Rosa Parks Circle is the living room of downtown Grand Rapids. This circular granite plaza, opened in 1999 and designed by Maya Lin — the architect who created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington — sits at the intersection of Monroe Avenue and Campau Avenue, the city's original crossroads. In summer it hosts concerts, food trucks, and the farmers' market overflow.
In winter the sunken bowl becomes a public ice rink, one of the busiest in Michigan. The plaza is named for Rosa Parks, the civil rights icon who was born in Alabama but spent much of her adult life in Michigan, living in Detroit from the 1950s until her death in 2005. Grand Rapids has a significant African American history of its own — the community that settled on the city's southeast side built churches, schools, and businesses that endured through decades of urban renewal and highway construction.
Maya Lin's gentle bowl pulls people down into a shared space, a gesture of democratic inclusion that Grand Rapids has tried, with uneven success, to live up to.