People talking about Grand Rapids

[GR_Urbanist]

18 hours ago, RegalTDP said:

All the other cities on the list get great drone shots or streetscapes, and GR gets a picture of Miss Havisham's overgrown garden.  I don't even know where the heck that house is.  I know listicle writers never put much effort into this, but there are so many great licensable pics of GR and you can find them in two seconds.

This has been an issue for years. We are so unknown that no one really knows what to actually show that represents us as anything but a modest medium-ish town.

 

Out of all of the larger cities in the western Great Lakes, ours invokes nothing off the top of people's heads like Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison, Chicago, Indy or even Toledo does when you mention them. So you get photos of a single house, the BOB, Calder on empty plaza, or 28th Street, or even the lakeshore.

 

Truthfully, I think even we dont have a "defining image" that we could honestly refer to, but at least some effort can be made to show GR as something better than the bland Anywhere, USA stuff we usually get.

[MJLO]

33 minutes ago, GR_Urbanist said:

This has been an issue for years. We are so unknown that no one really knows what to actually show that represents us as anything but a modest medium-ish town.

 

Out of all of the larger cities in the western Great Lakes, ours invokes nothing off the top of people's heads like Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison, Chicago, Indy or even Toledo does when you mention them. So you get photos of a single house, the BOB, Calder on empty plaza, or 28th Street, or even the lakeshore.

 

Truthfully, I think even we dont have a "defining image" that we could honestly refer to, but at least some effort can be made to show GR as something better than the bland Anywhere, USA stuff we usually get.

Lol there were other cities on that list that weren't any more known than GR TBH.  They still got better skyline/street shots.  You'll never convince me that Hickory NC is somehow better branded than Grand Rapids.   It is annoying that so often GR somehow gets represented in lists with stock photo's that don't show the city at all. 

[RegalTDP]

10 minutes ago, MJLO said:

Lol there were other cities on that list that weren't any more known than GR TBH.  They still got better skyline/street shots.  You'll never convince me that Hickory NC is somehow better branded than Grand Rapids.   It is annoying that so often GR somehow gets represented in lists with stock photo's that don't show the city at all. 

Yes, this. THIS was my point.  I don't care if the image is ICONIC, I just want it to be GOOD.  None** of those cities are recognizable to most people from their images alone. TBH only a few cities in the world actually are.   But all those other cities had nice drone shots or streetscapes, and we had a boring house.  So that house is in Meijer Gardens?  No one would know that.  It's not even a GOOD pic of Meijer Gardens.

They got that picture from Getty Images.  Getty Images has tons of much, much better stock photos of GR.  If you google "Getty Images Grand Rapids" you will be flooded with them.  It takes less than a second.  How they landed on this house is a mystery.

**Besides St. Louis. But they have an arch, so it's not really fair.

[arcturus]

20 hours ago, Winston1206 said:

Pretty cool, but does it bother anyone else that they call Grand Rapids a “town” in the headline?

Many media outlets define cities by their skyline.  Until GR has taller buildings it's an understandable label.     

[RiversideGR]

17 minutes ago, RegalTDP said:

Yes, this. THIS was my point.  I don't care if the image is ICONIC, I just want it to be GOOD.  None** of those cities are recognizable to most people from their images alone. TBH only a few cities in the world actually are.   But all those other cities had nice drone shots or streetscapes, and we had a boring house.  So that house is in Meijer Gardens?  No one would know that.  It's not even a GOOD pic of Meijer Gardens.

They got that picture from Getty Images.  Getty Images has tons of much, much better stock photos of GR.  If you google "Getty Images Grand Rapids" you will be flooded with them.  It takes less than a second.  How they landed on this house is a mystery.

**Besides St. Louis. But they have an arch, so it's not really fair.

I think this is a good one:

[GR_Urbanist]

31 minutes ago, arcturus said:

Many media outlets define cities by their skyline.  Until GR has taller buildings it's an understandable label.     

One of the problems I see is that there are no good ways of showing the skyline of GR completely without being so far back that the buildings look shorter than we would like , or having to crop out some in order to emphasize the other's height/prominence better.

