The Library
Most of the amenities at The Castle are typical for modern apartment complexes. Stone European castles may not have a pool, a bike storage room, a dog park, exercise rooms with cardio and weight machines, or a coffee shop, but this concrete American castle does. The pandemic has limited some things: rather than running on a treadmill on the third floor, where I see unmasked people working out, I jog laps around The Castle in the cold.
I find myself often glancing up at it as I run. Down the long exterior wall of the parking garage, around the base of the fifteen-story tower and the freight entrance of The Castle, back along the wall of the garage on the other side, and then up the hill in front of the brick facades, through the roundabout at the entrance, and back down the hill. As a kid, I learned about the Fall of Jericho in the Book of Joshua — how a little army brought down a great fortress by marching around it several times. Sometimes I think about that as I run. Each lap is roughly a third of a mile.
Even from up close, The Castle looks like a prison. The walls along the East and West sides of the structure are indeed cut with a square pattern, adorned by fake torches, and covered with ivy. The vibe is still decidedly sinister. The tower looms, and floodlights peer down from the rooftops at night. A concrete structure that massive couldn’t possibly be beautiful — but it does look better under snow.
The Castle has started to feel like home. I moved in towards the end of October, so I’ve lived here for a few months: time spent decorating, buying little pieces of furniture, constantly rearranging my houseplants, slowly building my apartment into a nice place to live. I’ve tried to find tasteful artwork. The couch and the cocktail table I ordered in December should be arriving by April. The unit itself is a good living space, especially for the price: high ceilings, a spacious master bath and walk-in closet, in-unit washer / dryer, and a solid kitchen. I’ve already made some fond memories here. I feel pretty comfortable.
A large, black IKEA bookshelf sits near the window in my living room. It’s almost full, room for just a few more books. My modest collection has become one of my most cherished possessions. I have a lot of literary fiction, short story anthologies, leather-bound volumes of my late grandfather’s journals, a tasteful selection of basketball books, a little bit of theory here and there, books about the state of Michigan, some old textbooks, random titles that I picked up wandering through bookstores. Together, they offer a very abstract composite of my experience and interests. I’ve dreamt of eventually accumulating enough books to have a small library of my own someday.
The Castle does have a few amenities that aren’t typical for normal apartment complexes — although the gravel pit “lakes” to the north and east of the property hardly constitute a moat. The courtyard at the center of the structure is dull and plain. The most unique feature of The Castle, in terms of the resident experience, is the library.
In a previous post, I wrote about the eighth floor of the building — but my tour proceeded quickly through the library without a sidelong glance. It’s a place that deserves a much closer look.
From an architectural standpoint, the library itself isn’t especially prominent, even though it’s high above the front entrance of the complex. The tower’s much taller than the library, and it’s easier to notice the tiny lion between the asymmetric parapets than the two-story library, a triangle of blue metal above the entry gate. At night, it stands out more, the soft yellow light in its broad windows contrasting with the sharp whiteness of the exterior lights. The library has big windows facing in each direction: north towards the courtyard and the tower, south towards Grandville.
It’s a strange room. The walls, the shelves, and the high ceiling (there are sometimes a few stray mylar balloons at the apex) are all made of the same cheap walnut-colored wood. The same bright dot-shaped lights in the ceilings of the apartments light up the library from the walls. Above the windows on the second floor, there are huge square spaces — a space for murals, perhaps? — but they’re blank. When I first saw The Castle, the shelves were almost empty. The property manager told me that a big donation from a local charity was going to fill the library. (They also mentioned that some residents had gotten married in the library before the pandemic). By the time I moved in, used books lined many of the shelves. There’s no system for checking them out; residents can take them as they please. A resident named Bernice works as a volunteer librarian.
