Walk 8th Street on a Saturday morning right now and you will find a line out the door of a restaurant that did not exist earlier this year. Shore by deBoer, the deBoer family's new breakfast and lunch spot, took over the old Jackie's Place space, and the line has already become part of the block's rhythm. Keep walking west, past the shops and the beer garden noise from whatever band is warming up for Thursday's Street Performer Series, and eventually the sidewalks run out. Not gradually. They just stop, and Lake Macatawa is still not visible from where you're standing.
That gap is not an accident of geography. It's the actual subject of this post, because the city just admitted, out loud, that downtown Holland and its own waterfront have never really been connected, and it's trying to fix that for the first time in decades.
The Restaurants Are Turning Over, Not Multiplying
The easy story about downtown Holland this year is that it's growing. That's not quite what's happening. Look closely at what's opening and you'll notice almost none of it is new construction. It's old spaces getting new operators.
Shore by deBoer is the clearest example. The deBoer family has run a bakery in Holland since 1956, and the new restaurant is a fourth-generation project, with a fifth generation already learning the trade behind the counter. Right now it's breakfast and lunch only, Tuesday through Saturday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., no reservations yet and no alcohol yet, though that's expected to change soon.
A few blocks over, Tulip City Bar & Grill spent almost two years and more than $850,000 rebuilding the space that used to be Tulip City Brewstillery on West 17th Street. The new owners, a father-and-son team named Carlos Mendoza and Carlos Mendoza Jr., expanded the footprint from about 5,500 square feet to 8,500 and shifted the whole concept away from in-house brewing toward a full-service Mexican-American fusion menu. It finally opened in February after enough delayed timelines that neighborhood Facebook groups had turned "any updates?" into a running joke.
The one true newcomer is Playa Bowls, which opened on West 9th Street earlier this year, bringing the acai-bowl chain's surf-shop aesthetic to a stretch of downtown that had nothing like it before.
None of this reads as a downtown running out of room. It reads as a downtown cycling through its own real estate, replacing tired concepts with better-capitalized ones in the same footprint. That's a healthier signal than pure growth, because it means demand is strong enough to justify a $850,000 gut renovation rather than a developer just building something new on the edge of town.
Two Blocks That Might as Well Be Two Miles
Here's the part that doesn't show up in a restaurant roundup. All of that energy, the lines, the renovations, the new patios, sits on the commercial side of downtown. None of it touches the water Holland is named for.
Window on the Waterfront, the 1.3-mile path locals call "WOW," is the closest thing downtown has to a waterfront connector. It runs along the Macatawa River marsh, past views of the De Zwaan windmill on Windmill Island, and it's a genuinely pleasant walk. But it dead-ends at Central Avenue near 3rd Street, right by the water reclamation facility. It doesn't connect to Kollen Park. It doesn't connect to the boat launch. It doesn't get you to Lake Macatawa itself. It's a nice loop that goes nowhere near the actual lake.
Linda Hart, executive director of the Holland Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the quiet part out loud in a July interview about the city's newest waterfront proposal:
"We always consider the civic center or the farmer's market to be our west end book end of our downtown."
Read that carefully. The farmers market and civic center, both well inland from the water, are the west end of downtown. The lake itself isn't even in the sentence. That's not a slip. It's how Holland has organized itself for years: a commercial core that faces inward, and a waterfront that functions as a separate destination people drive to rather than walk to.
The Plan That's Finally Trying to Close the Gap
What makes this the right year to write about the gap is that the city is actively trying to close it. Voters approved a land swap back in May 2023 that would relocate the Verplank Dock Company's operations to the site of the former James De Young power plant, freeing up the original Verplank site along Lake Macatawa for redevelopment. The proposal moving forward now would put a marina, shops, restaurants, and residential housing on that reclaimed shoreline, with the explicit goal, according to the city, of connecting downtown to Kollen Park and the lake in a way it currently doesn't.
There's a second thread in that same story that tells you how long this disconnect has existed. Holland used to host Great Lakes cruise ships docking directly in town. It lost that business to Muskegon roughly a decade ago. This year, one ship has started anchoring in Lake Macatawa again, though it still can't dock, and visitors get bused in from Muskegon instead. Hart put a number on what even that partial return is worth: seven cruise ship visits this year generated close to $360,000 in economic impact for Holland, without a single ship actually docking at the town it's visiting.
That's the whole pattern in one detail. The demand for a downtown-to-water connection is real and it's worth real money. The infrastructure to deliver it just isn't built yet. The Verplank/De Young project is the first plan with actual land, an actual vote behind it, and an actual timeline aimed at fixing that, rather than another trail segment or another restaurant a few blocks further from the shore.
If You're Timing Your Fall Around Downtown
None of this means downtown is quiet in the meantime. The next ten weeks are dense with the kind of small, recurring events that make a place feel lived-in rather than visited.
- The Gentex Street Performer Series is still running Thursday nights through the rest of summer, right on 8th Street.
- The Holland Farmers Market runs twice weekly through early December, so it outlasts the warm weather by a wide margin.
- Windmill Island Gardens hosts its Art on the Island Gala on Thursday, September 4, from 6 to 8 p.m., with local artists' work displayed and sold across the gardens.
- The next De Tuin Klas gardening class, "Branching Out," runs September 17 in partnership with MSU Extension, covering how to select a tree at the nursery, plant it, and care for it afterward.
- Fall Fest takes over 8th Street in mid-October, run jointly by the Farmers Market, Tulip Time, and Windmill Island Gardens, with professional pumpkin carvers, a community tulip planting, and hayrides.
Notice that almost every one of these lives on the inland side of downtown too. The gardens, the market, the street performers, the gala. The lake still isn't the anchor for any of it. That's the same pattern showing up again, just in calendar form instead of in a redevelopment plan.
What This Actually Adds Up To
Downtown Holland doesn't need more restaurants to prove it's healthy. The turnover on 8th Street already proves that. What it's been missing is a physical reason for that energy to walk the last two blocks to the water, and for the first time, the city has a voter-approved plan aimed at building one. Whether the Verplank site delivers a marina and shoreline restaurants that actually get used, or ends up as another slow-moving civic project, is worth watching if you already call this town home. It's the rare local story where the ending isn't obvious yet.
If you're paying attention to how this waterfront takes shape, whether that means the Verplank redevelopment, a future dock for the cruise ships now anchoring offshore, or the next stretch of trail that finally reaches the lake, Cottage Home Realty keeps a close eye on what's changing along the West Michigan shoreline. Begin your lakeshore home journey whenever you're ready to talk about what any of this means for your own piece of it.