[walker]

20 hours ago, RegalTDP said:

. . .  I don't even know where the heck that house is.  I know listicle writers never put much effort into this, but there are so many great licensable pics of GR and you can find them in two seconds.

I doubt if either of the writers of the two articles, the original one, and the one that was cribbed from it, spent more than a couple of hours each on their stories.  That's much less than the amount of time that's been spent here discussing them.  

[Khorasaurus1]

On 3/31/2023 at 11:25 AM, GR_Urbanist said:

One of the problems I see is that there are no good ways of showing the skyline of GR completely without being so far back that the buildings look shorter than we would like , or having to crop out some in order to emphasize the other's height/prominence better.

This will get even worse as the skyline extends south.

Good "problem" to have, though. 

[walker]

The May 8th issue of The New Yorker has a long profile article about the famous (some would say infamous) screenwriter and director Paul Shrader who is a Grand Rapids native and a Calvin College graduate.  They mention his Grand Rapids influences including watching artsy movies at the Wealthy Theatre.  OK - they didn't say Wealthy Theatre by name, they just called it a neighborhood theatre.  But I'm Shrader's exact age and that was the only place you could see artsy movies back then.  I went there too (Wealthy Theatre, not Calvin.)

NEW YORKER: paul-schrader-wants-to-make-another-movie

I have aged much better than he has.

 

     

Edited May 6, 2023 by walker
fixed typo

[walker]

Well, like the last post above about Paul Schrader, this one is  more about people talking about someone from Grand Rapids rather than about Grand Rapids itself:

You’ve likely never heard of this person unless you are very old like me and lived in either Grand Rapids in the fifties or in Detroit in the sixties and seventies or unlike me you were really into cable TV crafting shows late in the nineties and early 2000’s.  The New York Times has a nice and long obituary today about Carol Duvall who hosted Martha Stewart type TV shows well before there was a Martha Stewart.

She got her start on WOOD TV in 1951 hosting a kids show called Jiffy Carnival when the station was located in a small studio in the McKay Tower.  I can vaguely remember me and my sister being in the audience on one of those early shows.

NEW YORK TIMES: Carol Duvall, a TV Queen of Crafting, Dies at 97

 

[RiversideGR]

fun thread on reddit about GR:

 

Edited August 30, 2023 by RiversideGR

[RiversideGR]

Urban planning/transit/bicycle enthusiasts on social media have been gushing over the new protected bike lanes on Turner.

I've come across multiple posts on twitter and facebook about it with thousands of likes. It's been fun to read the comments!

 

[StreetcarGR]

This has been such a welcome surprise. I hope the City takes notice of what a positive reception and impact that this project has made! I always think of this map, which can be filtered down to all of the non-motorized they want to build, they just need political will and funding that comes with it. 

[Jonesey]

I walked down pretty much the whole new stretch and saw two cars parked in it and one car driving down it.  This stretch was striped with signage.  I know this happened on Monroe by riverside, maybe they need more signage or better education and enforcement?

Also GR re-striped north of Richmond, so now if you're going south the signage says both lanes are thru but they just mush into one with no warning.

Don't get me wrong, I really love this, but it will take some getting used to... for a lot of people it's pretty foreign concept here... hopefully it will be the norm soon like AA

[cstonesparty]

On 11/15/2023 at 2:29 PM, RiversideGR said:

Urban planning/transit/bicycle enthusiasts on social media have been gushing over the new protected bike lanes on Turner.

I've come across multiple posts on twitter and facebook about it with thousands of likes. It's been fun to read the comments!

 

Yeah, that’s partly a function of where you’re looking… 

post on We Are Westsiders group on FB has almost 300 comments.  Mostly quite negative.

2 minutes ago, cstonesparty said:

Yeah, that’s partly a function of where you’re looking… 

post on We Are Westsiders group on FB has almost 300 comments.  Mostly quite negative.

 

[RiversideGR]

30 minutes ago, cstonesparty said:

Yeah, that’s partly a function of where you’re looking… 

post on We Are Westsiders group on FB has almost 300 comments.  Mostly quite negative.

