Eastown

Everything converges on the five-way: Wealthy Street, Lake Drive, and Norwood Avenue all meet at one intersection, and that odd geometry is the literal center of the Eastown commercial district. The corridor grew out of a nineteenth-century streetcar line, when the Grand Rapids and Reeds Lake Railroad ran cars out Wealthy Street toward the Reeds Lake resort, and the mixed-use fabric that streetcar era left behind, storefronts pushed up to the sidewalk, apartments above, still shapes how the strip works on foot. It is a dense, browsable stretch of independents: bars and restaurants, coffee, records and books, boutiques and service shops, the kind of run you can do without moving a car. The district's turning point was a building. The Wealthy Theatre, built in 1911 for vaudeville as the Pastime Vaudette and renamed in the 1920s, sat empty and decaying for more than twenty-five years before a neighborhood-led capital campaign restored it; its reopening in the late 1990s as a nonprofit community arts center pulled the whole corridor back to life. The surrounding Wealthy Theatre Historic District was designated in 1997 under the Michigan Local Historic Districts Act. Each summer the strip closes to traffic for the Eastown Streetfair, spread along Wealthy Street between Giddings and Lake. The corridor also falls under the Uptown Grand Rapids corridor-improvement umbrella. For the residential blocks around it, see the Eastown neighborhood page.