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("Rest" by Basic Comfort plays) Living West Michigan is thrilled to welcome back a familiar face.

Candice Smith, the woman behind Tours Around Michigan, takes us on unforgettable journeys across Grand Rapids all year round.. We previously joined her for a spine tangling ghost tour, and now we’re back for a fascinating historic homes tour Get ready to step back in time and explore the stories behind Heritage Hill.

We are here on Madison Avenue in Grand Rapids, one of the largest historic homes districts, is that correct?

Yes, so we’re in Heritage Hill, and Heritage Hill is the largest, contiguous historic home district in the nation.

So what that means is that it’s one big piece home next to home, next to home, 1,300 registered historic homes right here.

There are more than 60 architectural styles here, because these were built by pioneers, building, you know, their lives here, their businesses here.

So every single home has the personality of the person that built it in there.

Yeah, so we’re gonna see a lot of different unique styles today.

Yes.

Okay, well, we’re gonna get started, take a little walk.

Yes, yes.

See what we can find.

Yeah.

The addresses in Grand Rapids all changed in 1912.

Oh,cause they renumbered all the street.

Oh, so confusing.

So sometimes you’ll find an address that’s before 1912, but you have to figure out what it was turned into to be able to find the current house.

Okay.

Now, the house right here on the corner, this one was built in in 1878 but as an Italianate house.. Now, today, it looks nothing like an Italianate house.

That’s because the front doors of this Italianate actually faced Logan Street.

So in Heritage Hill, it wasn’t unusual for homes on corners to get different owners, and then the owners were like, like, ", we really don’t want this style of house.

I really would like this."

And so instead of just changing the front of the house, they would switch it to the other side, change the address and create a new front to what their house would be.

Right over here, this house, this is kind of a Tudor style house right here.

This one is now the welcome center for the Meyer May house.

So with the Frank Lloyd Wright house that’s here.

And one thing that’s really funny about this house is it was already here when the Meyer May house was designed.

Now, when Frank Lloyd Wright was working on the Meyer May house, he absolutely hated this house.

And so when he designed the Meyer May house, he made sure that as few windows as possible were facing this house.

So you’ll see on that side, it’s essentially brick.

The May family moved into this house in 1909.

This was the eyesore of the neighborhood, and this was put up.

People hated this house.

They just thought it was not fitting in the neighborhood.

You know, you have all these welcoming porches and all these different homes And in this home, you really don’t know where the front door is.

You literally have to be told where the front door is.

So if you start to walk around the house, you’re like, oh, maybe that’s no, maybe that no, like you can’t find it.

So how you find the front door here is that you had to follow the red path.

You had to go up this path, and then you go in this low hanging area.

Yeah.

So, this was a concept that Frank Lloyd Wright called "Compress and Release.

So, you would come into a place, it would feel like you were being kind of squeezed in, so that includes this low ceiling.

You know, when you go in there, it’s just that little entryway and you immediately turn and go upstairs And then you turn again, and go up another set of stairs.

And then the release part is when you got to the top, that you went from feeling kind of confined to suddenly it just opened up.

And it’s not surprising that the May family would build a house that was so unusual.

They were business people, they were clothiers.

Meyer May, he was the very first person ever to put hangers in stores.

Really?

And because of that, Frank Lloyd Wright put something in this house that he really didn’t’t put in any of the other houses, and that was closets.

Oh, that makes sense!

Closets in this house.

Yeah.

Frank Lloyd Wright was quite the character.

So when Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house for the Mays, he made every decision, not only just what the house looked like, you, they were contracted to use furniture, he designs.

Also, he chose where it went on the lot, and how much of the lot was used.

Well, this lot, like many on this block used to go all the way to the next street.

So when Meyer May designed it, he decided not to use that.

And so a few years later, Mr. Leonard, who was a business owner in town, came to Meyer May and said, "Hey, I’d really like to buy that lot, you know, I just want to build a little bungalow on it.

So the bungalow ended up being a 6,000 square foot Mediterranean house.

A little bungalow.

with a two story built in organ.

And so the little bungalow essentially takes up every square inch, like you can see how close it is to the line.

Definitely would not pass now, you know, being that close to the property line.

So this home was an 1880s home.

One story I really love about it is the carriage house.

Initially it was built to hold horses, and then when they finally got a car, they didn’t want to go through the hassle of having to back the car out of the garage.

So instead, you would pull the car into this garage, which was no old horse stall that they turned into a garage, and it would essentially be on like a turntable where you could crank it and the car would turn around, and then you’d never have to back the car out, you just pull straight out.

I need one of those.

I know, just like I have it home.

So we’re standing in front of a 1914 Edwardian house.

It’s a really cool style.

This was built by Harry Leonard.

He had inherited his business from his father, who was Charles Leonard, who lived just kiddy Corner.

