Disaster Movie Potential
After our tour of The Castle last summer, my cousin and I grabbed some food at a diner down the street and went for a walk by the Grand River to talk things over. It made sense for both of us. He had let me know a few months earlier that he was interested in moving in together; I had gone to live with my parents at the start of lockdown and was looking for a new place. The Castle fit our criteria for price, location, amenities, and space.
I had to accept a certain level of dissonance in order to consider it. Yes, the building is an aesthetic nightmare from the outside. Yes, the apartments inside are nice enough — at least not that bad, especially since they’re new.
I’ve lived at The Castle for about eight months now. I launched the blog and have written a little, taken plenty of pictures, and tweeted some screenshots of The Castle Facebook group. I lost my job and found a better one. I adopted a dog. The Castle has become home, even if it was once an offhand joke that got taken way too far. It has felt less ridiculous as it’s grown to be so familiar.
As we heard the leasing agent’s pitch and walked through The Castle, my cousin and I were noncommittal. Afterwards, he told me that we needed to keep looking for a place but never found a better alternative. Of course, I was drawn to the absurdity and spectacle. I was curious enough to explore The Castle and to chronicle the experience for the internet. The tour was ridiculous enough: plenty of evidence that the entire project was ill-considered, cheap materials, and shoddy craftsmanship. Yet, relative to other apartments and rental properties in the area, it was a decent place to live for the price — $1,515 for a two bed / two bath.
I didn’t manage to convince my cousin to agree to The Castle until a few weeks after our tour. I’ve thought back to the first conversation we had after seeing the inside, back to a late lunch at the Rainbow Grill and a stroll on the trails northeast of Millennium Park. Towards the end, he made a comment that’s stuck with me: that living at The Castle could be a “potential disaster movie experience.”
While The Castle was being built, people made some predictions about its eventual fate. As to be expected, there were plenty of folks predicting that the place would quickly fall into disrepair and attract low-income residents — predictions came with the level of tact and subtlety you’d expect from a midwestern suburb that’s almost 90% white. A lot of people thought they’d have a tough time filling the place, which proved to be wrong. As the concrete structure grew, virtually nobody thought that Roger Lucas’s dream of a glorious luxury castle would be fulfilled.
People who knew the area well had another prediction: that The Castle would someday collapse.
Much of Grandville is built on swampy ground. Around twenty years ago, there was significant development a few miles south of the land where The Castle was eventually built. Wetland areas were cleared for a huge shopping mall and a new high school, and it didn’t take long for cracks to emerge. The northern parking structure at the mall buckles every few feet like rippling speed bumps, and the pool at the high school keeps leaking, needing frequent repairs. Families of ducks tread carefully across roads and parking lots to ponds that were incorporated into the landscaping.
The terrain by The Castle is even swampier. It was built on a convenient spot for developers: land they already owned, right by the highway. Grandville was originally settled a short distance downriver from Grand Rapids on the banks of the Grand, the largest river in the state of Michigan, to assure the safe passage of lumber along the bend of the river. The lowlands approaching that bend flood during the springtime, clusters of little ponds and fields of marsh grass deep in the woods. After it rains, the small plots of grass at the corners of The Castle grow sodden like paddies.
Across the river from The Castle, there’s a park system — Millennium Park — that’s built atop old gypsum mines. Gypsum, an ingredient in the creation of plaster, was one of Grand Rapids’s first industries, an extractive constellation ranging south of the city into what became the suburbs. One of the biggest mines in the area is located in Wyoming and was converted into a fallout shelter at the beginning of the atomic age. Most are hidden deep underground and have long been forgotten. Could the big mine system by the river ranged towards where The Castle now stands?
As the immensity of The Castle became more evident during the building process, people wondered whether that plot of earth was strong enough to support that much weight. I can’t help but be reminded of a hymn I sang growing up called My Hope is Built on Nothing Less: On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand. A lot of people wondered whether The Castle could be another Tower of Babel — a doomed monument to man’s hubris, cursed because of its gargantuan size.
Of course, there were other reasons why people thought The Castle could end in disaster. Fortunately, the risk of an earthquake is extremely low. I learned in elementary school that the Great Lakes sit atop a giant tectonic plate, far from any fault lines — a fact that was of some solace to me then and now.
