GRAND RAPIDS, MI — When Keith Honey landed a job as the city’s planning director in 1955, he arrived armed with ideas about new federal programs that could help Grand Rapids outgrow its gawky adolescence.

But first he had to find a parking spot. On one of his very first trips to Grand Rapids, Honey waited nearly 15 minutes in line to enter the parking ramp next to City Hall, only to have the “Sorry, We’re Filled” sign land just as he was driving in.

The telling moment underscored the growing traffic congestion that was but one cog in the city’s wheel of problems.

By 1955, downtown was losing its mojo. Stores and factories were drifting away. Families were flocking to the suburbs and those who stayed kept defeating proposals to rejuvenate the area.

Decades of coal heating had left layers of sooty grime on once magnificent-looking municipal buildings, casually dismissed as relics of a bygone era by their occupants, who were disinclined to give them the maintenance they deserved.

City politics were bitter. Discord reigned between downtown business interests and neighborhood activists with competing visions for the city future.

Congestion was a source of ire. The city, like many around the U.S., sagged under a postwar transportation boom fueled by a pent-up demand for cars and houses that Americans had foregone during the Great Depression and six-year world war. Although people were moving out, many jobs remained within the city, causing a clog of stop-and-go traffic on streets built decades prior.

Finally, parking was a hassle. By 1955, the 9,000-some spaces already downtown were a hot commodity and the one city-owned ramp had become a moneymaker, although it was never intended to turn a profit when it was originally built.

What to do about Lower Monroe?

For years, downtown business and civic leaders eyed the stretch of Monroe Avenue between Michigan and Lyon streets with escalating concern.

The ground now occupied by the DeVos Place Convention Center was once a maze of alley-like streets wound between riverfront factories hidden from shoppers by a tired row of stores, hotels and restaurants that many saw as blighted.

City leaders had long hoped to consolidate scattered city and county offices into a landscaped riverfront center along Lower Monroe. Talk of such an undertaking dated back decades. Multiple outside consultants, most notably the Urban Land Use Institute in 1955, recommended the city do something to beautify the area.

Studies gathered dust, though, as a persnickety populace refused to grant officials the tax hike needed to fund such a large redevelopment.

As the years wore on, officials grew more agitated.

It had been 40-some years since the last new construction downtown. Wurzburgs, a major anchor department store, had moved several blocks southeast to a part of Upper Monroe where retail activity was not waning as badly. Its original store, once located where the Calder Plaza Building is today, became a warehouse.

The southeastern drift of businesses down Jefferson Avenue and up State and Cherry streets was seen as a troubling drain on the Lower Monroe district, which was considered hard to access by downtown’s confusing arrangement of streets platted in the early 1800s.

By 1956, land value on Lower Monroe was in free fall. Upper floors in some buildings had become little more than flophouses for a growing transient population. Officials feared the stretch was becoming a skid row and they warned that the blight was starting to creep, citing an overall assessed land value drop in downtown by $10 million in the past 25 years.

“Moral problems” were also causing increased police presence. Merchants blamed the Mel Trotter and St. Vincent DePaul missions, which, in turn, blamed the problems on nearby bars, hotels and card rooms.

Marti Childs, 89, remembers dodging the homeless outside the former Center Theater on Lower Monroe, briefly home to the Civic Theatre players.

“We would get homeless people that would come into the theater,” she said. “Sometimes they would come in during performances.”

“It was a very run-down area.”

Renewal begins on the West Side

Despite the perceived blight downtown, Honey’s initial focus upon arriving in Grand Rapids was on arresting the decline in city neighborhoods.

In 1956, he said “Grand Rapids will have real slums in a decade if something is not done to reverse the trend.”

Grand Rapids city planners Keith Honey, left, and Howell Gilbert, right, with a map showing neighborhood areas around Grand Rapids that 1950s planners saw as deteriorating.

An aerial photo ran in the Grand Rapids Press on July 29, 1958 shows the West Side area between Scribner Ave., Webster St., Front Ave. and 3rd St. NW that was redeveloped into an industrial park during the 1960s urban renewal years.

Four years earlier, Honey’s predecessor, Scott Bagby, had proposed the city buy and demolish hundreds of run-down homes in the near-downtown neighborhoods, but the idea died amid squabbles over public housing.

However, it formed a backbone for subsequent efforts at blight removal that eventually gave birth to the first urban renewal project in Grand Rapids.

The words “urban renewal” didn’t enter the local lexicon until 1956, when members of the Grand Rapids Real Estate Board publicly floated the idea of using the new federal aid program to spur neighborhood redevelopment in conjunction with the planned U.S. 131 expressway route through the West Side.

The federal Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, and subsequent amendments, had created a national framework for tackling urban blight, providing large sums for cities to help tear down neighborhoods and resell the land for development.

Grand Rapids was late to the renewal game, though. Muskegon had already embarked on a $7 million neighborhood renewal project in the Marquette School area, and cities like Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Jackson and Detroit were also prowling for federal renewal money.

A series of stories by Grand Rapids Press reporter Bud Vestal in 1956 sought to explain the renewal solution to blight for local readers.

The government, Vestal wrote, would advance planning grants to help cities map their programs. If approved, cities would buy property through eminent domain, clear it, and resell the land. The formula called for the government to put up two-thirds of the land-price difference, and the city one-third.

In November that year, the City Commission took the first steps toward renewal by approving creation of a project blueprint called a “workable program.”

