Lakenenland: Free Sculpture Park Near Marquette

Fifteen miles east of Marquette, on the south side of M-28, there is a 37-acre park with more than a hundred metal sculptures in it. There is no ticket booth. There is no gate. There is nobody to pay.

It is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and has been free since it opened in 2003. One man built all of it out of other people’s garbage.

The reason it exists at all

Tom Lakenen is a union boilermaker. About twenty-five years ago he quit drinking, and by his own account that left him with a problem most people would not think of as a problem: he suddenly had a lot of evenings and nowhere to spend them, because he was no longer spending them at the bar.

So he started welding. He picked up scrap iron off construction sites — metal that was headed for the dump anyway, sometimes traded for a dozen donuts or a case of beer — and bent it into shapes in his yard.

The yard filled up. In 2003 he bought a plot of land on M-28 and moved the whole collection out to it. He has been adding to it ever since. By his own count he has built more than 100 sculptures over roughly twenty-five years.

He is blunter about it than that. “I traded beer drinking and bar stools for metal sculpting,” he told Michigan Country Lines. The first thing he finished was a set of dancing wolves, which he set out where traffic on M-28 could see it. “No one threw eggs at my house, so I decided to make something else.”

What is actually out there

The sculpture trail is a half-mile dirt road looping through pines. You can walk it, drive it slowly, or in winter ride a snowmobile down it.

The work runs in every direction at once. Dinosaurs, wolves, mermaids, a skeleton on a motorcycle, tributes to ironworkers and boilermakers, to the Marines, to the UP200 sled dog race. There is a sculpture explaining that bowling balls grow on the north side of trees.

And there is a whole vein of blunt political work he makes no apology for. The best known piece is the Corporate Greed Pig, built from drawings schoolchildren mailed him. Nobody will mistake his opinions for neutral, which is the point.

If you are counting: Lakenen’s own tally is more than 100, the figure his own site uses. Most guides and listings still say “over 80,” a number that went stale years ago.

Everything else is free too

This is the part that catches people off guard. The fishing ponds are free, the playground is free, the pavilions and fire pits are free. Leashed dogs are welcome, and the Marquette-area North Country Trail trailhead sits just behind the park.

Donations are accepted and obviously earned, but nobody asks.

Winter is his busiest season, which surprises people who assume a sculpture park shuts down in November. Snowmobilers pull off the trail to warm up at the fires. Lakenen runs a leaf blower over the sculptures to keep them visible under the snow, and turns up handing out hot cocoa.

He watches you look at it

Lakenen has said he sometimes comes through the park with his wife as an ordinary visitor. Almost nobody recognizes him, so he gets to watch strangers react to his own work with nobody performing for the artist. Watching people wander around laughing at it, he has said, is what makes it worth doing.

The Detroit Free Press once called it “the coolest unofficial roadside rest stop in the state.” That is about right, and it undersells the craftsmanship.

Finding it on M-28

The address is 2800 M-28, Marquette, MI 49855, in Chocolay Township — roughly 15 miles east of town, just past Shot Point Drive on the right if you are heading east. Watch for the metal signs; it is easy to blow past at highway speed.

It takes twenty minutes, which makes it the easiest stop on the long run east on M-28. If you are building a Marquette day around it, the Black Rocks at Presque Isle are on the other side of town, and Granot Loma is up the shore to the north.

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