Ottawa Hills

The streets give the game away: Mackinaw, Chippewa, Seminole, Pontiac, Cadillac. They wind rather than run straight because they trace the old fairways of the Grand Rapids Golf Club, which occupied this southeast-side rise until the land was platted for houses in the early 1900s. The first homes went up in 1922, and construction rolled on into the 1950s, so the housing reads as a catalog of 1920s revival taste — English Tudor and medieval cottage styles in abundance, with scattered Georgian, French Eclectic, and Southern Colonial designs, and at least one Italian Renaissance flourish. Homes sit well back from the street on generous, gently curving lots, which gives the blocks a wooded, unhurried feel that the straight grid of newer neighborhoods lacks. At the center stands the former Ottawa Hills High School, a Renaissance-style building completed by 1925 to designs by Harvard-trained architect Henry H. Turner and his partner Victor Thebaud. The neighborhood runs roughly between Martin Luther King Jr. Street and Hall Street, out to the eastern city limits near Cadillac Drive, with Alger Heights and its shops a short way south. Public schools here fall within Grand Rapids Public Schools. It is a place best understood on foot, where the curve of a street and the pitch of a Tudor roofline still carry the memory of the golf course underneath. To read about the neighborhood association and its long-running Fourth of July parade, see the Ottawa Hills association page.