The Union Pier Sidewalk That Finally Has Somewhere to Go
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Dunes Diva quoted Amanda Raba, who manages Mangata Beer Co. on Red Arrow Highway: "We've met so many locals and visitors, and so many business owners have come in to say hi." It's the kind of line you'd expect from any new business owner. What it skips over is the more interesting fact: none of those people had to get in a car to show up.
That's not a small thing on Red Arrow Highway, a road that spent decades as a four-lane cut-through with no real shoulder for a person on foot. The sidewalk that makes Raba's foot traffic possible didn't appear this year. It's been sitting there since 2021, mostly underused, waiting for someone to give it a reason to matter.
The Red Arrow Highway Linear Park, a joint project of the Berrien County Road Department, Chikaming Township, and New Buffalo Township, converted the four-lane highway through Union Pier into three lanes with a center turn lane, freeing up space for sidewalks and a dedicated non-motorized path. The project's own summary is blunt about why: the corridor had restaurants, cafes, and shops, but no safe way to get between them without driving.
The ribbon was cut on the finished corridor in May 2021, a little over five years ago now. According to the Southwest Michigan Planning Commission, the completed path runs 1.3 miles through Union Pier and another 1.5 miles north to Harbert Community Park. A later phase, funded through a 2022 CMAQ grant, extended the paving from Harbert Community Park up to Sawyer Road, finished in September 2023, about three years back. Grant funding was also lined up for a further stretch, from Union Pier's Community Hall Road down to the light at US-12, with planners at the time targeting 2024 for that piece.
For most of that time, the sidewalk was infrastructure without a payoff. You could walk it, but there wasn't much reason to. A stretch of Red Arrow Highway with a nicely paved shoulder and not enough destinations along it to justify leaving the car in the driveway. That's the part that changed more recently, not the sidewalk.
Mangata Beer Co. moved into a building on Red Arrow Highway that had sat empty for years, previously an auto shop, before owner Chris Betts and his father gutted it and rebuilt it themselves. Betts also owns Transient Artisan Ales in Bridgman, and Mangata gave him room to brew styles Transient doesn't usually pour: pilsners, saisons, English pale ales, a dark lager called Moonshadow and an IPA named Moon Road, after the Swedish word the brewery is named for.
"We had a really incredible local guy who did our countertops, which is a recycled glass and resin," Raba told the Herald Palladium earlier this year. The bar's taps run through a converted vintage refrigerator. The place did a soft opening the first weekend of October 2025 and has been building steadily since, with current hours running Wednesday and Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m. and Friday through Sunday from noon into the evening.
What matters for the sidewalk story is where Mangata sits. It's on the same stretch of Red Arrow Highway as Whistle Stop Grocery, the sandwich and picnic-market shop that's been a breakfast stop in Union Pier since 2015. A Garden Grove Inn rundown of the corridor names the same short list of neighbors clustered along this stretch: Mangata, Whistle Stop Grocery, Red Arrow Roadhouse, Black Currant Bakehouse, and Timothy's. Walk that corridor today and here's roughly what's within reach without moving a car:
None of that required a new road. It required someone to fill a building that had been empty long enough that most people driving past it had stopped noticing it was there.
If Mangata were an isolated case, it might just be a nice story about one brewery. It isn't isolated. A few miles north on the same highway, Fulcra Brewing Company opened in Sawyer in July 2025, in a two-room bungalow at 13400 Red Arrow Highway. Founders Ty Webb and Noah Hopkins met bartending and home-brewing in Chicago years before either of them had a lease in Michigan. Hopkins moved to the area once construction started, drawn back to a stretch of Harbor Country he'd explored as a kid growing up between Niles and South Bend.
Fulcra runs a five-barrel electric brewhouse and keeps ten beers on tap, no kitchen, packaged snacks only, with an outdoor beer garden planned for warmer months. It sits on the same Red Arrow Highway corridor that the Linear Park project extended paving to back in September 2023, two years before Fulcra's doors opened.
That's the pattern worth noticing. The infrastructure came first, in both towns, years ahead of the businesses that would eventually make use of it. The road diet and the sidewalk were in place before Mangata or Fulcra opened. They were built because a handful of township boards and a road department decided a highway lined with restaurants and shops needed a way for pedestrians to get between them safely. The breweries showed up afterward, on their own timeline.
None of this requires a special occasion. On a regular weekday evening, a walk from Whistle Stop's parking lot to Mangata's door is short enough that most people who live nearby could do it before their coffee got cold if they tried. The 10-foot landscaped strip separating the path from highway traffic means you're not dodging cars the way you would have on the old four-lane stretch. It's also flat, paved the whole way, and lit, which matters more in the shoulder seasons when Harbor Country's daylight runs out earlier than the dinner crowd wants it to.
August in Union Pier still means beach traffic backing up on weekends and a steady stream of out-of-town plates on Red Arrow Highway. But the corridor itself, the actual stretch between the grocery and the brewery, has quietly become something closer to a small commercial strip you can treat like a neighborhood block rather than a highway you drive through to get somewhere else.
That's the thesis, stated plainly: the sidewalk isn't news. It's five years old in front of Whistle Stop and Mangata, three years old up toward Sawyer Road. What's news is that the towns finally have enough reasons to use it, and those reasons arrived one empty building at a time, not because a road project made anyone build something, but because the road project made it possible for someone to try.
If you've lived in Union Pier for a while, you've probably watched this happen without naming it. If you're newer to the area, it's worth knowing that the walkability isn't an accident of small-town charm. It was built on purpose, years before anyone knew what would eventually fill in the gaps.
Southwest Michigan keeps changing in small, specific ways like this, one building and one grant-funded mile of sidewalk at a time. If you want a local perspective on what's happening in Union Pier or anywhere else along the lakeshore, Brian Waite has been paying attention to this stretch of Michigan for a decade. Let's Connect.
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