the Detroit River, once called Hog Island, laid out by one of Central Park’s designers — and home to two buildings that opened on the same day in 1904.

Most visitors to Detroit never leave downtown. Across the MacArthur Bridge, east of the city, sits a park larger than the one they would fly to New York to see.

Belle Isle covers roughly 985 acres in the middle of the Detroit River, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, which operates it. Central Park covers 843. Belle Isle is the largest city-owned island park in the United States.

It is also, by most counts, the busiest state park in Michigan, drawing around five million visitors a year and trailing only Niagara Falls among state parks nationwide.

From Hog Island to Belle Isle

The island has been renamed more than once. French farmers who held ribbon farms along the river let their pigs graze there, safe from predators on the mainland, and called it Île aux Cochons. English speakers translated that directly: Hog Island.

The current name arrived at a picnic. On July 4, 1845, a party of Detroiters on the island decided it deserved better and settled on Belle Isle, in honor of Isabelle Cass, daughter of former territorial governor Lewis Cass. Belle Isle is an archaic spelling of Belle Île — beautiful island.

The City of Detroit bought it on September 23, 1879, paying the Campau family $200,000, and opened it to the public the following year.

The Olmsted plan that mostly wasn’t built

Having bought an island, the city went looking for someone to lay it out, and hired Frederick Law Olmsted — co-designer, with Calvert Vaux, of Central Park. He was signed to a three-year contract in the 1880s.

Olmsted’s argument was for restraint. He wanted the swamps and the eastern woods left alone, with a ferry dock and public facilities concentrated in one section and the rest of the island kept in its natural state. In his plan he warned that “dance houses, race tracks, museums … and horticulture exhibits can be better placed elsewhere.”

City officials disagreed, and most of the plan was never carried out. What survives of it is real but partial: Central Avenue running through the island’s center, the canals, and the wooded areas he fought to keep.

Two buildings, one opening day

The island’s two best-known buildings opened together on August 18, 1904, and were designed by the same firm — George D. Mason and Albert Kahn, years before Kahn’s factory work made him famous.

The idea for an aquarium is credited to state representative David E. Heineman, who had visited Naples and studied the aquarium there. The enabling act authorising $150,000 in bonds passed on May 26, 1899.

The conservatory was known simply as the Horticultural Building until 1955, when Anna Scripps Whitcomb — daughter of Detroit News founder James E. Scripps — left it her collection of 600 orchids, many of them rescued from Britain during the Second World War. The building was renamed in her honor on April 6, 1955, and the donation gave Detroit one of the largest municipally owned orchid collections in the country. It is generally described as the oldest continuously running conservatory in the United States. It closed in November 2022 for a two-year, $10 million restoration and reopened in 2024.

The aquarium had a harder century. Its saltwater fish were sold off during the Depression, when the city could no longer afford the 95,000 gallons of seawater they required — among them Big Pete, a mammoth sea turtle who was sold to a market and turned into soup. At its closure in 2005, it was the longest continuously running aquarium in the country. Volunteers reopened it in 2012, and admission is free.

A city park run by the state

Detroit’s finances eventually caught up with the island, and parts of it fell into disrepair. In 2013 the State of Michigan signed a 30-year lease to take over its care, and Belle Isle opened as a state park the following year. The city still owns it.

What’s out there

Beyond the conservatory and aquarium, the island holds the James Scott Memorial Fountain, completed in 1925 to a design by Cass Gilbert — architect of the US Supreme Court building — the Nancy Brown Peace Carillon of 1940, the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, the Belle Isle Nature Center, a municipal golf course, and a half-mile swimming beach.

A Michigan Recreation Passport is required to drive onto the island, and it covers the vehicle rather than the people in it. Anyone arriving on foot, by bike or on the DDOT #12 bus gets on free. Once you’re across the bridge, most of what’s out there costs nothing.