Walk down Western Avenue this week looking for the hay bales and you will find orange barrels instead. For three years running, the stretch between 4th Street and Terrace Street has been where Muskegon's fall decorating contest lived, one straight sidewalk lined with hand-painted bales you could see start to finish in a single lap. Not this year. Resurfacing work on Western Avenue pushed the whole event off its usual block, and the Downtown Development Authority and Muskegon Social District had to find it a new home. They found it three.
The 4th Annual Harvest Hay Bale Trail is now spread across Hackley Park, the 200 block of Webster Avenue near the Art Museum, and the 300 block of 3rd Street between Western and Clay. Decorating ran September 12 through 22, so if you have not been by since last weekend, the bales just went up.
Why the Route Broke Apart
The construction detour is a small thing on its own, but it changes the shape of an errand a lot of downtown residents already had memorized. Where the trail used to be one continuous walk, this year it is three separate stops that do not sit next to each other. Hackley Park anchors one end. The Art Museum block anchors another. The 3rd Street corridor is its own short leg entirely. None of them touch.
The city also tightened the rules this year, capping entries at one hay bale per organization. The stated reason, according to the city's event page, is to keep the bales usable for farmers once the contest ends, which means fewer repeat entries from the same business piling up multiple bales in one spot. Combined with the Western Avenue closure, the result is a trail that is both more spread out and more evenly distributed across the participating businesses. Twenty bales, twenty organizations, three separate blocks.
Where the Twenty Bales Landed
| Location | Cross Streets | What's Nearby |
|---|---|---|
| Hackley Park Grounds | 3rd St & 4th St, between Webster and Clay | Hackley Public Library, Muskegon Museum of History & Science |
| Webster Avenue Corridor | 200 block, near the Art Museum | Muskegon Museum of Art |
| 3rd Street Corridor | 300 block, between Western and Clay | Downtown Social District core |
If you are trying to see all twenty in one outing, the Hackley Park cluster is the natural starting point since it borders both the library and the history museum, two stops people already build into a downtown walk. From there it is a short cut over to Webster Avenue, then down to 3rd Street to close the loop.
The Same Name Keeps Winning
One detail that survived the relocation is who tends to win. Lascko Services has taken the contest three years straight: a Scooby Doo Mystery Machine in 2023, a skeleton and jar of fireflies in 2024, and a Stitch from Lilo and Stitch entry in 2025. Voting happens by QR code posted next to each display, and the streak says less about any one design and more about a small business that has treated the contest as a yearly tradition rather than a one-off marketing stunt. A DDA organizer told WOOD TV the event was built to counter a real seasonal dip, noting that "traffic slows down after summer" and that the goal was to give both visitors and business owners a reason to stay engaged downtown into October.
A Mile Down the Shore, a Second Contest Nobody Coordinated
Here is the part that turns a construction detour into an actual change in how people move through their week. While the Hay Bale Trail was rerouting through downtown, the Lakeside Business District quietly ran its own parallel event: the Scarecrow Contest, themed this year around "Clowning Around," strung along Lakeshore Drive with its own QR code voting system. Lakeside is roughly a mile from the downtown core, connected by the paved shoreline trail, and it has never needed to sync its calendar with downtown's. This year the two just happen to be running at the same time.
That overlap matters more than it would have a few years ago, because Lakeside itself has been changing block by block. The Lakeside Business Improvement District approved a Façade Improvement Grant this spring covering half the cost, up to $2,500, of a new exterior awning for the Marine Tap Room at 1983 Lakeshore Drive, one of the businesses anchoring the district's year-round Social District where you can carry a drink between participating spots from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. A few doors down, the former Harbor Theatre at 1937 Lakeshore Drive has a redevelopment plan moving through city approvals, with the city establishing a Commercial Redevelopment District there in January. Neither project is finished, but both are visible enough now that anyone walking Lakeshore Drive for the scarecrows this month will notice the awning going up and the theater sitting mid-transition.
So the fall walk that used to be a single downtown loop is now, practically, two separate outings: the hay bale trail split across three downtown blocks, and a scarecrow trail a mile away in a district that is rebuilding its own storefronts in real time. Wonderland Distillery and Unruly Brewing Co., both regulars on the Lakeside and downtown trivia and event circuit, sit close enough to either trail to work as a natural stopping point between the two.
The Bookends: Farmers Market and the Color Tour
Two fixtures hold the season together regardless of where the hay bales end up. The Muskegon Farmers Market, which Visit Muskegon describes as Michigan's second-largest outdoor market, keeps running through the fall with cider, baked goods, and produce, and it sits close enough to the Hackley Park bale cluster that the two make an easy combined stop on a Saturday morning. Down the block at 610 W. Western Avenue, the Visit Muskegon office is handing out maps for the Depot to Depot self-guided color tour, which runs October 1 through 31 and gives walkers a free postcard to go with the route.
That address is worth noting for its own reason. The Visit Muskegon office sits on the same Western Avenue stretch that got resurfaced and lost its hay bales this year, so the street that used to host one fall tradition now hosts a different one instead.
Reading the Detour
None of this changes what Muskegon's fall looks like in the aggregate. The bales are still up, the scarecrows are still voted on by QR code, the market still runs on Saturdays. What changed is the shape of the walk itself. A route that used to be a single four-block lap down Western Avenue is now three disconnected stops downtown plus a separate trip to Lakeside, and the two events that used to have no reason to overlap are, for one season, running at the same time a mile apart.
If you want to see the season the way it is actually laid out this year rather than the way it has always been laid out, the order that works is straightforward:
- Start at Hackley Park for the bale cluster nearest the library and history museum
- Cut over to the Webster Avenue block by the Art Museum
- Finish the downtown leg on 3rd Street between Western and Clay
- Walk or drive the mile to Lakeshore Drive for the Scarecrow Contest, timing it to pass the Marine Tap Room's new awning and the former Harbor Theatre
- Save the Depot to Depot color tour map from the Visit Muskegon office for a separate weekend once the Western Avenue work wraps
None of it requires planning ahead. It just requires knowing that this year, for one detour-shaped season, the walk does not go where it used to.
If you're out walking any of these blocks this fall and find yourself wondering what a place like the one behind that new Marine Tap Room awning, or a storefront near the Hackley Park bales, would actually cost to own, the team at Michigan Homes & Cottages knows this stretch of Muskegon well enough to talk it through over coffee, no walking tour required.
