Midtown

It started with soot. After a mid-1970s fire at the old Baxter Laundry building — near what is now Midtown Green Park at Fountain and Eastern — left neighboring houses coated in ash, a handful of residents carried the complaint to city hall and kept meeting afterward. They took the name FUMD, for the four streets that framed them: Fulton, Union, Michigan, and Diamond. Through the 1980s they met on their own steam, and when Community Development Block Grant money opened up in the 1990s they organized formally as the Midtown Neighborhood Association. Today it is one of the busier associations in the city, running an office out of the same plaza as the Fulton Street Farmers Market — a brick building on park land — and employing an executive director who works alongside residents on neighborhood improvement, leadership, and crime prevention. Its stated aim is plain: unite neighbors as volunteers, build pride, and make an attractive place to live, work, and play. The association organizes the area as seven smaller pockets, each with its own name — Ashby Row, Brikyaat, Cegielnia Crossing, Coldbrook Creek, North of Market, Old East End, and The Woods — several of them nods to the Dutch brickyards that built the district in the 1800s. Landmarks give the work a spine: Houseman Field, the Fulton Street Cemetery (the oldest public cemetery in Grand Rapids), and the farmers market, billed as the city's largest source of fresh local produce. For the streets, parks, and housing themselves, see the Midtown neighborhood page.