Families of factory workers and tradespeople who couldn't afford Heritage Hill but wanted something better than the industrial districts near the river settled the Garfield Park neighborhood, the early twentieth-century working-class district on Grand Rapids' southeast side that you are walking through now. The neighborhood's modest bungalows and two-story frame houses represent the aspirations of a generation of Grand Rapids working families — the finish carpenter who saved for his own house, the dairy worker who planted a Victory Garden, the autoworker who commuted to one of the plants along the river. Garfield Park itself, the green space that gives the neighborhood its name, was developed as part of the city's early parks movement, the progressive-era belief that working families deserved access to greenery and fresh air as much as the mansion-owners of Heritage Hill.
The park includes a conservatory, a pool, and playing fields. The neighborhood today is one of the most racially and economically diverse in Grand Rapids, a place where longtime residents and new arrivals — many from Latin America and Southeast Asia — live side by side in a density and variety that the suburb has never managed to match.