The library has two staircases. A utilitarian flight of metal steps in front of the courtyard windows leads to the second floor, but the centerpiece of the room is an arch of two curved, wooden stairways that meet at the top. It was meant to resemble the staircase from Beauty and the Beast. There are little placards near the base of each that say they’re For Decorative Purposes Only. People are not supposed to use those stairs. Most of the weight is supported by two thin wooden rods, one of which is beginning to split at the screw down the middle. The platform at the top is cracked in half. It’s structurally unsound. The stairs aren’t cordoned off, and the warnings are easy to miss. It seems inevitable that they’ll collapse under the weight of someone, someday.
Underneath those stairs there’s a heavy wooden bench, an uncomfortable piece of furniture made of warped logs fused together. The shelves surrounding the janky staircase on the first floor are filled with fiction — a lot of John Grisham and Karen Kingsbury. Most of them are well-worn paperbacks.
In the middle of the room, there’s a large framed photograph of Neuschwanstein, the inspiration for the Grand Castle. There are superficial similarities between the two: little lion statues, brick walls at the entry gate, blue roofs. From a structural perspective, they’re completely different. The Alpine foothills look a lot different than 28th Street in Grandville too.
There’s a bathroom in the library opposite a closet filled with pipes. I’ve never used it. Past the restroom, to the left, there’s a banner listing The Castle’s sponsors. The top tier includes Land and Co., which funded and manages The Castle, and a local credit union; the second tier features WCET-TV, the public access channel for Grandville / Jenison / Hudsonville, and Engels Jewelry Company, owned by a family from First Reformed, the church I grew up in; at the bottom, Marge’s Donut Den, Brann’s Steakhouse, the Y. Behind that is another banner, a bigger one, with a picture of The Castle and its logo, captioned The Grand Castle / Grandville, Michigan.
Underneath the functional steel staircase is some nice, modern black leather furniture — two chairs and a couch — as well as a glass coffee table. The section of the library for kids is underneath the stairs. There are picture books on the floor, and a small, ragtag collection ranging from popular contemporary youth fiction to books that are generations old.
There’s a row of framed 4 x 6 photographs on the top shelves above the kids section. Most of them are pictures of the man who built The Castle, and they all have captions: Roger Lucas with the building designs, Roger Lucas on local TV stations, Roger Lucas with the mayor, Roger Lucas chatting with a reporter on a huge, empty dirt lot, Roger Lucas in a recording studio for an interview. In a few of the pictures, he’s pointing — over at unfinished concrete slats, down at a wad of blueprints that look like paper towels bound by shrink wrap.
Some of the pictures don’t include Lucas; one is an early artist’s rendering that looks much more regal than the building wound up being, a few are shots from distance of the bones of The Castle under construction. In the interviews pictured, Lucas made a lot of magnificent claims that never materialized, including stables for miniature horses and a huge marble sculpture in the middle of the courtyard. But he did build the library.
Each step up the metal staircase to the second floor of the library brings a loud clang. At the top of those stairs, visitors and residents can find the best public view of the courtyard and tower. I can see into my apartment at night if the blinds aren’t drawn. From the library, everything is the same concrete color. The courtyard is a square cut into a bigger square. Everything’s covered in snow right now, including the cement fountain at the bottom, and footsteps trace the path across the courtyard and around the middle from the tower to the entrance.
Looking at the tower from the library does make the structure feel like a castle — though maybe not in the whimsical fairytale style of Neuschwanstein. Rather, it’s imposing, powerful, foreboding.
The windows to the courtyard and the tower are at the back of the room, near the stairs. The roof makes a steep angle and has pipes for sprinklers running along the plain wood to the top. The walls above the shelves have indirect light projected towards the ceiling, and there are little gold lion heads underneath the sprinklers and support beams. There are chairs underneath each of the windows. Some of the space is open to the first floor below, but there’s a platform in the middle of the room. Four very comfortable couches face the center — room enough for three people each, overstuffed, rich brown leather in an indulgent, traditional style.
The selection of books is more interesting, though sparser, on the second floor. The fiction downstairs is crammed onto uniform shelves. Each non-fiction section looks different. There’s odd space between the shelves, inexplicable gaps, as if they’d all been built separately. Above, there are a lot of large framed prints sitting on the shelves — basic artwork of dogs and deer and snow-covered landscapes, possibly bought in bulk.
