Perfect Waterfront Wedding Locations in the Detroit Area

Start off your futures together with a picture-perfect wedding in one of several beautiful and unusual settings that recall the Motor City’s great and historic past, especially the region’s deep and enduring links to the rivers, inland lakes and the Great Lakes that fed the Detroit area’s settlement, growth and development.

St. Paul’s-On-The-Lake Catholic Church
Grosse Pointe Farms

Looking more like a cathedral than a quiet neighborhood church, St. Paul’s grew up on the banks of Lake St. Clair, a few miles before uptown from Detroit itself but very much a part of the city’s history. Established in 1825 in a log cabin near an old Indian settlement near Vernier Road, St. Paul’s now ranks as one of the area’s most beautiful edifices, inside and out, its Gothic spires and magnificent Rose Window rising over the lake like a sentinel with each sunrise. St. Paul’s, the region’s first church, was built in an historic region with a long memory, having celebrated Lake St. Clair’s bicentennial in 1879.

If you choose to marry at old St. Paul’s, your wedding procession will have the perfect backdrop, the lake to the East, the lovely Rose Window to your West, as you pass the lake-side along a brick path that once led directly from the lake to the massive wooden church doors.

St. Paul’s Catholic Church is located at 157 Lake Shore Road in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan 48236. Telephone the church secretary at 313-885-8855 to make your wedding arrangements.

The Old Mariners’ Church
Downtown Detroit

Consecrated in 1849, the Old Mariners’ Church overlooks the Detroit River in the heart of downtown Detroit, a gateway to the sometimes treacherous Great Lakes that dominated Detroit’s growth for most of its developmental history prior to the automobile age. It was established as a haven for the Great Lakes’ numerous merchant and enlisted seamen, the funds for its construction provided by the wills of Julia Anderson and Charlotte Taylor in 1842.

Every March, the church – now a National and State Historic Landmark – still holds a special Seamen Service and a ceremonial Blessing of the Fleet.

But after more than a century of faithful Anglican service to the public – it still describes itself as “a house of prayer for all people” – the Old Mariners’ Church faded into near obscurity in the 1950s and 1960s, as Detroit’s port activities waned and its population moved to the suburbs and out of the city core.

But on November 10, 1975, the Church became, once again, the voice and heart of the Great Lakes seafaring families. News of an unthinkable tragedy at sea crackled across the wires, and then-Reverend Richard Ingalls, now the Bishop, grieved and prayed alone all night in the Church, before tolling the ancient sea-bell 29 times in the pre-dawn darkness, one toll for each of the men lost that night on largest, heaviest and unsinkable ship on the Great Lakes, the freighter “Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Rev. Ingalls’ private mourning in the Mariners’ Church tradition brought media from all around the world to the little stone church on the river, and the event was immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

The Old Mariner’s Church is located at 170 East Jefferson Avenue in Detroit, Michigan 48226. Phone the church at 313-259-2206.

The Pointe At Metropolitan Beach
Mount Clemens, Michigan

If barefoot and whimsical is your idea of a great wedding party, in the Detroit area you might choose to exchange your vows at The Pointe at Metropolitan Beach Metropark, a flat and sandy expanse of parkland that narrows to a rocky peninsula tumbling down to, and surrounded on three sides by, the deep blue waters of Lake St. Clair.

With views of Canada clear on the horizon, a popular pleasure-boat channel on one side and the sandy Metropolitan Beach on the other, your wedding ceremony on The Pointe could disperse immediately into a day of sunbathing on the beach, roller-blading along the miles of smooth boardwalk, fishing, sailing, bocce ball, tennis, or any of the myriad fun-and-games at hand at the Park. There are dozens of outdoor grills, picnic tables and even a camp store in case your reception crew left something behind!

And don’t worry about the half-mile walk from the Park’s gateway to the Pointe: A canopied shuttle makes regular runs through the peninsula, and will transport you, your wedding party and all the fixin’s safely to your destination, and back again, when day is done.

Metropolitan Beach Metropark is at 31300 Metropolitan Parkway in Harrison Township, Michigan 48045. You may reach a ranger at 586-463-4581.