Michigan Oaks

Three of the six lakes inside Grand Rapids city limits sit here — West Lake, Middle Lake, and Church Lake — strung just north of Fulton Street East, and they give this stretch of the far east side a civic identity built around water and green space rather than a single downtown corner. The anchor is the old Marywood campus at 2025 Fulton Street East, the motherhouse complex of the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids. On its grounds sits the St. Francis of Assisi Sculpture Garden, roughly eleven wooded acres open to visitors, a rare piece of contemplative landscape kept up by the order rather than the city. A short way northeast, Frederick Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park draws the region for its outdoor art and seasonal shows, and the two gardens together make this part of town a destination as much as a place to live. Local civic life leans on that mix of institutions and small industry: Oak Industrial Park gathers working businesses on the neighborhood's edge, and residents coordinate the ordinary business of an area — traffic, upkeep, watching out for shared spaces — largely through an active online neighborhood group rather than a storefront office. The area the association speaks for runs wider than the tight cluster of the lakes, taking in the blocks that developed out of the old Paris Township farmland in the 1920s. What holds it together is less a founding charter than a set of landmarks people organize around: the lakes, the sculpture gardens, the parish and campus history along Fulton. For a walk through the streets, parks, and housing that surround all this, see the Michigan Oaks neighborhood page.