Heritage Hill, the largest urban historic district in Michigan, holds one of the finest concentrations of Victorian and Edwardian residential architecture in the Midwest. From roughly 1870 to 1920, the families who made their fortunes in Grand Rapids furniture — the Widdicomb family, the Berkeys, the Gay family, the Luce family — built their houses on this ridge east of downtown, climbing away from the river and its industrial smells toward the high ground with its views and breezes. The result is a neighborhood of Queen Anne towers, Colonial Revival porches, Craftsman bungalows, and occasional Prairie-style experiments, all packed onto thirty-seven square blocks of genuinely remarkable streetscape.
By the 1960s, many of the mansions had been subdivided into apartments and the neighborhood had declined significantly. A preservation movement began in the early 1970s — among the first neighborhood-scale historic preservation efforts in Michigan — and today the district is meticulously maintained, its architectural character protected by local ordinance. Walk one block in any direction and let the scale of what the furniture industry made possible sink in.