The East wall has an eclectic collection of randomly arranged biographies; there are a few shelves of old travel books, including a once expensive book commemorating Grand Rapids, its history and economy, commissioned by the chamber of commerce in the mid-eighties; the biggest section on that wall is labeled self-help and ranges from standardized testing aids to parenting guides; there’s a small section of politics with a Karl Rove and Glenn Beck hardcover milieu; there are a few books about gardening, even though there’s nowhere for residents to garden at The Castle. Around Christmas, I grabbed one of a few Reader’s Digest guides titled Success With House Plants, released in 1979.
The West wall features what’s labeled as Christian Literature, a generalized mix of theological tracts, religious history, apologetics, guides to an ethical life, and fiction oriented around religion. That section takes up over half the wall. Local Christian publishers produce West Michigan’s greatest cultural export, an ecosystem of explicitly theological media consumed by evangelicals. A few books in the library may have been originally sold at Kregel’s, a Christian bookstore near Wilson and Chicago Drive where I used to get VeggieTales tapes as a kid.
The rest of the West wall covers a wide range with a limited selection: a bit of history, mostly about World War Two, a couple shelves under the broad category of science, a dated selection of cookbooks, a few dozen books about sports, and a couple of leather-bound encyclopedia sets. A lot of the books have stamps indicating that they were donated by a charity and not to be resold. The library feels like a place to hunt for antiques: a lot of old stuff that would probably be considered useless by most, with a few treasures hearkening back to a past age hiding on the shelves.
The library is my favorite place in The Castle, besides my apartment.
I like to walk the few flights of concrete stairs to get to the eighth floor and make my way to the library to relax for a while. I usually bring a book of my own; I usually don’t bring my phone. My favorite chair sits in the corner on the second floor, facing south towards Grandville. There’s usually never anyone else up there. I enjoy the solitude, a reprieve from the screens in my apartment, reading uninterrupted, and gazing out over my hometown, especially beautiful from above this time of year.
The library faces the entry boulevard to The Castle, a divided roadway with flickering lamps and sunflower plots in the median. It was built at a slight angle. Traffic flows horizontally on 28th Street, but the eye is drawn down Ottawa Street, which extends past 28th and through a few other notable East-West roads before it ends at Buck Creek. On Ottawa, there’s a small industrial lot, a diesel mechanic who made once headlines for proclaiming that he wouldn’t serve gay customers, the railroad tracks, and the red Grandville Public Schools administration building. Children in Grandville were educated there for almost a century. My grandfather played basketball in its gym for Wyoming Park, Grandville’s then rival, and I was among the last students to walk its halls — most of it was torn down after the Class of 2011 finished sixth grade.
Since the trees are bare in the winter, it’s easier to see further south, to pick up cars traveling different routes through Grandville, and to glimpse the rooftops of houses further south. The Castle is at the north end of a blue collar neighborhood, some of the oldest remaining housing in the city. There are small traces of a grand, characteristically Midwestern style — some symmetrical two story homes with wide front porches facing the street.
To the left, far on the horizon, you can see the new hospital in Wyoming down near M-6 and the big white water tower on Gezon Parkway.
To the right, there are two tiny water towers in the foreground, one of which is emblazoned with Grandville Center. Indeed, it used to mark the center of the city, its old heart, before Grandville sprawled south. The library looks out over downtown, and I can pick out Kregel’s if I focus closely enough. The biggest, most prominent building on the landscape is First Reformed, just behind the water towers: orange brick, pale green roofs, and flat triangles. I spent my childhood wandering through that church. It’s the oldest congregation of Dutchmen in Grandville.
There’s a bell tower that rises out of the middle of the church four stories above the ground, marking the hour and ringing out hymns on Sunday mornings. I loved exploring the building as a kid — it evolved over the course of generations — but I never went up in the bell tower. For a long time, it was the tallest point in Grandville.
The Castle is much taller.