"We don't have a gathering area for employees or residents to relax and share a lunch," Bloomfield Township Supervisor Dani Walsh said the year the township launched Food Truck Wednesdays. It is a strange thing for a supervisor to admit out loud. Birmingham has Old Woodward. Bloomfield Hills has Cranbrook pulling foot traffic toward it like a tide. Bloomfield Township, the unincorporated stretch of Oakland County that wraps around both of them, has a parking lot behind a cable access studio and a schedule taped to a folding table.
That is not a criticism. It is the actual shape of the place, and once you see it, you stop looking for a Main Street that was never going to be there.
The Doughnut With No Hole in the Middle
Bloomfield Township is geographically the frame around two cities that get most of the attention. Birmingham sits inside it as its own municipality. Bloomfield Hills sits inside it as its own municipality. What is left, the township itself, is subdivisions, private clubs, church parking lots, and long stretches of Telegraph and Maple Road that function as commercial corridors rather than a commercial center. There is no square you can point to and say this is where Bloomfield Township happens.
So the township built one. Not a physical square. A recurring appointment.
The Parking Lot That Became an Institution
Food Truck Wednesdays started as a lunch idea and has since become the closest thing the township has to a civic ritual. It runs out of the parking lot at 4190 Dublin Drive, on the northwest corner of Dublin and Exeter, one block south of Long Lake Road and one block west of Telegraph, behind the studios of Bloomfield Community Television. There is no marquee. You find it by knowing it is there.
This year the township changed the formula. Instead of a truck every week for a few summer months, 2026 stretched the season from late May through the end of September and moved to an every-other-Wednesday rotation, with an extra hour added to the lunch window. The full lineup for the season:
- May 27 – Tacos El Guero
- June 10 – Deutsch Troit
- June 24 – Motor City Street Treats
- July 8 – Circle T
- July 22 – Simply Spanish and Detroit Mini Donut
- August 5 – KDubs Grill
- August 19 – Shinobi Street Food
- September 2 – Good Eats Mobile
- September 16 – Twisted Street BBQ
- September 30 – Heavenly Chicken and Waffles
Two dates are still ahead of you this fall. If you have not made it out yet, September 16 and September 30 are the last chances before the lot goes quiet until next spring.
What makes this worth noticing is not the tacos. It is that a local government decided the absence of a gathering place was a problem worth solving with a rotating cast of small businesses and a parking lot it already owned. Downtown Publications, the monthly newsmagazine that covers Birmingham and Bloomfield, has tracked the series since it started, and the roster has grown each year as trucks build a following among township employees and residents who show up on their lunch break from wherever they actually live in the township's scattered geography.
Two Institutions Hiding a Few Minutes Away
The food truck series is loud about its own schedule. Two other pieces of Bloomfield Township's daily life are not, and residents drive past both without necessarily knowing what they are passing.
The first is the Affleck House, a Frank Lloyd Wright design tucked into a wooded lot off Woodward. Gregor Affleck, a chemical engineer, and his wife Elizabeth commissioned Wright in 1940 after Elizabeth fell for Fallingwater. The house that resulted is one of only about 25 Usonian houses Wright built before World War II, constructed of brick and cypress and set into a natural ravine so the living and dining space cantilevers over a small stream running beneath it. The Afflecks lived there until their deaths in the early 1970s, and their children donated the house to Lawrence Technological University in 1978. LTU still owns and operates it, and public tours run the third Saturday of most months, ticketed in advance rather than open for walk-ins. It is not a house you stumble into. It is a house you have to already know to look for, on a street with limited parking and rooms too narrow for large groups.
The second is Bloomfield Open Hunt, a 40-acre equestrian, tennis, and swim club on East Long Lake Road with a 60-stall boarding barn and indoor and outdoor riding arenas. It sits right on the line where Bloomfield Township's subdivisions give way to Bloomfield Hills, visible mostly to the people who board horses there or hold a membership, invisible to everyone else who just knows there is a long fence line and a barn roof past a certain bend in Long Lake Road.
Neither of these is a secret in the conspiratorial sense. They are simply gated by calendar or membership rather than by geography, which means they do not show up on a map the way a coffee shop with a sandwich board does. You find Food Truck Wednesdays by following the township's social media. You find the Affleck House by booking a Saturday months in advance. You find Bloomfield Open Hunt by knowing someone who already rides there.
The Pattern, Once You See It
This is the thing that separates Bloomfield Township from its two more photographed neighbors. Birmingham's identity is spatial. You can walk it. Bloomfield Hills borrows its center of gravity from Cranbrook, an institution with a physical campus you can wander onto. Bloomfield Township's identity is temporal. It exists on a calendar: a parking lot that only matters on alternating Wednesdays, a house that only opens its doors one Saturday a month, a club that only reveals itself to people already on its member list.
None of these things advertise themselves at the property line. They advertise themselves in a schedule, and the people who feel most at home in Bloomfield Township are the ones who have that schedule memorized, not the ones circling the block looking for a downtown that was never part of the design.
That distinction matters if you are trying to understand what daily life actually looks like here, separate from square footage and lot size. The township's version of community is less about where you live inside its boundaries and more about whether you know what is happening this Wednesday, this Saturday, this season.
Two Wednesdays are left before the parking lot on Dublin Drive goes quiet for the winter. September 16 brings Twisted Street BBQ. September 30 closes the season with Heavenly Chicken and Waffles. After that, the calendar resets, and the next person who wants to understand Bloomfield Township will have to learn it all over again, one appointment at a time.
If you are already thinking about what a home in this part of Oakland County is actually worth, from a custom build near Long Lake to a resale a few streets from the township campus, Rob Haber has spent more than 15 years reading this market block by block. Let's Connect.
