Bohemian is the word for Eastown, the neighborhood east of downtown Grand Rapids where the independent bookshop, the vintage clothing store, the co-op grocery, and the dive bar have coexisted on the same block for decades. Eastown developed in the 1920s as a streetcar suburb, its commercial district built for the residents of the surrounding bungalows and two-flats who could walk to the shops and catch the car downtown. The streetcars are long gone, but the walkable scale of the neighborhood survives: buildings set close to the sidewalk, parking in the rear, storefronts at eye level.
The commercial district declined in the postwar decades and then revived beginning in the 1980s, attracting the kinds of independent businesses that couldn't afford or didn't want the rents of a strip mall. Today Eastown is genuinely mixed — in income, in age, in background — the kind of urban neighborhood that planning schools hold up as a model and developers try to replicate in new construction without quite capturing what makes the original feel real.