Meet Mack-A-Tron: New 30-foot robot towers over Mackinaw City shopping district

MACKINAW CITY, MI – There’s a new guy in town. He’s 30 feet tall, made mostly of metal and is definitely the strong, silent type. Meet Mack-A-Tron. This massive robot art installation assembled in the last week in the Mackinaw Crossings shopping district has become the newest Northern Michigan photo op that people are flocking to.

The team behind all this buzz is headed up by Joe and Enzo Lieghio, co-owners of Mackinaw Crossings. Joe Lieghio said Mack-A-Tron has been in the planning stages since last year. It will now be a permanent art installation in the courtyard area of the Crossings, which is a Victorian-inspired collection of unique shops, activities, restaurants and a movie theater just a step-off from the city’s main corridors.

“We were looking for something that said Mackinaw City and Michigan,” Lieghio said of the piece designed by Kalifano. “This particular piece of art is made with auto parts – and Michigan is all about the auto industry and tourism. There is even some Mackinac Bridge steel in it,” he said, adding the bridge pieces are from the old steel grating that the Michigan Department of Transportation sells when it replaces the bridge road sections.

Mack-A-Tron was made with more than 1,000 automotive parts. This includes cars, trucks and even some motorcycle and semi tractor-trailer pieces. They’ve been treated to prevent rust.

The robot-looking piece weighs 15,000 pounds – too much to be transported and unveiled in one day. So some of the final assembly work was done secretly in a Mackinaw City pole barn and then it was put together on site with a crane.

“Everyone who worked on it did a good job keeping it quiet,” Lieghio laughed. But once it started to be pieced together inside the Mackinaw Crossings courtyard, there was no keeping it under wraps. Crowds gathered to watch the action.

“It’s just been amazing,” he said. “Even when there was just a leg up, people were coming back every day to see the pieces going up.”

Mack-A-Tron was finished earlier this week. And now that the crane and work crews have gone, there’s a clear path for visitors who want to marvel at the piece – or get their next great Instagram shot.

In addition to a big array of shopping options at different price points, visitors to Mackinaw Crossings can catch a movie at the 5-plex cinema, enjoy a nightly laser light show, hear some live entertainment, or grab a seat at a restaurant.

For more information about Mackinaw Crossings, check the website here.

Many of the Mack-A-Tron photos here are being shown to MLive readers courtesy of Northern Michigan photographer Aaron Thompson. You can see more of his work here.