By 6:15 on a Thursday in August, the grass along the Pomona Park bandshell is already claimed. Lawn chairs face the water, a couple of coolers sit half in the shade, and somebody's walked over from Parkside Pizza & Sub with a box balanced flat so the cheese doesn't slide. Nobody paid to get in. Nobody had to. This is Dancing into the Sunset, and if you live in Fruitport, you already know that.
What you might not know is how far back this exact acre of shoreline goes for live music. The dance party that fills the bandshell today is not a new invention bolted onto a quiet village. It's the current version of something this stretch of Spring Lake has been doing for more than a century, under different names, in different buildings, for different reasons. The habit is older than the tradition built around it.
The Same Ground Has Been Doing This Since Before Anyone Signed Up
Long before there was a bandshell, there was the Pomona House, a resort that once stood in the park and drew visitors to the shoreline. It burned down twice, the second time in 1876. Around the turn of the century, the Interurban railway company built a wooden pavilion on the site, which changed hands and eventually landed with a musician named Frank Lockage, who ran shows there for decades. A 1963 fire severely damaged that pavilion and the bar next to it, closing that chapter of the site's history.
By local account, the acts who once played the Fruitport Pavilion were not small names. Sue Halter, who now runs the modern Thursday series, has said as much herself.
"It's crazy how these big-name entertainers played in this pavilion."
Doris Day, Lawrence Welk, and Buddy Holly are the names tied to that stretch of stage history, according to Urban St. Magazine's account of the series. Whatever you make of that list, it points to something specific: this shoreline has hosted paying crowds for live music since long before anyone in Fruitport today was born. The current series didn't create a tradition. It picked one back up.
Sue Halter Didn't Set Out To Build A Summer Season
The modern version started small and stayed small on purpose. Halter had competed in Dancing with the Local Stars, a fundraising dance competition run by the Women's Division Chamber of Commerce in Muskegon, and came away wanting to keep dancing somewhere. So she opened the floor to the public instead, with what she has described as a zero-dollar budget and six weeks to put a summer of live music together.
It grew from there without much of a plan. Musicians started donating their time. A military night landed around the Fourth of July, with cupcakes and carnations handed out to veterans during a flag ceremony that, by Halter's account, has drawn grieving visitors to listen in from their boats on the water. None of that was scheduled in year one. It accumulated, the way local traditions tend to.
What Actually Fills In Around The Bandshell Now
The park itself hasn't changed shape, but the businesses around it have grown into the routine. A Thursday night in Fruitport in 2026 typically threads through a short list of specific stops, not a generic "downtown."
- Odd Side Social Brews, at 50 Park Street, is the newer anchor. It's the second location of Odd Side Ales, built inside the former Fifth Third Bank building. The space runs as a coffee shop in the morning and shifts into a cocktail and taproom scene by evening, with a kitchen on site and a dining room set inside the old bank vault, safety deposit boxes still visible on the wall. Grand Rapids Magazine covered the opening as proof that a second location can outdo the original.
- Crawville Cakery, at 16 South 3rd Avenue, is the bakery stop, known locally for its muffins and kombucha rather than a full dinner menu.
- Hooligans Tavern grew out of Hooligan's Artisan Meats, a meat market on Airline Road that opened in 2021 before expanding into a full restaurant attached to the shop. WZZM covered the expansion, and regulars now point to its smoked wing specials as a Wednesday-into-Thursday habit of their own.
- Parkside Pizza & Sub is the pickup order people bring straight to the grass. It's not a sit-down stop most Thursdays. It's the box under someone's arm on the walk over.
None of these businesses existed in their current form when the dance series started. The park stayed the same. The town around it filled in.
Three Thursdays Left This Season
The printed schedule for Dancing into the Sunset runs May 10 through August 30 this year, with showtimes shifting from 7 p.m. in June and July to 6:30 p.m. once August arrives, according to Local Spins' summer concert guide. Since August 30 falls on a Sunday this year, the last regular Thursday show lands on August 27.
| Date | Time | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Aug. 13 | 6:30 p.m. | Regular week |
| Aug. 20 | 6:30 p.m. | Regular week |
| Aug. 27 | 6:30 p.m. | Season's final Thursday |
No tickets, no gate. Bring a chair or a blanket and find a spot on the grass.
Before The Band Starts, The Park Does Double Duty
Pomona Park earns its keep well before 6:30 p.m. It's an 8.5-acre waterfront park with a boat launch, an ADA-accessible kayak launch, a fishing platform, a playground, and picnic space, all inside the Village of Fruitport, according to the village's own park page.
The two launches are priced differently, and that difference is worth knowing if you're planning an evening around the water. The kayak launch, added in 2020 with support from a Michigan DNR grant, is free and open to paddlers of all ability levels. It's also a marked stop on the West Michigan Coastal Water Trail Experience, part of the larger Lake Michigan Water Trail, as the village explains on its kayak launch page. The adjacent boat launch runs $10 for a daily permit or $50 for the season, per the launch listing on Paddle Guide, and the village is specific about enforcement on one point: no three-axle trailers, with a $500 fine for a first offense and $1,000 for repeat violations, according to the village's Pomona Park page.
For anyone who'd rather walk or bike before the music starts, the Lakeside Trail is a 15-mile paved loop that circles Spring Lake and connects Fruitport to Ferrysburg and the Village of Spring Lake, with public restrooms staged along the route including one right in Pomona Park, per Michigan Trails Magazine. A short stretch of it before the show is enough to justify the pizza afterward.
The Habit That Keeps Renewing Itself
None of this is packaged for out-of-towners. There's no cover charge to protect and no gate to staff. The businesses that fill in around the bandshell didn't open because of the concert series. They opened in a village that already had a hundred-year habit of gathering by this water for music, and the series just made that habit visible again on a fixed weekly schedule.
That's the part worth sitting with if you already call Fruitport home. The Thursday routine isn't a marketing calendar. It's closer to muscle memory for a community that's been dancing by Spring Lake, in one form or another, since before the bandshell existed to hold anyone.
If you're weighing what makes a small West Michigan community actually livable day to day, rather than just affordable on paper, this is the kind of detail that tells you more than a listing sheet ever will. Zuniga Real Estate Team spends its time in towns like this one, not just its transactions. If you want a straight conversation about what's happening in Fruitport or anywhere else along the Muskegon and Oceana County lakeshore, schedule a no-pressure conversation whenever it's useful to you.
