Howell — Livingston County has five main communities, each with its own personality.
Fowlerville is our farm country. The biggest day of the year is the last day of school, when all the seniors drive their tractors and lawn mowers to school. The biggest week of the year is fair week, when we get to see 4-H pigs and horses during the day and demolition derby competitions at night.
Fowlerville kids are literally the nicest kids in the world. Always have been. Charlie Gehringer was a legendary second baseman for the Detroit Tigers a century ago and said maybe six words total during his 19-year Hall of Fame career. He grew up in Fowlerville.
People in Fowlerville were so proud of Charlie that in 1929, they held a “Charlie Gehringer Day” and presented him with a set of right-handed golf clubs as a gift. Whoever bought the clubs never bothered to notice that he batted left-handed. Charlie was so nice, though, that he just learned how to golf right-handed rather than risk hurting anyone’s feelings. That’s the Fowlerville in him.
Hartland is an upscale bedroom community that’s basically a lot of beautiful subdivisions surrounded by traffic. I’m pretty sure that’s the town motto: “Hartland: A Lot of Beautiful Subdivisions Surrounded by Traffic.” If not, it should be.
The intersection of US-23 and M-59 in Hartland is the most comically designed mess you’ve ever seen in your life, and the traffic is ridiculous. Hartland takes a backseat to no one when it comes to bizarre roadwork. A few years ago, for example, they decided to redesign everything so that Hartland Road, the main road heading north into town, went right through the Meijer parking lot.
And apparently the town fathers have decided that Hartland Township needs even more traffic, because they recently approved a Chick-fil-A at that very same intersection.
Pinckney is in the southern part of Livingston County, and that’s where you’ll find all the trails, streams and lakes. This is the prettiest part of our county. The Potawatomi Trail, which winds its way through nearby Hell, is perhaps the most beautiful spot in southeast Michigan.
There are only maybe six businesses in Pinckney and half are auto parts stores. I’m not kidding. There are three auto parts stores in Pinckney within a span of about 500 yards along M-36. Two of them are literally right next to each other: AutoZone and O’Reilly’s. You can almost stand in between them with your arms outstretched and touch both stores at the same time. If you need jumper cables or brake pads, you’ve come to the right town!
And then you have the two big boys, Brighton and Howell. Livingston County is unique in Michigan in that we don’t have one main city, but two. Brighton and Howell are roughly the same size, even when you factor in the surrounding townships, and they compete in everything.
Aside from the fact they’re both in Livingston County, though, they’re nothing alike. Brighton and Howell each have their own personality, style, and even roundabouts. My office was in Brighton for many years, and I live in Howell, so I know them both well.
If they were characters on the TV show “Friends,” Brighton would be Rachel and Howell would be Phoebe. Rachel is fashionable, modern, and loves shopping and restaurants. Phoebe is charming, quirky, and down-to-earth. Brighton is also a little bit Monica (likes to control things) and Howell is a little bit Joey (not too picky, just wants food).
Howell is the county seat, with the magnificent and historic Livingston County Courthouse as the anchor downtown. There’s a lot of history on display in Howell, with 150-year-old Victorian homes lining Grand River Avenue and lots of historic businesses downtown, including the Howell Opera House (built in 1880) and the Howell Theater (which has been showing movies since 1928).
Howell’s downtown is filled with quirky shops, most of which sell old pieces of furniture that were found in somebody’s barn and then repainted and sold to my wife for $250. There are also several nice restaurants, including Coratti’s Pizzeria, which is in an old Detroit Edison building and has two bocce courts inside.
But the biggest commerce-related news in Howell in the past five years or so was when the new Panda Express opened in 2023. It’s all people could talk about for weeks, and the cars were lined up for half a mile just to get a glimpse.
This is what we do. Any time a new chain store or restaurant opens in town, Howell people act like small-town goobers who’ve never seen electricity or running water before. We’re getting a Hobby Lobby later this year, and I’m already dreading the traffic jams. It might even top the mob scene we saw in 1991 when Walmart opened.
