Introducing The Castle
The story of The Grand Castle starts in Bavaria.
In 1868, King Ludwig II cleared the ruins of two castles in the foothills of the Alps to build a castle of his own. Young King Ludwig’s authority was diminished after a military defeat, and he spent most of his reign pursuing elaborate vanity projects. Those pursuits eventually bankrupted him, and he was deposed in 1886 before dying under mysterious circumstances. The castle was unfinished, and Ludwig’s enemies cited the massive debt he incurred to build it as evidence of his insanity.
Neuschwanstein was the mad king’s dream. By the 19th Century, European castles were no longer built for strategic or military reasons, but noblemen sunk large sums into recreating ornate replicas. Ludwig was a lifelong bachelor with refined tastes, and his castle was highly stylized, memorializing the Swan Knight of German legend and the operas of his friend, Richard Wagner. After his death, the castle was turned into a tourist destination. Nowadays, Neuschwanstein is one of the most visited castles in the world. It’s something straight out of a fairytale.
By the late 19th Century, Germany was lurching into the modern age: Bismarck forged a confederation of German states, and the Rhine Valley had grown into an industrial powerhouse. Bavaria’s eccentric king splurged on a castle of childhood dreams and was eventually consumed by the pursuit of making his monument to the old regime as beautiful and perfect as he possibly could. In building Neuschwanstein, Ludwig immortalized the fading splendor of royalty.
Generations later, after several tours of the castle, the madness of Bavarian King Ludwig II descended upon a developer from Grand Rapids, Michigan named Roger Lucas. He built The Grand Castle in Grandville, my hometown. During his PR push, Lucas frequently cited Neuschwanstein as inspiration, claiming that he had visited over a dozen times and become obsessed with building his own castle and filling it with luxury apartments. They broke ground in 2016, and after delays, cost overruns, and labor violations, tenants arrived in 2019. Construction is ongoing.
The Castle is advertised as the second-largest castle structure in the world. Lucas would have had to have gotten special approval from the FAA to build it any taller. On the journey from Grand Rapids to Chicago, the castle appears in the distance past several industrial yards. The sight is much more spectacular coming from the other direction: after a slight turn along the bend of the Grand River and past some woods, it’s suddenly there, looming high over the 28th Street / Wilson Exit. It’s a surreal sight for unsuspecting motorists: an immense structure with a brutalist vibe and chintzy trappings. The Castle looks more like a prison than an apartment building, with its drab concrete and small, evenly spaced windows.
If The Castle’s most striking aspects are its immensity and its architectural crudeness, its comically inadequate efforts to seem castlelike are even more ludicrous. The conical towers feel like they were designed as an afterthought. Lamps on the boulevard entering the property, ringing the parking structure, and throughout the hallways flicker orange, as if they were torches. Cheap suits of armor sit in the corners of elevator lobbies. Some features were allegedly borrowed from the Alpine original: a brick facade above the entry gate appears unfinished, the royal blue color looks garish on the metallic roof, and standing atop the tower is a tiny, ridiculous lion statue.
The Castle may be the strangest apartment complex in the United States. Like Neuschwanstein, it reflects the specific madness of its creator and the conditions under which his grandiose dream was fulfilled. It’s a building with an incredibly powerful energy. When I found myself at a crossroads this summer, I felt a madness of my own drawing me towards The Castle.
I might never know a place as deeply as I know Grandville. My grandfather staked our family’s claim here when he bought a funeral parlor on Chicago Drive back in the fifties. I spent my childhood in a quiet neighborhood by Calvin Crest Park and graduated as a product of Grandville Public Schools, a proud Bulldog. I had some of the same teachers as my father: Ms. Van Haartesveldt for 8th Grade US History and Mr. Huizenga for 11th Grade Econ; one of his high school classmates, Mr. Verburg, was my 6th Grade teacher.
I made my profession of faith in the same church where my grandfather was baptized, where my mother is an elder, where my parents got married, and where I helped carry out my grandmother’s casket. First Reformed is the oldest church in Grandville — a few blocks down Wilson from The Castle. A few years ago, after a service, I took a side stairwell from the top floor and was startled to see it in the distance, perfectly framed in the window.
Grandville was a pleasant place to grow up. It’s one of the oldest suburbs in Grand Rapids, a few miles southeast on the Grand River, the first stop out of town on the way to Chicago. There are thousands of Grandvilles spread across the US: indistinct burgs with a mild civic pride that have been swallowed by suburban sprawl. For a while, what differentiated Grandville from its neighbors was RiverTown Crossings, a shopping mall that opened a few months before Y2K.
The climate, foliage, and whiteness are characteristically Midwestern. Like the rest of West Michigan, Grandville is quite religious. There are dozens of places to worship, including a few non-denominational megachurches, but our Calvinist tradition is still strong. Perhaps the painting of Neuschwanstein in the style of Van Gogh’s classic Starry Night hung prominently in The Castle office is a nod to our regional Dutch heritage.
