small lake

Lowriders lined the parking lot leading to the clubhouse, where the party would spread out next to the swimming pool and a small lake.

Mr. Treter and others in this small Lake Michigan community with a population of nearly 16,000 came up with a solution: a 47,000 square-foot building that offered spaces for residences, businesses and community activities that had been in short supply as gentrification in the city pushed prices up and local residents out.

He spent his early childhood years in the small Lake Erie town of Vermilion, Ohio, where his father was a police officer.

Helen Whitney, a resident of Cobb, another small Lake County town, told me that the exhibits, workshops and craft fairs at the nonprofit Middletown Art Center have turned it into a “focal point for the area’s resilience and growth.”

Then he arrived at the place he thinks of as a hidden oasis: a pond and small lake that, in better times, bask in the emerald glow of looping, leafy trees and tall grass.