Brighton, on the other hand, is where you’ll find most of Livingston County’s upscale stores and restaurants. Brighton used to be a sleepy little burg at the intersection of US-23 and I-96, but all that started to change in the 1970s and 1980s when the westward migration out of Detroit began.
All of Livingston County boomed during those years, primarily Brighton, where developers raced to build subdivisions that were named after whatever they had to destroy to build it (Pleasant Valley, Rolling Meadows, etc.).
Brighton’s downtown used to be a bit dingy, with maybe half the storefronts vacant, but it’s become one of the most vibrant and beautiful downtowns in the state now. The downtown is built around the Mill Pond, which has a three-legged bridge crossing it called the Tridge (a name stolen from Midland). There’s also one of those wonderful wooden playgrounds right on the Mill Pond, which makes downtown Brighton very family-friendly.
The main attraction in downtown Brighton, though, is a five-foot-high statue of an ugly naked guy that all the locals call, unsurprisingly, the Ugly Naked Guy. It sits right on the banks of the Mill Pond and it’s been a source of controversy from the moment it arrived in 2006. Half the people in town love it and the other half hate it, and they’ve been arguing about it nonstop for almost two decades.
And oh my, people in Brighton love to complain. About everything. If you bring something new to town—a housing development, a store, a statue of an ugly naked guy—people in Brighton will complain about it. They’ll either complain about whatever the thing is, or they’ll complain that everybody is complaining about whatever the thing is.
You should have seen the heads exploding back in 2006 when right on the heels of Brighton getting the Ugly Naked Guy, we also got North America’s first double roundabout. There was a huge new commercial development built on the south side of town, just off the Lee Road intersection on U.S. 23, that was anchored by a Costco and Kohl’s.
They needed to beef up the intersection to make way for all these stores and they apparently thought, “You know, we could just put a stoplight here and everybody could just calmly drive into the Costco parking lot, but what fun would that be?”
So instead, they built the first double roundabout in North America, and it’s about as easy to figure out as assembling an Ikea desk. It’s become a crash magnet, and naturally, people in Brighton complain about it. Or they complain that people are complaining about the roundabout.
Howell, meanwhile, got into the roundabout business itself a couple years after that. They knew they could never outdo Brighton when it came to having huge roundabouts, so they went the opposite direction. They built teeny-tiny roundabouts, maybe six feet across, and then they stuck one at damn near every intersection in town.
These are the dumbest things you’ve ever seen in your life, and they’re everywhere. They’re supposedly there to “calm” the traffic, but they don’t do that at all. In winter, snowplows smack into them all the time. When you pull up to one and you want to make a left turn, you have no idea if you’re supposed to drive in front of the roundabout or behind it. They’re stupid and I hate them.
Here’s the main difference between Howell and Brighton, though. While people in Brighton complain about everything, people in Howell complain about nothing, even when they should. When the teeny-tiny roundabouts started showing up in 2008, a few people weren’t happy about it, but the prevailing attitude in Howell seemed to be, “eh, whatever.”
People should be flooding Howell City Council meetings every week to complain about them. Instead, they just swerve around them and go on about their business.
I can guarantee you that if these bad boys had shown up in Brighton, people would have been holding Million Man March-style protests every day. And the Brighton City Council would have responded by not only keeping them, but by sticking a statue of an ugly naked guy in the middle of every one of them, too.
So yes, we certainly have our quirks in Livingston County, but you won’t find a better place in Michigan to live or hang out. We have two beautiful downtown areas that have charm and style in abundance. We have nature trails and lakes that rival anything you’ll find south of the M-10 dividing line. We have spectacular golf courses. We have friendly people and great neighborhoods. We have auto parts stores are far as the eye can see.
If you seek a pleasant county (or an Ugly Naked Guy), look about you. Livingston County has it all.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
