Heritage Hill: A Neighborhood Built on Lumber and Furniture Money
Near Grand Rapids, Michigan
The neighborhood immediately east of downtown is called Heritage Hill, and it is, by most measures, one of the most remarkable intact urban residential districts in the Midwest.
Roughly thirteen hundred homes line its streets, ranging from modest worker cottages to elaborate Victorian mansions, and most of them were built between eighteen sixty and nineteen twenty. The district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is consistently cited as one of the largest historic districts in the entire United States.
What you are driving through, essentially, is a topographic map of Grand Rapids' economic history. The grandest houses at the top of the hill nearest downtown belonged to the lumber barons, the furniture manufacturers, the wholesalers and financiers who got rich in the boom decades after the Civil War. As you move down the slope, the houses become somewhat smaller, reflecting the gradations of a working industrial city.
Architectural styles represented here span more than fifty different types. Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne, Shingle Style, the whole vocabulary of Victorian American domestic architecture is on display within a few walkable blocks. A Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie-style house, built in nineteen oh eight, stands here too, a later addition that shows how long the neighborhood's construction era stretched.
The Voigt House, a three-story mansion built in eighteen ninety-five for grain merchant Carl Voigt, is preserved as a museum open to visitors. It retains essentially all of its original furnishings, down to personal items left behind when the last family member died in nineteen seventy-one. The Grand Rapids Public Museum manages it.
Heritage Hill was added to the National Register in nineteen seventy-one. The preservation effort that followed was early and vigorous, which is why the district survived the urban renewal era largely intact while comparable neighborhoods in other Midwestern cities did not.
