The Trail Is Beating the Food Hall on Godfrey Avenue

Ask anyone in Roosevelt Park what is happening at Factory Yards and you will get the same answer: apartments, a food hall, something about a parachute factory. It is the headline everyone in the neighborhood has been repeating for two years, and it is still mostly true on paper. What almost nobody mentions is the thing that is actually finished first, and it is not a restaurant. It is a trail.

By the time the leaves turn this fall, Roosevelt Park will have a paved, lit, non-motorized route running from the neighborhood straight into downtown Grand Rapids. That is a bigger daily-life change than a food hall that is still years from opening, and it is arriving on a schedule nobody has been talking about at the coffee counter.

Two Timelines, One Street

Godfrey Avenue is currently running two separate clocks, and mixing them up is how you end up disappointed.

Clock one is Factory Yards, the $147 million redevelopment of the old World War II era parachute factory site at 655 Godfrey Ave SW. The full plan calls for 467 apartment units, a 22,000-square-foot food hall, 31,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, and another 30,000 square feet of offices. It is a genuinely large project, and construction on the very first new building, a 25,000-square-foot build-to-suit office at 565 Godfrey, got underway earlier this year after financing delays pushed the timeline back from its original 2024 target. The food hall and the apartments are still further out. If you are waiting for that part of Godfrey to feel finished, you are waiting for something that is still mostly demolition and framing.

Clock two is everything else on that same stretch of road, and it is moving much faster. Two blocks from the construction fencing, small businesses have already opened their doors and are open for business right now.

What You Can Already Walk Into

This part of the story gets buried under Factory Yards headlines, but it is the part you can actually visit today.

• The Elevated Market, at 955 Godfrey Ave SW, opened its doors as a 25,000-square-foot vintage marketplace on June 25, selling clothing, décor, furniture, art, and jewelry, with free coffee for anyone who wanders in.
• Furn Grand Rapids, the woman-owned furniture showroom, relocated into an expanded space at 1035 Godfrey Ave SW back in April, trading up from its previous footprint.

Neither of these needed a state tax incentive or a brownfield plan to open. They just opened, on the same road where the big project is still measured in construction quarters rather than open-for-business dates. If your mental picture of Godfrey Avenue is still a row of vacant industrial buildings waiting on one big development, it is already out of date.

The Trail That Actually Changes Your Commute

Here is the part that deserves more attention than it has gotten. The Oxford Trail, a $9 million project led by Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. and the city's parks department, broke ground last September and is expected to open this fall. It extends the existing trail south from Oxford Street to Hall Street and Godfrey Avenue, rebuilding the older segment between Wealthy Street and Oxford Street along the way. City project manager Karie Enriquez described the goal plainly during a council committee meeting: the project is meant to connect the Black Hills and Roosevelt Park neighborhoods to each other and to downtown.

That is not a scenic upgrade. It is infrastructure. Once it opens, residents on the southwest side will have a dedicated, non-motorized path from their own neighborhood into the Grand River Greenway system, the same trail network that is meant to eventually run from Lowell all the way to Lake Michigan. The route runs directly past the Factory Yards site itself, which means the trail residents can use this fall will likely be finished before the food hall everyone is waiting on even breaks ground on its own building.

The new segment also connects to another piece of neighborhood investment that is easy to miss if you are only watching Godfrey Avenue: a $2.3 million public park at 680 Cesar E. Chavez Ave SW, backed by a coalition that includes Habitat for Humanity of Kent County, Grandville Avenue Arts & Humanities, and the Roosevelt Park Neighborhood Association. It broke ground in the spring of 2025, funded through a Michigan Enhancement Grant and the city's Parks Capital Fund, and has had well over a year to take shape since. Between the trail and the park, Roosevelt Park is getting two pieces of shared outdoor space that were built through public dollars and neighborhood partnerships, not private development capital, which is worth knowing if you have ever wondered who actually pays for this kind of thing.

Meanwhile, Down on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue

Godfrey Avenue is not the only street doing something different this year. A few blocks over, Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, the commercial corridor still known to many longtime residents by its former name, Grandville Avenue, is having its own quieter version of a moment.

This is where the neighborhood's food identity actually lives day to day. Tacos El Cuñado's second location, painted the same lime green as the original, keeps a steady lunch crowd on its patio. Rodriguez Supermarket remains the anchor for fresh produce and Mexican and Central American groceries. Sabor Latino serves daily plates a short walk away, and MudPenny café offers a change of pace for anyone craving a breakfast spin that is not a taco.

The Roosevelt Park Neighborhood Association has also been working on a quieter kind of change along this same corridor. Executive director Amy Brower has described a plan to narrow travel lanes and better define on-street parking, paired with new plantings.

"The goal is to slow traffic by narrowing the lanes and defining on-street parking," Brower said. "We're getting barriers with native plants and adding plenty of beautification to the area."

It is the kind of project that will not make headlines the way a $147 million redevelopment does, but if you drive Cesar E. Chavez Avenue every day, you will notice it before you notice almost anything happening over on Godfrey.

What to Watch For Before Snow Flies

If you live in Roosevelt Park, here is the realistic order of what actually shows up between now and winter, based on what is already funded and under construction rather than what is still on a rendering.

The Oxford Trail should open sometime this fall, giving the neighborhood its first dedicated non-motorized connection to downtown. Roosevelt Park Day returns with its Taste of the Trucks lineup, a beer garden, food trucks, and live music, with vendor applications due by early September. Framing should keep climbing on the first new Factory Yards building at 565 Godfrey, the build-to-suit office space that broke ground earlier this year, though it is not the food hall or apartments most people picture when they hear the project's name. And the lane-narrowing work on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue continues as part of the neighborhood association's longer beautification push.

None of this changes the basic math on Factory Yards. The apartments and the food hall are still real, still funded through a $103 million brownfield incentive, and still coming. They are just not the thing that changes your Tuesday commute this year. The trail is.

If you are watching this neighborhood shift block by block and want to talk through what any of it might mean for your own plans, whether you already live here or you are weighing a move into Roosevelt Park, Welcome Home West Michigan is happy to walk through it with you. Book a Consultation whenever you are ready to talk specifics.