Eastown and the Wealthy Street Corridor

About a mile and a half east of downtown, Wealthy Street runs through a neighborhood called Eastown that locals have sometimes called the Greenwich Village of Grand Rapids, a little bohemian, independently minded, with a commercial strip that has managed to stay interesting through several cycles of boom and decline.

The neighborhood began as a streetcar suburb. In the late eighteen hundreds, as Grand Rapids built out its electric streetcar network, Eastown developed as a commuter community positioned between downtown and the recreation grounds at Reeds Lake to the east. The wood-frame housing stock from that era still defines the neighborhood's character.

The commercial anchor is a theater. The Wealthy Theatre was built in nineteen eleven as a vaudeville house, the Pastime Vaudette it was called originally, and it shifted to movies as vaudeville died. By the nineteen sixties it was known city-wide as the place to see foreign and art films, a specialty that gave it a distinct identity in a city whose mainstream movie palaces were showing the same Hollywood releases as everywhere else. The theater went dark in the mid-nineteen seventies.

It stood empty for more than twenty-five years. Then a neighborhood arts organization launched a capital campaign, and in nineteen ninety-nine the Wealthy Theatre reopened as an independent nonprofit community arts center, and since two thousand five it has been run by the Grand Rapids Community Media Center. It now hosts live theater, music, comedy, film screenings, and local broadcasting, a full-spectrum community venue operating in a building that survived a century of format changes and a quarter century of abandonment.

Eastown's Wealthy Street corridor today is what it has long been: independent businesses, a repair shop next to a coffee shop, a hardware store beside a gallery, the kind of commercial strip that chain retail cannot easily replicate or replace.