Which community has had the most epic decade in Michigan history?
Ann Arbor in the 1960s had hippies running wild. Detroit and the auto industry boomed in the 1920s. Grand Rapids officially became “Beer City USA” in the 1990s.
But the title of “Most Epic Decade in Michigan History” belongs to Hartland in the 1970s.
Hartland? Where’s that?
Hartland is a sleepy suburb in Livingston County that’s best known these days for the bad traffic at US-23 and M-59, but in the 1970s it was far and away the coolest place in the entire state. Consider all that happened in this tiny bedroom community back then:
The rock band KISS held one of its most memorable and disastrous concerts ever at an ice rink in Hartland, attracting 5,000 fans to a venue that held at most 1,500 people, resulting in both the cops and fire department showing up and hundreds of people peeing in the parking lot at the grocery store next door because the ice rink wouldn’t let them in.
And to top it all off, a campground and summer retreat called Waldenwoods hosted a poor man’s version of Woodstock—an event that not only featured the rock bands MC-5 and Brownsville Station, but also a poor dude who got attacked by two other dudes with a tire iron and screwdriver, and then when the ambulance showed up to help him, the overwhelmingly drunk and high crowd responded by trying to tip the ambulance over with the poor man inside it.Then the 1980s arrived and Hartland’s stretch of awesomeness came to an end, aside from the occasional police brawl in Shaq’s parking lot.
