Adam Bird for The New York Times
The three-story brick and glass building, in an area of old warehouses, will have a greenhouse that will be available for events.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The idea of building a year-round public market to tie the city’s skilled chefs to the region’s big complement of young farmers had already attained an air of inevitability by the time this Midwestern city held its first Restaurant Week three summers ago.
Adam Bird for The New York Times
The Downtown Market under construction in Grand Rapids, Mich., will be a center for commerce in culinary arts and food.
Next year, just in time for the fourth annual Restaurant Week, Grand Rapids is scheduled to open the $30 million, 130,000-square-foot Downtown Market, a destination that is expected to attract 500,000 visitors a year. The three-story brick and glass building, under construction in a neighborhood of vacant turn-of-the-20th century warehouses, is intended by its developers to be a state-of-the art center of commerce for the culinary arts and fresh local foods.
It is also seen as having the potential to accomplish much more.
“This project fills a variety of needs,” said David Frey, chairman of the Frey Foundation and co-chairman of Grand Action, a nonprofit group of local business leaders that joined the city’s Downtown Development Authority to raise money for the market and to build it. “It creates a lot of synergy for the development that’s been happening in Grand Rapids for some time now.”
The Downtown Market, in effect, is the newest piece of civic equipment built here since the mid-1990s to leverage the same urban economic trends of the 21st century — higher education, hospitals and health care, housing, entertainment, transit, and cleaner air and water — that are reviving most large American cities.
Few small cities, and possibly none in the industrial Midwest, have been nearly as successful. One reason is the distinctive partnerships formed between this city’s redevelopment agencies and wealthy industrialists and philanthropists. Hundreds of millions of private dollars have been raised here to build a downtown that encourages entrepreneurs, develops career-track jobs and attracts new residents.
The civic projects built in the urban core by public-private partnerships since 1996 include the 12,000-seat Van Andel Arena, the $60 million new home for the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the $220 million DeVos Place convention center, $1 billion in hospitals and the new headquarters of the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, several parks and the downtown campus of Grand Valley State University.
This small city, Michigan’s second-largest behind Detroit, was floundering a generation ago with a shrinking and aging population and poor job prospects for young people.
But it has been transformed. Today, Grand Rapids is full of young professionals in good careers, who enjoy a low cost of living, first-rate restaurants with locally brewed beer and a variety of residential options near work. The population has rebounded to nearly 190,000, from a post World War II low of 181,000 in 1980, and the region’s jobless rate fell to 6.7 percent in September, 1.8 percentage points below a year ago and well below the state rate of 9.3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“One of the elements that serves what we’re doing here is to build pedestrian corridors downtown,” said Mike VanGessel, president and chief executive of Rockford Construction. Rockford has invested more than $60 million to convert 13 mostly vacant warehouses and office buildings near the Downtown Market into 400,000 square feet of residential, retail and office space. One of the projects is GRid 70, a four-story office building a few blocks north of the market, where top designers for the region’s sport shoe and office furniture manufacturers work.
“The people this city attracts now want to be near things,” Mr. VanGessel said. “They want to walk, not drive. The Downtown Market is close. It’s part of the answer to, ‘How do we keep doing the next right thing for retaining our talent?’ ”
It turned out that the next right thing was to focus on fresh local food. Like hundreds of other cities, Grand Rapids has an outdoor seasonal farmers market that operates on Fulton Street four days a week. The Downtown Market fills what city leaders saw as a different need — a year-round, seven-days-a-week public market that would be a place to shop for local foods and a destination for residents and visitors.
Square Feet: Grand Rapids, Mich., Bets on a Food Market for Growth
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Square Feet: Grand Rapids, Mich., Bets on a Food Market for Growth