And so he was president of the Leonard Refrigerator Company in the earlier 1900s one out of every six refrigerators sold in the world was a Leonard, and they were the largest employer in Grand Rapids for a long time, and obviously a very significant company worldwide.

So it’s beautiful inside.

Let’s go inside.

Let’s go in.

We also had the chance to speak with Ken, one of the current owners of the Leonard house.

So, the heating system in here was really unique.

In fact, I think my feet are a little toasty just from just from being in here.

So back in the day he had the big, typical, big octopus coal furnace under our feet here, but he hung radiators from the floor joices, underneath the whole first floor, which heated the floor, and then, of course, that heat would rise up, and that’s the way he heated.

So they were a refrigerator company, so they probably knew a little bit about, like, pipes and things like that.

There were many.

Yeah.

But about 15 or so years ago, this was turned into a bed and breakfast.

We have eight guest rooms, six on the second floor, two on the third floor, and it’s open all year long, and we just welcome guests from literally all around the world And it’s been a very exciting experience.

Yeah.

It has been brought back beautifully.

One thing they had here was a central vacuum, which is no longer functional, but you can see it right back here, one of the outlets for it.

So there’s still a massive unit in the basement.

It’s so big that it’s essentially impossible to get out, so it’s still here, but it’s kind of cool that they still have those little pieces here.

What we also have in here is is the Leonard Cleanable refrigerator.

So these are really cool.

So let’s open one up and take a look, and I will tell you why these were so special, and why these sold so well.

Most of the ice boxes were just this inside they were wood or sometimes metal.

So Charles Leonard, what he did was create ceramic inserts.

So you can see these, the ceramic inserts right here.

So it became the Leonard Cleanable refrigerator, because this is a heck a lot of it is a lot easier to clean than this.

or this, right?

So that’s how the big business really started.

You can see on the label it does say the Leonard Cleanable refrigerator.

So they were calling them refrigerators back then.

Wow.

I wouldn’t have guessed that’s what this was when we first saw it.

So this used to be an area where the horses could actually come through, so you could just pull the horse right in here, get off, come on in the house.

There’s still a little evidence that the horses were here, because if you look here you can see where the horses were probably tied up here and they got a little bored, so they started to chew on the wood here.

A horse garage, if you will.

Yeah, it was kind of a walk through, yeah.

Heritage Hill hasn’t always been the vibrant neighborhood it is now.

It’s gone through quite a transformation to become what it is today.

You, as the neighborhood changed, so did these homes.

So with Heritage Hill, our first homes are from the 1840s that we still have here.

By the late 1930s, you started having some of the original owners, they were passing away.

People started getting cars, moving out to the suburbs and that left many of these houses empty, 1940s happens, World War II.

We get all these people coming back, they need places to live with their new families, so many of these houses get caught up into apartments.

Finally, with urban renewal, we’re getting toward the late ’60s, early ’70s, and there was a plan that would have demolished about three quarters of Heritage Hill.

And so the owners here worked with state legislature to get laws passed and enforced that essentially said, "You can’t use federal money to demolish a historic building."

And that was passed just a few days before the project was approved that would have ripped out the majority of this historic home district.

Wow.

So that is what saved us so close.

And now it’s amazing.

It’s one of the most beautiful historic home districts in the nation.

One reason for that is that there are strict rules here.

If you own a house here, anything on the outside of the house has to be approved by a committee.

You can only use materials that were available when the house was built.

Wow.

That’s really cool.

And that is why this is such an accururate, beautiful.

Yeah, so we’re really lucky to still even have all of these houses around us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So and it’s really a labor of love to own one of these places.

It’s your life.

And many people have spent decades, you know, taking these homes that were divided up and not cared for, and, you know, bringing them back, making them beautiful again, turning them back into single family homes.

Yeah.

This neighborhood has lived a lot of lives.

Yes, many lives.

And it’s beautiful, and we’re so lucky to have it.

(Whoosh) He never stopped learning.

He never stopped educating himself as a kid who dropped out of school in seventh grade, went on to become a millionaire and invent so many items, and being the whole time being conscious about his impact on the environment, to me that that’s really inspirational.

We are here at the incredible Felt mansion today.

Can you kind of share some of the history behind the Felt estate and maybe more specifically, the Felt family history?

Yeah, so the Felt family was from Chicago.

The patriarch of the family Dorr Felt was the inventor of the comptometer.

It was the first mechanical machine that could do all four types of math functions.

And that’s what really made him his fortune.

But he was an inventor of many other items.

He had 70 some odd patents throughout the years.

Now, the family had come to this area to visit a friend one summer and fell in love with it.

And so doors started picking up piece by piece, little chunks of property, eventually amassing over 1,000 acres, and they decided that they wanted to build a house for his wife, Agnes.

