The Eighth Floor
The vision that animated The Castle clearly had its flaws.
It’s much bigger than it should be. The sheer size of the building made it virtually impossible for the developers to avoid using cheap materials at scale. Had The Castle been built half as big, they could have finished the exterior instead of leaving exposed concrete. They could have found a more modern look for hallways and common areas than fluorescent lights, rough plaster walls, walnut baseboards, and the ubiquitous blue / brown / green patterned carpet. Even shoddy craftsmanship in the apartments could be explained by the logistics of carefully finishing that many units.
The Castle also suffers from a lack of coherence. It’s difficult to define its style because so many of its elements contrast with each other. The Castle could be described as unintentionally brutalist — vast gray rectangles, the power of concrete at a massive scale. However, as a castle and not an eastern bloc relic, medieval elements were important to the blueprint: two small, cylindrical towers with the classic square parapets framing the main entry gate, mismatched brick facades, and pointed peaks at corners of the roof. Those efforts at reproducing old world romanticism are comical at best and dystopian at worst. The result is a sort of mismatched postmodernism, tailored for the Rust Belt.
Maybe The Castle could be considered avant-garde neo-feudalism, built in America’s modern age of oligarchy by a developer who inherited control of an apartment complex empire.
Even as a residential property, The Castle isn’t really sure what it is. Grand Rapids suffers from a shortage of housing, much like many cities. In the beginning, The Castle was pitched as high-end, luxury living — and whether that intention was sincere or not, the price point for renting apartments is decidedly lower than other new construction in the area. It’s affordable for working class people. I’d expect that the median castle income is lower than the rest of Grandville. The penthouses up in the tower are a mystery: how many there are, who lives there, how much they cost, if they’re even finished.
When I expressed interest in renting an apartment, they told me that the studios and one-bedrooms were full. The campus of the fourth-largest university in Michigan, Grand Valley State, is split between exurban Allendale and the West Side of Grand Rapids, each an easy commute from The Castle. A lot of college-aged kids live here. For them, it’s a giant dorm.
The eighth floor is the dorm floor.
From above, The Castle is shaped like a rectangle with a line, the tower, jutting off one of the sides. Most of the building’s attractions are either outside — the pool, the playground, the dog park, and the “lakes” (old gravel pits) — or on the eighth floor, which is the tallest accessible floor outside of the tower. The eighth floor has both of the public roof overlooks, the game room, the lounge, and the library. The fitness center, with weight and cardio rooms, is on the third floor. Conference rooms are above them, on the fourth floor. The office, the coffeeshop, the courtyard, and a comfortable seating area at the base of the tower are on the second floor.
From the inside, not much differentiates each floor of the castle. The exact same hallways extend long distances: fluorescents overhead, little flickering orange lights on the walls, the same stale carpet, rough plaster, sloppily built baseboards. There are mirrors and framed photos of a different castle, without labels, in each of the tower elevator lobbies. While each floor may look the same, they smell perceptibly different. The smoking floors reek of cigarettes. One has a subtle umami aroma. Mine smells vaguely like a dairy product past its sell-by date.
The eighth floor is unique. It’s where the studio apartments are crammed together — two stories with a small, lofted area for a bed tucked in underneath the roof. The hallways have a low-hanging, ridged metal roof bearing the weight of those lofts, and the “torches” look more prominent relative to the fluorescents. Most of the doors have little welcome mats, ranging the spectrum of millennial and zoomer sensibilities. Even the carpet is different — dark blue with blotches of black.
Taking a left from the tower elevator brings visitors out to an overlook facing northwest. There’s a room at the end of the hallway. A few windows look north over a wheelchair ramp to the exit door, and a Grand Castle flag hangs above a long counter and a sink; exposed pipes run along the walls and above a large, aluminum air duct snaking several feet below the disjointed, angular ceiling. There’s no furniture inside. The doors out to the overlooks are locked for the season, but during warmer months, visitors would find a concrete patio with hairline cracks and deep gutters in front of the parapets. The northwest overlook has a variety of random outdoor furniture: white composite adirondacks and high chairs / tables, modern silver chairs around little metal tables.