 

Sure, but when is a neighborhood Facebook group excited about change? I’m in several Creston groups and any time a new development or restaurant is announced people find something to complain about. It’s generally just a place where people go to rant. Not exactly where I would go for well-researched opinions. 

[joeDowntown]

100%. Facebook is where people with nothing better to do go to complain. I think it’s baked into Meta’s business model. Quit the site back during Covid and it was a great choice. 

Joe

 

[GR_Urbanist]

I was tempted to look at the discussion a couple of days ago, but it almost always devolves into  just overly righteous bicyclists that will go on about how much they hate cars and why people that drive are dumb, and NIMBYs complaining for the sake of complaining as if they cant wrap their heads around this design and that a couple of meters shaved off a lightly used one-way street that is used more as a speed-up to get on the freeway (which literally forms a solid wall facing the houses there, will result in lower property values or something.

 

This same setup exists along Riverside park and on Century Ave, north of Franklin. Everything is just fine. If anything the lane will make that stretch of Turner at least look a little nicer even if the people there take a minute to figure out that they arent supposed to park on it...

[MJLO]

On 3/31/2023 at 10:50 AM, RegalTDP said:

Yes, this. THIS was my point.  I don't care if the image is ICONIC, I just want it to be GOOD.  None** of those cities are recognizable to most people from their images alone. TBH only a few cities in the world actually are.   But all those other cities had nice drone shots or streetscapes, and we had a boring house.  So that house is in Meijer Gardens?  No one would know that.  It's not even a GOOD pic of Meijer Gardens.

 

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/best-places-to-live-in-the-us

Another list, another not cityscape stock photo to represent GR     Today's listicle comes from Architectural Digest 

[RegalTDP]

48 minutes ago, MJLO said:

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/best-places-to-live-in-the-us

Another list, another not cityscape stock photo to represent GR     Today's listicle comes from Architectural Digest 

At the very least, this time they found a very good picture from Meijer Gardens.  I'm not unhappy with this.

[MJLO]

16 minutes ago, RegalTDP said:

At the very least, this time they found a very good picture from Meijer Gardens.  I'm not unhappy with this.

Yeah it's not a bad photo.  Still it's funny that the streak continues.  Every other city on that list was represented by some type of skyline or city scape photo except for GR. 

[Pattmost20]

Malcolm Gladwell mentioned Grand Rapids on his podcast a couple months ago.

The exact quote was: 

"I've been to Manilla, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Detroit, and Grand Rapids in just the last month. And if you're wondering, my favorite of all those places, not even close: Grand Rapids. Love Grand Rapids. Why doesn't everyone live in Grand Rapids? I don't get it."

I know he was in town for Tech Week. Cool to hear he enjoyed the city so much. 

[RegalTDP]

2 hours ago, Pattmost20 said:

Malcolm Gladwell mentioned Grand Rapids on his podcast a couple months ago.

The exact quote was: 

"I've been to Manilla, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Detroit, and Grand Rapids in just the last month. And if you're wondering, my favorite of all those places, not even close: Grand Rapids. Love Grand Rapids. Why doesn't everyone live in Grand Rapids? I don't get it."

I know he was in town for Tech Week. Cool to hear he enjoyed the city so much. 

I would definitely choose Grand Rapids out of those five in September.  Absolute perfect time to be in Michigan.

[Pattmost20]

New York Times released their list of their 23 favorite restaurant dishes of the year. KCM's Hire Katsu Curry made the list. Just had it on Saturday and I can attest, it is extremely good. 

[walker]

12 hours ago, Pattmost20 said:

New York Times released their list of their 23 favorite restaurant dishes of the year. KCM's Hire Katsu Curry made the list. Just had it on Saturday and I can attest, it is extremely good. 

If you are not a subscriber to NYT,  they allow subscribers to share an article with non-subscribers by providing a special temporary shared link.  Be my guest:

NYT: same article - unlocked

"Perhaps you live in a part of the country where katsu curry is abundant, and thus does not turn heads. Grand Rapids is not such a place, which is part of the reason my visit to KCM was so memorable. Larger reasons were the crisp perfection of the fried pork and the chef-owner Jason Kim’s convivial, prideful hospitality." -  BRETT ANDERSON