"Similar to Freedom Hill and the county park they have there, we can't dig into the ground a whole lot."
That's Clinton Township Trustee Mike Keys, co-chair of the Prince Drewry Park Advisory Committee, explaining a problem most park committees never have to think about. Prince Drewry Park sits at 22013 Quinn Road, partly on top of a former landfill, directly across from a former incinerator. The state installed methane vents on the site in 2019 because gas leaks have been a running concern since the park was built. You cannot put in a splash pad or reroute a trail through new bedrock without running into decades of buried material first.
So the committee did something that sounds almost too simple: instead of trying to rebuild the ground, they built a night.
What's Actually Under the Ground
Most park improvements follow a predictable script. A township gets a grant, pours new concrete, adds a playground structure, maybe repaves a lot. Prince Drewry Park can't follow that script, at least not without extensive remediation work that isn't in the cards right now. The land's past life as a dump site and its methane venting system mean any major excavation project comes with a level of engineering scrutiny most neighborhood parks never face.
That constraint shaped everything that came after. In 2021, the Clinton Township Board of Trustees dedicated resources to the park and approved a new walking path, one of the few improvements that doesn't require disturbing what's underneath. The board also created the Park Advisory Committee specifically to figure out what else could be done given the site's limitations. Keys put it plainly when talking to local reporters: the harder work wasn't engineering, it was "changing the attitudes and culture of making these events happen."
If the ground was off limits, the committee's actual lever was people.
A Committee That Borrowed From Dodge Park
The first real test came in July, when the Advisory Committee partnered with the Township's Parks and Recreation Department to host a movie night at the park. It worked well enough that the committee decided to try something bigger for fall: a recurring market.
The model wasn't invented from scratch. The committee looked at the farmers market running at Dodge Park in Sterling Heights and adapted the idea for Prince Drewry. The first Market Days series launched in 2022 as a three-day, biweekly event: September 28, October 12, and October 26, with vendors set up in Pavilion 1. Keys told local reporters the committee aimed for roughly 40 vendors, a mix of local businesses, entrepreneurs, and even students selling products or advertising services. Around that core vendor fair, the committee layered in free youth and senior programming, pulling in nonprofits and government organizations to run activities like basketball tournaments.
It was ambitious for a volunteer-driven effort on a site nobody could physically improve in the usual way. And ambition, it turned out, came with a cost.
How the Format Changed Year Over Year
Running three separate market days across two months takes staffing, vendor coordination, and budget that a township committee has to fight for every year. The event's shape has shifted noticeably since that first fall.
| Year | Format | Frequency | Dates |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Market Days | 3 days, biweekly | Sept 28, Oct 12, Oct 26 |
| 2023 | Market Days | Series, board-approved | May through August |
| 2024 | Market in the Park | Single evening | Aug 14, 4–7pm |
| 2025 | Quinn Road Community Night Out | Single evening | Aug 20, 4–7pm |
The 2023 return wasn't automatic. The Board of Trustees had to vote on it, and the approval came after debate over budgeting and how the series would draw on township resources. The board ultimately backed a $6,000 amendment to the Recreation Department's budget to cover it, and the event ran as a series from May through August rather than the fall biweekly format from the year before.
By 2024, the series had condensed into a single evening called Market in the Park, held August 14 from 4 to 7 p.m., with a vendor fair, food trucks, free youth programming, and community resources all packed into three hours instead of three separate dates. In 2025, the event returned under a new name, the Quinn Road Community Night Out at Prince Drewry Park, held August 20 on the same 4-to-7 schedule, with kids crafts, prize raffles, backyard games, and a community resource tent added to the mix.
Why Smaller Turned Out to Be Stronger
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only skim a calendar listing: the event didn't shrink because it failed. It shrank because a three-day series stretched a small volunteer committee thin, and a single, well-run evening does more for less. Compressing everything into one date meant the committee could put more into that one night rather than spreading thin resources across three separate ones. The rename to Quinn Road Community Night Out signals the same thing. It's less a market and more a block party with a market inside it, built around a specific street rather than an abstract "series."
That's the actual lesson buried in four years of tweaking a fall event nobody outside the neighborhood tracks closely. When you can't fix a place by digging into it, you fix it by giving people a repeatable reason to show up, and you keep adjusting the format until people actually do.
If You're Watching the Calendar This Fall
If the last two years are any indication, this year's edition likely already came and went sometime in mid-August, not September. That's worth knowing if you've been checking the township calendar this month expecting a fall date the way the 2022 version ran. The event has settled into a mid-August rhythm, so the smarter move for next year is to start checking the township calendar in early summer rather than waiting for autumn.
The Prince Drewry Park Advisory Committee meets the first Wednesday of every month at 6 p.m., and meetings are open to residents who want input on what happens at the park next. Local businesses or vendors interested in future Market Days can reach out through the contacts the committee has used in past years, and residents with questions about programming can go through the township's recreation department. The park itself remains open year round for the walking path and the pavilions, methane vents and all.
What the Calendar Tells You That the Ground Can't
Most guides to a neighborhood park focus on square footage, playground equipment, or trail mileage. Prince Drewry Park is a useful reminder that a park's real condition sometimes has nothing to do with what's built on it. This is a site the township literally cannot dig into without navigating decades of landfill history, and the fix wasn't concrete. It was a recurring evening that took four years to find its right size.
If you live near Quinn Road, that's a small but real piece of neighborhood knowledge worth having: the park down the street runs on a calendar, not a construction schedule, and the calendar has been getting sharper every year.
For more on what makes this corner of Macomb County tick, from local parks to home values nearby, the Clinton neighborhood guide from Raymond Matti is a good place to keep exploring. And if you're ever curious what a home near Quinn Road might be worth, or just want to talk through what's changing in the neighborhood, The Matti Team is always happy to be a resource, no obligation required.
