Old Coastal Towns and a City Disaster

Friday, May 22, 2015--Traverse City to Grand Rapids

Traverse City is really a nice place.  It's interesting that the downtown area is more alive than the suburban mall area.  Somehow, the city has managed to turn the downtown area into an entertainment and dining complex along with a center for offices (which are still being built with several new office buildings in the area).  The downtown even has two cinemas, along with lots of bars and restaurants and food truck parks.  It is filled with nice old buildings which all seem to be used rather than vacant. 

We left there this morning to head south.  We drove to Manistee which bills itself as a city of Victorian buildings.  The downtown has several blocks of wonderful, old buildings.  Unfortunately, many are vacant.  The downtown isn't very successful economically, but it is beautiful.  Also, they have a very nice river walk they have built behind the row of downtown buildings that goes all the way through town to the shores of Lake Michigan.  Many apartments overlook it, and people seem to enjoy it for jogging.  It also houses a municipal marina where people can dock their boats in an area that is safer from the storms while allowing quick access to the lake.

Ludington was our next stop.  It has a very successful downtown which attracts tourists, but the buildings are far from being as nice as the ones in Manistee.  Part of the popularity of this town, however, is that it is also the dock for a car ferry that goes across Lake Michigan between there and a city in Wisconsin.  The ferry was there loading for an outgoing trip.

We stopped at a roadside park for lunch.  It was fine for a while, but then the wind picked up making it difficult to deal with the food and making it too cool to enjoy being out.  We went back to the car to finish our dessert.

Muskegon was the surprise of the day.  We went downtown to find a strange situation.  There were a few old scattered buildings and a few new scattered buildings, but there were empty lots all over the place.  I questioned whether there had been a disaster, because it reminded me of downtown Waco after the tornado years ago that left lots of vacant lots.  When I got onto the computer later to see what had happened, it had been a disaster, but a man-made one.  The city tore down many of their old buildings and built a shopping mall to try to save downtown.  It worked only for a decade or so before someone built a suburban mall and the stores started leaving downtown.  They eventually tore down the new downtown mall and are trying to fill the gap left by it with new buildings.  They have a long way to go.  The photos of what used to be there give an idea of what a disaster the idea was to tear down most of downtown and build a "modern" shopping mall.

Our destination today was Grand Rapids.  It's the second largest city in the state and in some ways the most successful one lately.  It has a very large downtown area which has a mixture of many beautiful old buildings and newer modern ones.  They've created open spaces for people to congregate, and they have brought in many university programs to keep downtown more alive.  It also has new city facilities (arena, theater, convention center) along with gleaming modern office buildings to indicate that it is a progressive place.  The river has "rapids," but they are man-made ones with constructed lines every 100 yards (meters) or so that cause the water to ripple over them and on down the river.