The Village Retired Its Mini Golf. What Replaced It Explains the Rest of This Fall on Kercheval
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
For the past several years, if you walked Kercheval between Notre Dame and St. Clair in early fall, you'd have found an inflatable mini golf course set up along the sidewalk. This year it's gone. No banners, no putters, no rented course. If you noticed the gap and assumed the fall calendar just got thinner, you'd be wrong. What's replacing it, and what's already running a few blocks away right now, tells you something about how The Village actually thinks about its own six blocks.
On Sunday, Oct. 11, Main Street Grosse Pointe and the City of Grosse Pointe Foundation are staging the first Village Fall Family Fun Day & Tailgate Party, noon to 4 p.m., on that same stretch of Kercheval. There will be bounce houses and tailgate-style games instead of a rented golf course, and the timing isn't an accident. The Lions play in Arizona that afternoon with a 4:30 p.m. kickoff, and Main Street Grosse Pointe executive director Cindy Willcock has been direct about why the event stops right when it does.
"It's a 4:30 p.m. start, so that's why we're running the event from noon to 4 p.m. like a tailgate. We hope people who want to stay and watch the game will then go to our establishments, our bars and restaurants that have televisions, and spend some time patronizing those businesses and watching the game with their friends, neighbors and families."
Read that again and you'll notice the event isn't designed to be the whole afternoon. It's designed to end exactly when the businesses that pay rent on Kercheval are ready to take over. Mini golf was a rented attraction that lived and died on its own. This is scaffolding built to hand foot traffic to a bar with a TV.
That's not a one-off decision. It's the same logic running underneath everything else happening in The Village this fall.
Right now, through Sept. 30, the Art Takeover Project has original artwork hanging inside more than 38 businesses and common spaces across The Village, with more than 85 participating artists from across southeast Michigan. There's no rented gallery space and no separate exhibition hall. The art lives on the walls of the shops that were already there.
The event started small. Its first year brought roughly 60 artists into about 26 Village businesses. By 2025, it had grown into a record year with 85 artists and roughly 250 works spread across 35 spaces. This year's fourth edition has topped that again, pushing past 38 locations. Organizer Michelle Boggess-Nunley, an artist who owns Posterity Art & Framing Gallery at 17005 Kercheval, put the growth simply: "We will have a lot more locations, so there's a lot more art in the Village."
The mechanics reinforce the same point Willcock made about the tailgate. Voting for a favorite piece has to happen in person, dropped off at Posterity, Savvy Chic, or Half-Moon Outfitters, because as Boggess-Nunley explained, it's hard to appreciate art without standing in front of it. Every piece sold during the event goes to the artist without commission, which means the incentive for a gallery owner to give up wall space and sales margin only makes sense if the real payoff is measured elsewhere. Willcock has said as much herself: the event connects people to stores they haven't been to before. The art is the draw. The store is the point.
The same pattern showed up on Sept. 12, when Grosse Pointe PorchFest returned for its second year and more than doubled in size, growing from 12 bands on 11 porches to 24 bands on 18 porches. There's no festival ground and no ticketed venue. Residents volunteer their own front yards, funded by the City of Grosse Pointe Foundation and coordinated by Mayor Sheila Tomkowiak and a small committee of neighbors. Performers don't get paid. They get a PorchFest T-shirt.
At 6 p.m., once the last porch set wrapped up, the event moved into The Village for an afterparty in front of The Whiskey Six, with a set from Erich Goebel & the Flying Crowbars. Same shape as the tailgate and the Art Takeover: the community supplies the infrastructure, whether that's a front lawn or a storefront wall, and the last stop of the evening routes people into a business that's already paying rent on Kercheval.
None of these events required an outside promoter or a fenced festival lot. They're built entirely out of things The Village already has: porches, storefronts, and a stretch of sidewalk that closes for an afternoon.
If you live in the City of Grosse Pointe and haven't been paying close attention, here's what's actually still ahead before the holidays take over:
Six weeks, four separate reasons to be on that stretch of Kercheval, and not one of them requires driving anywhere else.
None of this is flashy. There's no headline act, no admission gate, no out-of-town promoter renting the block for a weekend. What The Village has instead is a district that figured out how to turn its own residents, its own storefronts, and its own sidewalks into the infrastructure for its calendar. Mini golf was fun while it lasted, but it was also the odd one out: a rented attraction sitting on top of a district that increasingly builds its own.
That's worth knowing whether you've lived here for twenty years or you're just starting to pay attention to what a Sunday afternoon on Kercheval actually looks like. A neighborhood that can fill its own fall calendar without importing anything is telling you something about how it sees itself, and it's a different story than the one the mini golf course used to tell.
If you're already part of this stretch of the City of Grosse Pointe and find yourself thinking about what comes next for your own address, whether that's a move within The Village or just curiosity about where things stand, Megan Prieur at Closing and Toasting is always happy to talk it through over coffee somewhere on Kercheval.
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