The view is unfortunately dominated by the highway. To the north, you can see the playground, featuring a stubby gray castle of its own, and one of the “lakes” on the property, but the dog park is mostly blocked. The massive Citgo sign and parts of north Grandville (as well as the DeVos family’s old church, if you know where to look) appear south around the corner. From every angle on both overlooks, you can see the parking lot ringing The Castle.
It was built right to the east of the I-196 exit, a highway constructed during the postwar boom to connect Grand Rapids down the Lakeshore to I-94, the artery running from Chicago to Detroit through lower Michigan. It tracks the curve of the Grand River near Grandville. Even from The Castle roof, the Grand is obscured by the highway and river valley hills. The woods on those hills north of the river would make for a nicer view, especially bathed in golden light at dusk, had the highway — its inexorable white and blinking red lights coming and going — not been built in the foreground.
The corner of the patio has what can best be described as a hut. It’s an octagonal concrete room with a huge, blue tower — the same towers that look tiny from the highway below. Inside, there is some of the patio furniture, including a chair facing west through a window. The walls are made of metal with scribbled sharpie and some pale green padding. There’s no ceiling above, just a fractured lattice of random metal bars crossing the diameter and tapering towards the top.
From the first overlook, visitors can continue to the lounge. Before the coronavirus, people congregated there to watch football on a giant wall-mounted TV. Right now, the room stays empty. Felt West Elm chairs sit around odd tables — cold metal with the same rough texture as the walls, balanced on springs. There’s a standing banner featuring a picture of The Castle in the corner.
The room is bathed in a deep blue light, which amplifies the presence of strange lamps on the walls. No two are the same, and they illuminate the plaster: there are some with triangular patterns of blue lights, there’s one with short green lines, and a few multi-colored lights, one with a confounding red, blue, and green shamrock-like pattern. Like the room inside the overlook, the lounge has high, two-story ceilings; it also has an inexplicable door on the second story, inaccessible from the lounge itself, but leading to a small ledge that runs above the eighth floor hallway.
Up next on the tour is the library, a fascinating place that deserves its own special attention — a story for another day. After spending some time in the library, visitors would proceed towards the game room in the southeast corner.
That room is a mirror copy of the lounge, but there are normal lights and the walls are mustard instead of navy. There’s another door atop the ledge, and there are signs explaining a few rules for the game room. A nice table shuffleboard runs the length of the room. The centerpiece is a large black ping pong table, already a little worn though expensive-looking. But there are only a few arcade games: a tiny knockoff tabletop PacMan, a console displaying the choice of some obscure “arcade legends,” and a pinball machine that requires quarters to play — Black Knight Sword of Rage. Visitors would be well-advised to use some of the hand sanitizer outside the elevator in the game room.
The overlook on the northeast side of The Castle is last on the tour, and it too resembles the other side of the building. The bizarre room inside the building has the same aluminum air duct and exposed brass pipes, and another flag, counter, and sink. The dimensions aren’t exactly the same though; there’s a black leather L couch sitting in the corner and a ton of framed photographs sitting on the ground — all pictures of The Castle.
The northeast patio is bigger than the northwest, and there’s less furniture. The hut is bigger too, and has some cheap wooden paneling on the interior. The “lake” and the highway can still be seen looking north, but so too can a concrete plant and a gravel company. The view facing east is probably best: in front, there’s the other “lake” and some industrial-zoned areas behind it — my car mechanic hides behind some trees, and a company that builds construction signs sometimes fills its parking lot with tiny orange diamonds. What’s best is viewed at a distance, water towers poking up across Wyoming, Kentwood, and the Southside of Grand Rapids. As someone who knows the area well, I strain to trace familiar landmarks and routes from high on The Castle roof.
The modest skyline of downtown Grand Rapids can be seen in the distance to the northeast, to the left of a crane and a smokestack in the foreground. So too can The Castle be seen from the Varnum Building, the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, and the rest of those downtown buildings — a little gray and blue block with rusting scabland in front.