When Roger Lucas approached the City of Grandville about building The Castle, he had a compelling pitch for revitalizing the north end of town, long a goal of the mayor and the city council. His rezoning petition was unanimously approved by the City Council. As commercial development continued around the mall to the south, the 28th Street and Chicago Drive corridors rusted, and Lucas made some grand promises.
In interviews, he claimed that one of his goals was to build the nicest apartments in Michigan. He envisioned second and third stages of redevelopment, anchored by The Castle, that would include several new apartment complexes and mixed-use retail / office spaces. It’s situated at a convenient outpost for those who take the short highway commute to downtown Grand Rapids or out towards Holland and the Lakeshore, but it was absurd to think that it could generate a small boom of new high-end development at a busy intersection downstream from an industrial area.
At the exit, there are competing gas stations, an auto body shop, a mortgage and an insurance broker, stores called Muffler Man and Chain Saws Plus, and The Castle. There’s also a new Best Western Plus, designed with little castle towers of its own. The Castle property only has one entrance and exit — to the South onto busy 28th Street, a five-lane thoroughfare with no sidewalks. There’s no light, and traffic is busy at rush hour. To the West runs I-196. To the North and East are long-dead gravel pits that have filled with water and been rebranded as lakes.
Like others, I was skeptical from the beginning. I moved across the country after they started construction and returned before they finished — my brief stint in Houston that was effectively ended by Hurricane Harvey. I moved back into the house I grew up in and found a job in Grand Rapids. While I was living with my parents, I drove by The Castle on my daily commute. It was a monstrosity long before it was finished. After a few months, I moved into a friend’s house in Alger Heights. I lived there and worked on the West Side for about two years, but I was ready for a new adventure by the time life was upended by the pandemic.
My parents had left Grandville and retired to the countryside, so my siblings and I moved out there to be together in March — an empty nest that became full again. I’ve battled melancholy / depression for most of my adult life. Even before the crisis, I had been mired in a tough stretch. The isolation, anxiety, and boredom we experienced made things worse. The tenor of my weekly therapy sessions grew darker during the first few months of quarantine.
But then a cold spring gave way to summer. I started taking medication again and felt better. I grew closer to my family and savored my time with them. I saved money living with my parents again in a locked down world while working remotely. I saw life bloom around the lakes, across the fields, and in the woods, and I savored every minute spent under the sun during the loveliest months in Michigan.
I still entertained the idea of relocation and briefly had to consider whether to follow my brother to Atlanta in July. The pandemic dominated that decision, and I felt like it would be difficult to find a quality job and an entirely new social circle there, given the circumstances. I decided to stay in West Michigan for a while, but I wanted something temporary. I knew my cousin was looking to move, so I asked him if he was open to renting a two-bedroom apartment with me, and he was.
The Castle fit our criteria for price range, location, and space. In the past, I’d often joked about scheduling a tour there just to get a look inside. Most people in the Grand Rapids area rightfully deride The Castle as grotesque and ill-conceived, but nearly everyone is curious as to what life on the inside could be like. I truly hated this enormous, dreary building, an inexplicable blight on my hometown. And yet, I was curious about it too. I felt that its existence was itself compelling — that a great story could be told about such a strange, dystopian place.
Our tour was on a warm Saturday morning. The office is just to the left past the main entrance gate, and we chatted through masks with the leasing agent about the property and the specifications we were looking for. The conversations in the office and on the tour were mundane for the most part, though they did occasionally veer towards the ridiculous when the leasing agent presented tacky castle-inspired features. In the tunnel leading from the main gate to the courtyard, there are six bizarre displays, mostly framed pictures, behind sheets of glass and cheap plaster walls.
Collectively, they encapsulate The Castle’s strangeness. One display features a few of the available floor plans. Another traces the path of The Castle’s construction — bones of the structure coming up in stages, towers sitting on the ground, aerial shots of the unfinished building. Signs of ongoing construction still appear around the property on fields of dirt and in odd rooms at the base of the parking structure. A display boasts various amenities — among them the fitness center, pool, library, coffeeshop, arcade, and dog park. A staged apartment occupies one display, even though it looks about as mediocre as new construction possibly be. One contains an inexplicable, random assortment of art prints, including some famous works like the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and Washington Crossing The Delaware.
The last display contains the spirit of The Castle. Much of it is occupied by a creased plastic banner of a photograph taken of the side of Neuschwanstein; there’s a painting of flowers and a big, blank TV screen; four ornate swords and four patterned shields are hung up next to a Starry Night print (there’s another across the tunnel in the random artwork display); a suit of armor with a shield and a lance stands sentinel the corner. A replica of the lion on top of the tower stands facing awkwardly sideways, stashed between the glass and the wall. It has a crudely sculpted mane and a concerned, serious expression.
The leasing agent gave us time to examine the displays, then took us across the grim, gray courtyard and up the tower in an elevator that counts to thirteen.