Frankenmuth — This town is known for two main things—German heritage and Christmas all year round. Combined with a slew of newish family-friendly indoor waterpark resorts, this little Michigan city of fewer than 5,000 continues to serve as a tourist draw.
The truth is, that’s all just window dressing. Frankenmuth’s real appeal is that it’s a pleasant, well-ordered, charming little walkable city. Michigan’s “Little Bavaria” is such a rarity in Michigan that it’s a genuine tourism destination.
Frankenmuth was founded in the 1840s by German immigrants from Franconia, a smaller region of Bavaria. They were stubborn, conservative Lutherans of the sort you rarely find these days.
Their intention was to spread Christianity to the natives, but they ended up evangelizing for German culture instead. They were committed to maintaining the German language and to Franconian architecture, modeling their city and dwellings after their home country.
Everyone speaks English there now, but walking the streets, if you’re a German-American, awakens the strangest feeling of ancestral blood memory. My earliest German ancestors in America came here from Bavaria in the 1840s as well, from towns and cities that looked roughly like Frankenmuth.
I’ve never been to the fatherland, but Frankenmuth felt uncannily familiar, even as modernity creeps in around it. It felt like, “yes, everything here makes sense, this is how cities this size should be.” The German part of my brain relaxed and felt at home, pleased by the sight of urban shapes and patterns that intuitively made sense.
Downtown Frankenmuth is one main drag of shops, restaurants, and tourist spots. Easy to walk up and down in an afternoon, depending on how long you stop to check things out, eat some food, or drink beer.
Most buildings downtown are built in the distinctly Franconian style. Lots of stucco, timber framing, slanted roofs, turrets, and colorful paint. It’s obviously distinct from the rest of the state, and a large part of the charm.
The aesthetics of Frankenmuth feel deliberate, because they are. The original settlers took pains to maintain their heritage, not just inwardly, but outwardly, and their descendants have done the same.
Like any other tourist spot, it’s downright kitschy at times. That’s the risk with commodifying your identity, that you might turn it into a pastiche to be bought or sold. You blend the actual history with new creations that mimic it, and the whole place turns from something real into something constructed and fake—a simulacrum of a city, more than a real one.
Some places in Michigan feel exactly like that. Mackinac Island, for one, isn’t a real place; it’s an amusement park on an island, and we love it for that. Frankenmuth, however, manages to still feel genuine, even with the kitsch.
While other tourist towns take the real thing and turn it into artifice, Frankenmuth has managed to take the artifice and turn it into something real.
Frankenmuth River Place Shops, for example. It’s a relatively new shopping center constructed in the old Bavarian style, with winding cobblestone paths and shops scattered around curves and bends.
You’re forced to leave your car outside the walls and wander through the maze of distilleries, ice cream stands, pasty bakeries, gift shops, hot sauce stores, and other such establishments.
It’s meant to mimic old Bavarian towns, and yes, it’s kitschy—but it has the delightful side effect of being actually useful, charming, and accessible. Compared with your typical American strip mall, it’s a delight, so much so that it’s a tourist attraction, despite being composed of essentially similar stores as you might find elsewhere.
An old wooden bridge connects the Bavarian Inn Lodge, a massive waterpark resort across the river, with the Bavarian Inn Restaurant, an older creation, and Zehnder’s restaurant. All owned by the Zehnder family, the closest thing Frankenmuth has to a real-estate dynasty.
Though it looks older, the bridge was actually constructed in the 1970s. Built in the old style, out of thousands of feet of Douglas Fir boards, Zehnder’s Holzbrücke manages to be both aesthetically charming and actually useful.
Cars drove through the covered bridge constantly as I walked across, back and forth from downtown Frankenmuth over to the Bavarian Inn Lodge.
The slatted wood framing let rays of sunlight through, enough to see the Bavarian Belle, a large paddleboat that takes tourists up and down the river, coming back from a recent trip.
I had no intention of specifically traversing the wooden bridge for tourism reasons. It simply made the most sense logistically from where I was to get across the river. It wasn’t built just for eye candy; it serves a genuine role.
That’s the best way to think about Frankenmuth. Yes, the Bavarian aesthetics are a crucial part of the city, but they’re just the spice. Overwhelmingly, Frankenmuth is just a well planned and ordered small city.
Even the kitschy tourist shops, like the giant Frankenmuth Cheese Haus, serve a real function. Americans eat a lot of cheese, and the store is filled with it.
Shops like the Frankenmuth Woolen Mill sell wool-stuffed pillows and blankets made right on the premises (the wool comforters are a personal favorite, and worth every penny). What’s more useful in a cold Michigan winter than a nice wool blanket?
Coffee shops, breweries, bars, and restaurants line the downtown street. There are the older establishments, like Zehnder’s, serving up Bavarian classics, but also newer spots, like Prost, a wine and charcuterie bar with more modern yet still European-style fare.
There’s very little parking out front along the downtown street but tons of small public parking lots out back. It’s easy to park your car and get on your feet and traverse the city that way.
In fact, you want to get on your feet as soon as you get there—every bit of design leads you to that conclusion. A city with a purpose, to get you to walk around, designed for that purpose.
It’s shocking, in a way, that Frankenmuth is considered so special. That this one little street with a few shops and restaurants, and a bit of old Germanic aesthetic, is so noteworthy that people drive hours for a visit.
It’s not alone in Michigan, but it’s rare. Holland and Traverse City come to mind, but both are much larger. You don’t see many small cities the size of Frankenmuth that have maintained a downtown that’s worth walking around for an afternoon in.
It’s sad, because truthfully, this is how every little city should be. An actual city, a nice downtown, filled with commerce, people window shopping. This is how every city used to be, perhaps, even more recently than 1840s Bavaria.
American cities used to be like this too, but we’ve lost something the last few decades. Shopping malls, then strip malls, and now the internet. We’ve lost the basic commercial functioning of our city centers, and for most places, that was enough to kill their downtowns all together.
Frankenmuth is proof that we don’t have to live like this. The model is simple—come for the novel aesthetics, stay for the actually walkable city. Posed like that, urban beautification campaigns are more than just flimsy aspirations. They’re necessities.
It’s simple, in the end. Make your city a beautiful, well-ordered place, and people will want to come there. Why don’t we do that everywhere?
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