I’ve heard some startling rumors and innuendo about the construction process, but I can only attest to what I know. The Castle was built by stacking massive concrete slats atop each other, which was a novel construction process for apartment housing. There are framed pictures of The Castle under construction on the eighth floor, and the slats look like a tower of cards. A project of this scale had never been attempted, especially not with concrete instead of steel as the main material. The seams of the building show the ends of some slats — they have tubes hollowed out of them.
When my cousin suggested that moving in could be a Potential Disaster Movie Experience, he was referring to some of the things we saw during the tour. The splintered wooden staircase in the middle of the library could have been a metaphor: cracked down the middle, supported by just two thin rods.
Everything looked like it was made with the cheapest possible materials — which makes sense, given the scale of the building. We saw signs of shoddy craftsmanship throughout the apartment: paint on the hardwood, flooring that didn’t quite line up right, misaligned handles on the closet doors, inexplicable little holes in the door frames. The metal rings on the front door’s handle rattle around. It’s all minor and superficial, things you might not notice unless you’re looking closely. Nothing I’ve seen inside The Castle’s doors has been that alarming from a structural standpoint, but the haphazardness of the building’s finishing touches makes you feel a little skeptical about its bones.
The parking garage makes you feel much more skeptical about those bones. The surface of the garage, at least on the northwest side, is splayed with hairline cracks that look like shattered glass. Some of them have already been filled with sealant. The entire structure is built atop a first floor of parking spaces, and the base of the garage is held up by white steel beams. Water seeps all the way through to the bottom from the third floor — the surface parking. Some of the cars on the ground floor have been seriously damaged by the dripping ceiling in the winter, a corrosive fluid of salt and oil that stains the paint and windows. It looks like the cars got bombarded by bird shit, and it doesn’t wash off.
And yet, I don’t feel unease or dread because of The Castle’s structural integrity — or possible lack thereof. My intuition tells me that I’m safe here and that the concrete will stand here for a long, long time. At the very least, any structural issues that may arise wouldn’t be enough to bring down the entire building. The odds of a spectacular collapse feel very low. That’s not to say that the place is entirely safe: at the end of winter, giant chunks of ice melt, slide off the roof, and fall several stories. They put out a few orange barrels to warn people.
I suppose that The Castle could fall apart someday. I think it’s more likely that, as some predicted, it will eventually be abandoned and destroyed with dynamite.
The most dangerous part of living at The Castle is quite banal: the only way in or out is an access road that meets a street with fast, nasty traffic, and there’s no stoplight at the intersection. If you’ve ever been in a serious car crash, you’ll know that lingering sense of peril I sometimes feel in front of The Castle. As you turn onto the property heading west on 28th Street, you’ll notice some debris in the road from various accidents that have taken place there; they usually clean up most of it, but the twinkling glass and little shards of metal and plastic are a reminder that The Castle sits on a busy, unforgiving road.
That’s rather boring, isn’t it? There aren’t any dragons or marauding armies besieging The Castle, nor is there a serious risk of a disaster movie collapse. It’s an apartment building in my hometown. For a few weeks, or maybe for a month, I felt some awe. When you’re driving towards Grand Rapids on I-196 and you get to the 28th Street / Wilson exit, The Castle is a spectacular sight — maybe even more spectacular because of how ineffably tacky it is. It may not be beautiful, but it is a spectacle.
But as the months have slid by, The Castle has somehow grown to feel normal. I spend most of my time in my apartment: working remotely, relaxing, watching TV, playing with my dog, and reading. The only windows in our unit face the courtyard, which is to say that all I can see is The Castle — the often dry stone fountain at the bottom, the library and the tower overhead. They’ve wheeled in some flowerbeds with vined trellises for the summer. When people visit for the first time, I tell them to walk through the front entrance and across the courtyard so they can see how much more massive, gray, and foreboding The Castle looks from the inside. There’s a sense of awe there.
I know all the ways in and out of The Castle now, and I usually take the side entrances. I don’t know what I expected when I decided to move here. If I thought that it would be an opportunity to craft a grand tale about an architectural experiment gone horribly wrong, I didn’t anticipate how ordinary the experience of living here would become. It isn’t a disaster movie. It might be a surreal short film cast in dull colors that chews on the tedium of life.
Maybe that’s why it’s been more difficult than I’d realized to tell stories about the place. Maybe there’s only so much that can be said about a big, stupid building. Maybe it’s just harder to see it all from up close.