Frederik Meijer Gardens: The Grocery Mogul's Gift to Grand Rapids
Near Grand Rapids, Michigan
East of Grand Rapids on the Beltline sits one of the most visited cultural institutions in Michigan, and it exists because a man who built a grocery empire chose to give away a wetland instead of paving it.
The story begins in the early nineteen eighties, when the West Michigan Horticultural Society was searching for land to build a botanical garden. Grand Rapids had civic ambitions and a growing arts identity, but no botanical garden to speak of. In nineteen eighty-six a member of the Horticultural Society approached Frederik Meijer, who had founded Meijer grocery megastores and built one of the largest retail chains in the Midwest, to request a parcel of land the company owned on the eastern edge of Grand Rapids Township.
The land Meijer donated, seventy-point-seven acres transferred to the public in January nineteen ninety-one, was not prime commercial territory. It contained a stream, wetland areas, and rolling terrain. Meijer had originally planned to build a superstore there. When an alternative location was found for the store, the environmentally sensitive parcel became available, and Meijer gave it away.
A thirteen-million-dollar capital campaign followed, led by Meijer executive Earl Holton. The park took thirteen years from concept to opening, finally welcoming its first visitors in April nineteen ninety-five. Meijer himself remained involved, and as the institution grew it added his name and expanded its sculpture mission. Today the grounds encompass more than one hundred thirty acres and hold one of the premier outdoor sculpture collections in the country, works by Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, and Deborah Butterfield among many others. The centerpiece is a cast of Leonardo da Vinci's monumental horse, the Gran Cavallo, which da Vinci designed but never completed in his own lifetime.
The gardens draw more than six hundred thousand visitors a year. In a region better known for automotive manufacturing than for the arts, Meijer Gardens has become something genuinely unexpected: a world-class sculpture park that started with a grocery store owner and a wetland.
