Purple — 601 Michigan

Purple is a mixed-use building at 555 Michigan Street NE in downtown Grand Rapids, completed on August 1, 2016. The building holds 2,400 square feet of commercial space — occupied by Walgreens Pharmacy on the ground floor — plus 8 residential units above. Together with its companion building Orange, Purple was designed to activate a vacant block on Michigan Street while supporting future neighborhood business.

The development meaningfully upgraded the streetscape: curb and biking cuts, new walks, new trees, and landscaped areas, all delivered as part of the same $7.1 million construction package that delivered Purple and Orange together. The Walgreens lease at Purple brought five new jobs to the corridor on day one.

Purple and Orange are part of the broader Mid Towne Village master development that anchors Third Coast Development’s footprint on Michigan Street. Both buildings continue to demonstrate the firm’s preferred approach to vacant urban blocks: build the right two-or-three-story scale, get a meaningful ground-floor tenant signed before delivery, and use the project to seed a longer redevelopment story for the surrounding parcels.