← A short history of Grand Rapids
The forty neighborhoods of Grand Rapids
Grand Rapids has forty recognised neighborhood areas, and most people who live here could not draw more than a handful of them. The map below is the city’s own — every boundary as the City of Grand Rapids records it, rather than the rough shapes that get passed around.
The shape of them is not an accident. This is a city that was founded on a set of rapids, tore them out to run mills, built furniture until the industry left, and rebuilt itself about once a generation afterwards — and each of those turns left a layer of housing behind. Midtown was farmland with clay underneath it, and the brickyards that worked the clay left the most crowded blocks in the city behind them. Which era a neighborhood belongs to is usually the first thing worth knowing about it, and it is why the history of the city is the best introduction to any single part of it.
Two things do most of the sorting, and neither of them turns up in a listing. Grand Rapids ran electric streetcars until 1935 and then abandoned them for buses, earlier than most American cities did — so a neighborhood here is either part of the close-set grid those lines built, or it came afterwards and was laid out around a driveway. And the city has six historic districts, inside which it reviews the outside of your house: additions, alterations and repairs all need a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Historic Preservation Commission, and that comes before the building permit does.
I’m writing these one at a time, starting where I can tell you something a listing cannot. Each one covers where it actually starts and stops, what is standing in it and why, and what is within walking distance.
Briggs ParkGpwitteveen · CC BY-SA 3.0Creston
2.77 sq mi · built 1880–1950
Built around a railroad depot in 1858, and not called Creston until a naming contest settled it in 1906.
View Creston →
Hodenpyl WoodsGpwitteveen · CC BY-SA 3.0East Grand Rapids
3.38 sq mi · built 1890–1940
Its own city wrapped around Reeds Lake, built out at the end of a streetcar line that ran to an amusement park.
View East Grand Rapids →
Wilcox ParkGpwitteveen · CC BY-SA 3.0Eastown
0.61 sq mi · built 1900–1930
Grew up at the point where two streetcar lines met, halfway between downtown and the amusement park at Reeds Lake.
View Eastown →
Meyer May Houseen:User:Jaydec · CC BY-SA 3.0Heritage Hill
0.48 sq mi · built 1843–1925
The city's first historic district — around 1,300 houses on the rise east of downtown, where the outside of the building is not entirely yours to change.
View Heritage Hill →Midtown
0.56 sq mi · built 1890–1930
A half-square-mile of 1920s bungalows and four-squares east of downtown, built out along a streetcar line that no longer exists.
View Midtown →Ottawa Hills
0.12 sq mi · built 1922–1959
Laid out on a golf course that closed in 1922. The streets curve because they are said to follow the old fairways.
View Ottawa Hills →West Grand
2.75 sq mi · built 1880–1950
The West Side's largest neighborhood, built along two business districts — West Leonard and Stockbridge — with Richmond Park at its centre.
View West Grand →Still to write: Alger Heights, Baxter, Belknap Lookout, Black Hills, Downtown, East Hills, Eastern-Burton, Eastgate, Fulton Heights, Garfield Park, Grandville, Highland Park, John Ball Park, ken-O-Sha Park, Lake Eastbrook, Leffingwell-Twin Lakes, Michigan Oaks, Millbank, Millbrook Community Bridgeworks, North End, North Park, Northeast, Oldtown-Heartside, Richmond-Oakleigh, Ridgemoor, Ridgemoor Park, Roosevelt Park, Seeds of Promise, Shangrai-La, Shawmut Hills, Shawnee Park, Southeast Community, Southeast End, Southwest.