And so Agnes’s house, which we now know as the Felt Mansion, was started in 1925, and it took 100 guys three years to build it.

So the home was finally finished about 1928 By then, Agnes was ill. And when they moved in, Agnes finished out her time.

She had all of six weeks to enjoy all of the work that Dorr had done on her behalf.

Dorr followed about two years later.

The daughters maintained ownership of the home for another couple of decades, and then ultimately sold it, and it was becoming a seminary and a state police post and then was left just vacant for a time period.

And then the founding director of the Friends of the Felt Estate, Patty Meyer, stumbled across it and decided to start the restoration project.

When Patty petitioned for the ability to start this project, the township was resistant at first, and eventually, they did give her permission to start, but with a budget of zero And so early on, most of the restoration effort was done with discounted or donated materials, donated time, volunteers, doing all the work, and room by room attacked this 25 room, 12,000 square foot behemoth, and managed to eventually get it back to the state it is in today.

Yeah.

So, can you maybe point out some of those architectural pieces that were original to the home that they really took the time to restore?

So when you first walk in the door into the foyer, the woodwork in that area is absolutely spectacular.

The cornice up on the ceiling the wall paneling with bleached mahogany, inlaid marquetry.

It’s really gorgeous.

The original stairs, not a single spindle, was missing from that stairway, but the paneling and the light sconces, even the fireplace mantels had been removed throughout the various lives of the home.

And so as those pieces were missing and Patty was working on the restoration itself, she kept running into people in the community that wanted to be a part of that process and volunteer their time or had pieces of the estate that they had collected throughout the years.

And so the paneling and the sconces came back to us through the community supporting it.

So it’s amazing when you think about all the pieces that weren’t here when she began, but are original to the home, and how they’ve all managed to find their way back.

Over time, you said it’s been a seminary, it’s been a prison, and I’ve read somewhere that even the new pope attended the seminary, is that right?

Yeah, St. Augustinian’s out of Chicago, purchased the property, and originally, they were using this house as the dormitories As time went on, an enrollment increased, they built a new building, and that building stood until the mid ’90s, and that is the building that Pope Leo actually went to school at.

So he graduated high school from there, and then came back for a reunion here and has been in the mansion and in the chapel and walked these grounds, and it’s kind of amazing to think of that.

Dorr Felt was known for his conservation efforts.

He’s planted, he said, 250,000 trees in the area.

How do those efforts maybe continue to influence the estate’s grounds today?

Yeah, so the efforts that Dorr was doing in the early 1900s around Dune land stabilization, rainwater collection, green initatives that 100 years later, we’re still really trying to still get behind that.

One of the things that we have added is a solar array, and that solar array is able to produce enough energy for us to be able to cover all of our needs in the summer.

And actually, we’re putting energy back into the grid.

And even in the winter, we get a decent amount of energy out of it.

So it’s really interesting to be able to continue forward that idea and to continue educating people about the types of conservation that are possible and that doesn’t have to be hard to do.

So how can people come enjoy the day?

How can people can visit?

So, start by visiting the website, which is feltmansion.org, and you’ll see on the website a list of tour opportunities and events every summer we do a concert series on Thursday nights in July.

That is a free concert series.

Christmas time is a big deal for us.

Last year, we had 65 different decorated trees in this house, but April through October, we have regular tours, both self guided and guided tours that are available Historical homes are kind of an interesting entity in that most of the time you go into a home and it’s " don’t touch anything, don’t sit on anything, don’t sneeze."

And when Patty started this project, she was adamant that this was not going to be a velvet rope sort of place, that we want to bring people into the spaces and let them be in this environment to be able to feel it and appreciate it and have some context to the stories that we tell.

(Whoosh) The city of Grand Rapids is home to numerous beautiful and interesting neighborhoods, one of which is Ottawa Hills.

Here, residents say, there’s a great city sense of community.

Some even consider it a step back in time, all having to do with the intricate weaving of great neighborhood charm mixed with charming neighbors.

There are so many stories emanating from the homes in Ottawa Hills, the beautiful tree lined streets were at one time home to a golf course.

Developers, they say, followed the fairways when designing and building the homes in the 1920s.

The beauty of the neighborhood is evident, but did you know there are some fascinating stories brimming out of the homes that line these fairway guided streets?

We didn’t know, but we found someone who did.

Pamela VanderPloeg spent countless hours researching and writing an entire book on the architecture, the builders, and those who lived in these homes in those earlier days.

Okay, so we are here in the Ottawa Hills neighborhood today, and I am with Pam VanderPloeg, who has written this amazing book on architecture and the like here in Ottawa Hills.

This is a big piece of the history of Ottawa Hills, correct?

It is.

Ottawa Hills was once a farm and then from that estate, someone had the idea to build a golf course.

That was about 1905.

In 1921, three golf courses had gone through this property.

