If you lived on or near Red Arrow Highway in Lakeside these past few years, you complained about the same thing everyone else did: the cones, the flaggers, the single lane creeping past the old brick building where Lakeside Antiques used to be. It felt like construction for the sake of construction, the kind of project towns endure rather than benefit from.
It wasn't. The road crews weren't just repaving a four-lane highway down to three lanes. They were building a sidewalk to everywhere, and most of Lakeside didn't realize it until the ribbon got cut.
The Road Work Everyone Grumbled About Was the Point
Here's what actually happened. The same Berrien County project that narrowed Red Arrow Highway from four lanes to three also graded and paved an 8-mile non-motorized path running alongside it, from New Buffalo north through Union Pier, Lakeside, and Harbert, ending at Sawyer. The road reconstruction and the trail were never two separate projects competing for the same construction season. They were one project, funded jointly by the Berrien County Road Department, the Michigan Department of Transportation's Transportation Alternative Program, a USDA Rural Business Development Grant, and The Pokagon Fund, among other partners.
This isn't even the first time a highway project has quietly handed Lakeside a piece of public space. The triangle of land that is now Lakeside Park exists because Red Arrow Highway was widened after World War II, leaving behind a leftover parcel between the road and the old Austin's Grocery store. The E.K. Warren Foundation bought it and turned it into a park rather than let it sit as scrap ground, and the Chikaming Township Park Board now maintains it after decades under the Lakeside Association's care. The road that annoyed you is doing what the last one did: turning infrastructure into a place people actually go.
What Opened at the Corner of Lakeside Road
The trail's official debut wasn't quiet. On Friday, June 27, 2025, at 10 a.m., representatives from New Buffalo Township, Chikaming Township, Berrien County, and Friends of Berrien County Trails gathered for a ribbon-cutting at the Lakeside Park trail crossing, the corner of Lakeside Road and Red Arrow Highway. Gary Wood of Friends of Berrien County Trails, Chikaming Township Supervisor David Bunte, and New Buffalo Township Supervisor Michelle Heit all spoke. The next day, the towns along the route held a public "Celebrate Red Arrow Trail Day," inviting people to walk or bike the whole stretch and stop wherever it looked interesting.
That framing matters, because the trail was never pitched as a recreational amenity bolted onto the highway. It was pitched as an alternative to it. Officials described the path as a route people could use to get to shops, beaches, and restaurants without a car, and the timing bears that out. Berrien County has kept building since. The 2026 construction season is extending the road and trail project north from the Cook Nuclear Plant toward Stevensville, which means the corridor Lakeside sits on is still growing longer, not just older.
The Businesses That Bet on Foot Traffic First
Three weeks after that ribbon-cutting, on July 18, 2025, the Harbor Country Chamber of Commerce cut another ribbon, this one at 14876 Red Arrow Highway, the same historic brick building that had housed Lakeside Antiques. The building has had a strange life since the 1930s: an auto repair garage, an airplane parts manufacturer, an arts and crafts supply store, and finally an antique shop before it became Blue Anchor New & Vintage Goods, run by Debbie Osgood and her husband Jim Komie. The shop sells a rotating mix of new and vintage home goods, furniture, and fashion finds, and it's open Thursday through Monday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., the kind of schedule built around weekend foot traffic rather than daily commuter drive-bys.
A few doors down at 15300 Red Arrow Highway, ARS Gallery Arts & Culture, a community art center that's been running exhibitions and youth art programs since 2010, updated its hours starting April 24, 2026. Neither business is large enough to make regional news on its own. Together, though, they read as two separate owners making the same bet within a year of each other: that people walking or biking a paved path past their front door are worth designing a storefront around.
The Beaches Already Worked This Way
None of this required Lakeside to learn a new habit. Chikaming Township's smaller Lake Michigan beaches, Townline, McKinley, Miller, Berrien, Pier, and Harbert, have never had lifeguards, dedicated parking, or facilities. The township's own description of them is blunt: they're used mostly by residents who walk or ride a bike over, not people who drive and park. That instinct, that some places in this township are simply reached on foot, predates the trail by decades. What the Red Arrow Trail did was extend that same logic onto the highway itself, the one stretch of Lakeside that had always required a car because there was nowhere safe to walk it.
Inland, Chikaming Township Park and Preserve on Warren Woods Road tells a similar story on a larger scale: 263 acres, seven miles of trails, a fishing pier, and a community garden, all reachable without ever needing a parking spot near the water. Lakeside was already a place that assumed you'd walk to things. The trail just made that true of the commercial strip too.
What a Walk Down Red Arrow Highway Looks Like Now
Park once, at the Lakeside Park trail crossing or one of the trailheads in Union Pier, and the rest of an evening unfolds on foot. A short walk north gets you to Blue Anchor, open into the evening on weekends. Continue on and you'll pass ARS Gallery, where exhibitions rotate often enough that a repeat walk rarely looks the same twice. End at the Lakeside Inn, a National Register of Historic Places building with a 100-foot porch facing the water, where the Lakeside Association holds its Mingle and Munch as the summer season winds down.
That gathering isn't new, and neither is the Association's broader calendar: the Memorial Day ceremony at Lakeside Cemetery with the New Buffalo American Legion Post, the July 4th parade that a local kazoo band has long since made a fixture, the Ice Cream Social under a tent in Lakeside Park where a bowl still costs five dollars. What's changed is how far those traditions now reach. A resident in Harbert or Union Pier can walk the length of the corridor to join a Lakeside event rather than driving over for it, and a Lakeside resident can do the same in reverse. The trail didn't invent Lakeside's slower pace. It just gave that pace a longer, safer stretch of pavement to happen on.
That's the part worth sitting with if you already live here. The orange cones weren't a detour from the town you knew. They were building a version of it that finally matches how people already wanted to move through it, on foot, unhurried, stopping wherever the day suggested.
If you're weighing what a home along this stretch of Harbor Country is worth now that the corridor works differently than it did before the trail opened, Judy Gibbons has spent years tracking how these small shifts in a town's daily rhythm show up in buyer interest and pricing. Start Your Home Story — schedule a consultation.
