Ottawa Hills Neighborhood Association

By 1972 several Grand Rapids neighborhoods were sliding, and a group of residents on the southeast side decided not to let theirs follow. They formed the Ottawa Hills Neighborhood Association to protect the area's distinctive features — the curving streets, the setback lots, the historic-revival houses — and to organize the collective upkeep that keeps a place intact. More than fifty years on, the association still runs a full calendar of neighborhood work and gathering: an annual garden tour, an ice cream social, tree plantings, a neighborhood-wide garage sale, and a spring clean-up. Its signature event predates the association by decades. The Hollyhock Lane Parade began as a children's bicycle procession during the Great Depression and has grown into what is billed as Michigan's longest-running Independence Day parade, drawing spectators from across the city each Fourth of July. The association covers the blocks bounded by Martin Luther King Jr. Street on the north, the Grand Rapids city limits near Cadillac Drive on the east, Hall Street on the south, and Giddings Avenue on the west — the same footprint platted in the early 1900s on the old Grand Rapids Golf Club grounds. Volunteers handle board business, publish minutes, and keep the events running year to year, the ordinary machinery that has held this district together since the early 1970s. For the streets, architecture, and layout of the neighborhood itself, see the Ottawa Hills neighborhood page.