And they were all gone, the land was vacant, Grand Rapids, the city was expanding, it was post World War.

One, there was a housing shortage, they were looking to areas where they could build And this area looked prime.

It was so beautiful.

So, Pam, one of my biggest questions is, why did you decide to write this particular book about all of the architecture and all of these homes in this particular neighborhood?

The thing that really distinguished it is a lot of times a neighborhood will have one developer, an architect that will design all the homes.

But in this neighborhood, especially in this first section, people bought a lot, and they often hired an architect and a builder.

And so the houses, they followed a pattern of historic revival, so so they’re quaint and they have individual extraordinary characteristics that made them interesting to me.

We’re going to take a walk because we have some interesting homes and interesting people that live in a lot of these homes.

Correct.

That is the fun part of this, of why I wrote the book.

The people were so interesting.

Homes and buildings are interesting, but it’s the people that bring them to life.

Let’s take a walk.

All right, let’s do it.

So, it was Charles Leonard Whittier, and what makes him special, he and Lucile lived here.

His grandfather invented the Leonard Cleanable refrigerator.

It was one of the first refrigerators ever.

So, the people that lived here have interesting provenance.

And we’re going to look at some more that have some very interesting backgrounds, as well.

Yes, yes.

I love this house.

It’s beautiful.

That would be enough of a reason, but what I really love about this house is it was designed by a woman, architect.

Her name was Louise Gillio.

Her father was Clarence Gillio, and he ran the printing department for the Grand Rapids Herald.

And I really think that helped her get her stories out.

These were a four plus,cause other people helped too, but decided to start the Hollyhock Parade on the Fourth of July.

So I think that’s what’s kept this neighborhood going as really community.

Okay, and this is a really fun house.

This house had two very famous residents from 1940 to 1945 the gentleman that lived here with his wife, who was a Grand Rapids native.

He was a baseball player.

And his name was Wally Pip, and Wally Pip made a big mistake.

He played for the Yankees from about 1915 to 1925, thereabouts.

He got a headache one night, so he stayed home and they put somebody in his place.

Lou Gehrig.

And Lou Gehrig had that spot for a long time after that.

That was the end of Wally Pip’s tenure as the first baseman for the Yankees.

But before Wally Pip lived there, another interesting guy, Emmy Davenport, and Emmy Davenport started working for at Grand Rapids Business College.

Well, it was floundering at a certain point, and he saved the school.

Today, we know the Grand Rapids Business College as Davenport University, and they both both families lived in this beautiful house.

The core of all of this, you look at the architecture, you look at who lived here here.

It is the people, would you say?

I would say so.

To me, the serious part was inventoring the homes, who designed them, who built them, the fun and most living element was who resided in these homes, what they did what their life was like, just a little bit of that, just brings them to life, I think.

There are up to 300 homes in the Ottawa Hills neighborhood, an annual newsletter keeps residents up to date on all the activities and happenings, such as the yearly Hollyhock parade, as well as the the beautiful garden tours.

Ottawa Hills’s association president, Mike Hanson, says this area remains incredibly popular, and he, too, says, it’s the people that reside in these beautiful homes that makes this area so special.

You have neighborhoods all over the city, but it’s the people that make that neighborhood special and the people that live in this neighborhood make it special., and we’ve got a very diverse neighborhood, a lot of people from different backgrounds and so forth, and they volunteer, they put on block parties, they really work together.

They look out for each other, so it’s a special place.

Could you imagine yourself living anywhere else?

No, no.

This is just, it’s perfect for us.

We like to walk, we like the bike ride.

You know, we’re so close to everything The people.

No, I don’t see us moving anywhere else.

This is it’s just a very nice neighborhood.

And speaking of the people, longtime resident Fred Davison is one of the ones who puts neighbor into neighborhood.

A past association president, he grew up here as a kid, left and then made his way back.

And this has been his home for the last 39 years He says things are running full circle as it relates to the community that is Ottawa Hills.

So we have a a lot of young families that now are in the neighborhood, similar to when I was growing up in the 1950s.

I was going to say, it’s kind of like history repeating itself.

It recycles.

And that’s what we’re in.

We’re in another new cycle of new families, and it’s really exciting to see You know, we will sit out here and look at the families across the street and then there will be anywhere from 12 to 14 kids either playing basketball or volleyball, or they’ll be playing baseball off the corner.

That’s the same thing I did over here.

We used this large intersection as a softball area, and there was occasions when line drives were bounced off homes and glass windows were shattered.

But everybody seemed to understand it because that was the area that we were in.

Fred, could you envision yourself living anywhere else?

No.

Really.

And it’s because the community, the people are really wonderful.

They’re good neighbors, good friends and everybody steps out to do the things that they can to help each other.

("Rest" by Basic Comfort plays) Have a good day!