The city’s pilot project was a 44-acre West Grand neighborhood between the river and Scribner Avenue, north of Third Street NW. U.S. Rep. Gerald R. Ford helped secure federal funding for what eventually became a $3.5 million industrial park.

Although the 500-family West Side neighborhood was typical of Grand Rapids in many respects, planners feared it would be “isolated” when U.S. 131 was finished in 1961 and the homes would become a “breeding nest for crime and disease because of low property values.”

“We are going ahead with this as rapidly as we can,” said Mayor Paul Goebel.

'Americans discovered cars and fell in love'

As the 1950s wore on, it had become obvious that despite attempts to improve city services with reforms, parking bonds, new sewage disposal programs and a capital improvement plan, Grand Rapids was still losing population to the suburbs.

In the 1950s and 60s, citizens were leaving the central city for suburban neighborhoods like this one at Shawnee and Onekama Drives SE.

The Herald reported that between 1950 and 1953, the city population grew by 3.3 percent while the outlying suburbs grew by 91.1 percent.

“Americans discovered cars and fell in love,” said Grand Valley State University history professor Matthew Daley. “They were hugely democratizing. No longer were you tied to living in a densely-packed urban neighborhood.”

It wasn’t just homes going up outside the city tax net, either. Industry was drawn to the acres of farmland on which to build sprawling factories and large parking lots. Wyoming Township added more than 2.5 million square feet of manufacturing space between 1945 and 1960. In 1958, the region’s first shopping mall, Rogers Plaza, opened on the booming 28th Street.

As people and jobs began to leave at an ever-quickening pace, Grand Rapids began grabbing wide swaths of suburban townships through annexation; at one point nearly doubling the city size from 23.5 to more than 40 square miles and adding nearly $55 million worth of assessed property in 1960 alone.

Related: Urban renewal timeline

In 1953, the state approved plans to build U.S. 131 though Grand Rapids, running the expressway west of the Grand River and avoiding the downtown business district. The new highway also helped facilitate the suburban growth.

In no small way, the state and federal highway system became a driving force behind the desire to get something moving downtown. The projected routes of U.S. 131 and I-196 cleaved the city into neat quadrants.

Soon, the once hard-to-access stretch of Lower Monroe would be mere minutes of drive time from anywhere within the local area.

Downtown renewal finally picks up steam

The fog finally lifted around downtown redevelopment plans after a New York firm sent a key consultant to Grand Rapids in 1959.

Two years earlier, the city had unsuccessfully gone to voters with a $12 million “A Better City” bond proposal to finance their dream for a downtown civic center.

Frustrated officials were encouraged by the plan advanced by Ebasco Services Inc., and its envoy, John Paul Jones, who convinced the city to pursue urban renewal downtown under a clause in the federal housing law that permitted 10 percent of a state’s renewal funds to go toward non-residential projects.

“Here was a chance to get this federal money and in the process have a dynamic new downtown with brand new buildings,” said Gordon Olson, a former city historian and author of the 1996 book “A City Renewed.”

Jones recommended the city lure investment by real estate, banking, legal and insurance firms and ignore new retail space.

Retail business had yet to entirely flee to the suburbs. The 1959 report stated 92 percent of all retails sales in the county still happened in Grand Rapids. Woodland and Eastbrook (now Centerpointe) malls would not rise until the late 1960s.

Compared to peer cities in the Midwest, Grand Rapids had a favorable economic climate for investment, according to his report. The city’s position was nearly 25 percent better than cities like Flint, South Bend and Fort Wayne.

What the downtown core needed, Jones argued, was not more apartments, restaurants or entertainment venues. Instead, it needed more than a million square feet of government offices and another 13,500 parking ramp spaces.

His 1959 consultant report summed up the problem, and the solution, succinctly.

“An analysis of this area indicated that in spite of all the efforts of the city and in spite of all the monies expended for its upgrading, it is still declining,” Jones wrote. “It is essential that fast and strong action be utilized to halt the growing blight.”

“Urban renewal is the type of action needed.”

If voters came on board, he said, demolitions could begin within a year.

NEXT INSTALLMENT:

Where many others failed, John Paul Jones found a way to succeed. Find out how a consultant from the Big Apple sold Grand Rapids on redevelopment and landed himself a job as city planning director.

Series Links

• Why GR chose to bulldoze downtown

• The NY consultant who sold renewal and became planning director

• The eminent domain case that pried the veil off redevelopment

• How 'World of Tomorrow' architects sculpted a new downtown

• Why old GR City Hall was destined for the wrecking ball

• Urban renewal: Slow-acting antidote or huge mistake?

Timeline:

• Key dates in GR renewal

Sidebars:

• History in the basement: Urban renewal booklet on Old Kent Bank

• Tale of two cities: Old GR City Hall's twin survives in Virginia

Interactive:

• Old and new downtown images collide

Photo Galleries

• 88 photos of old GR City Hall

• Old GR City Hall's twin survives in Virginia

• 100 photos of downtown renewal wrecking

• 65 photos of downtown GR before urban renewal

• 40 photos of downtown GR after urban renewal

• Grand Rapids Then & Now

• Renewal book showcases new Old Kent Bank

Videos:

• 16mm footage shows destruction of dimestore block

• Old footage shows changing downtown GR

• Gerald R. Ford at presidential museum dedication

• Wrecking ball foe Mary Stiles recalls fight for old City Hall

Garret Ellison covers business, government and breaking news for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email him at gellison@mlive.com or follow on Twitter & Instagram