Highland Park

Community life in this pocket of Grand Rapids, just north of I-196, runs largely through the Highland Park Neighborhood Association, a volunteer group that keeps the calendar and the communication lines going for the area between Leonard Street and the highway. Much of its work is the unglamorous, useful kind: organizing cleanups at Eastern Park, sharing neighborhood news, and giving residents a channel to raise issues, which the group handles mostly by email and social media rather than a storefront office. One of its more ambitious recent projects was documentary work about the neighborhood's own past. In June 2022, the association premiered a 50-minute video, 'The Story of Highland Park Neighborhood,' at the Emerald Flats auditorium on Eastern Avenue NE. The film was produced by Caroline Cook of Grand Rapids Running Tours and paid for through the City of Grand Rapids Neighborhood Match Fund, a program that matches resident volunteer effort with city dollars for exactly this sort of neighborhood-led project. That combination — a small association leaning on volunteer hours and matched grants to tell its own history and tend its own park — is a fair picture of how the group operates. The neighborhood it serves carries a long history of its own, stretching back more than 170 years, and the association's documentary and cleanup work are efforts to keep that record and the shared spaces intact. For anyone wanting to get involved, the practical entry points are the association's email list and its Facebook and Instagram pages, where meeting notices and event dates get posted. To read about the park, the streets, and the setting, see the Highland Park neighborhood page.