The South Shore of Lake Macatawa: the Village, the Drive, and Central Park

This is an area guide within the guide to living on Lake Macatawa. Everything below traces to the City of Holland's own pages, Park Township's master plan, and a state historical marker; where a name belongs to a private project rather than a place, the page says so.

One Shore, Several Places

Reading west from downtown: the city's shoreline parks and the South Shore Village district come first, then the residential streets along South Shore Drive, then the Central Park neighborhood, and finally Park Township's Southside, which carries the shore to the Ottawa County line at West 32nd Street and on toward Macatawa Park at the peninsula, covered in a guide of its own. One more name floats through search results: South Shore on Macatawa, which is not a neighborhood but a waterfront development the city's planning page lists among the area's recent projects. Knowing which name is a place, which is a district, and which is a project is half of understanding this side of the lake.

South Shore Village, the City's Lakeside District

The Village is the organized heart of the city's south shore. Holland designated it a Business Improvement District in 2015, and since then the city, the district's property and business owners, and the State have funded the streetscape and pedestrian promenade work the city describes as a great success. The planning history runs deeper, from a district enhancement study in 2005 to neighborhood open houses in 2022 feeding a current area plan, and the city's own planning page measures the change by its recent arrivals, naming the Heinz Waterfront Walkway, South Shore on Macatawa, and deBoer's Bakkerij. For a buyer, the takeaway is simpler: this end of the shore has an organized district with public investment behind it, and the paper trail is on the city's site.

Kollen Park and the Heinz Walkway

The city's waterfront centerpiece arrived as a gift: Martha Diekema Kollen gave the land to Holland on February 12, 1921, in memory of her husband George E. Kollen, and the park built out through the late 1920s now covers more than 24 acres at the end of Kollen Park Drive. Its trademarks are quietly international, a fountain donated by Queretaro, Mexico, and a Dutch immigrant sculpture from the Netherlands, and its shoreline keeps going past the park's edge: 4,000 lineal feet of boardwalk run west on a perpetual easement granted by the H.J. Heinz Company, with the city's facility page noting room in the easement for 2,000 more. The city boat launch operates here too, with details and season in the launches and marinas guide.

Central Park, Once Called Saint's Rest

Keep west and the shore turns to the lake's oldest kind of neighborhood. Central Park began in the late nineteenth century as a summer cottage colony on what was still Black Lake, filled by vacationers arriving on the rail and interurban lines that tied this coast to Chicago and Grand Rapids. The state marker at Grove Avenue and Lakeview Drive preserves its founding texture: John R. Stryker hosting worship on his porch until the interdenominational chapel went up in 1903, built under medical missionary Dr. John A. Otte on land Gerrit Zaalmink donated, with early services in Dutch as well as English. So many ministers summered here that the marker records the colony's nickname, Saint's Rest. The chapel still stands, its gable sign still promising summer services, and the cottage-colony grain is still legible in the streets around it.

West Into the Township

Past the city, the shore belongs to Park Township's Southside, and the township's master plan describes its own territory with unusual candor: small inland neighborhoods and large homes on the Macatawa shore, older resort-era streets whose small houses and big trees lend an almost rural feel, and a modest commercial corridor on 160th Avenue amounting to a restaurant and a party store. The plan even names the area's structural quirk, that it sits disjointed from the rest of the township, reached by crossing the lake through the city. Public assets thicken here: Virginia Park and Woods on Harrington Avenue, the township's South Side Kayak and Boat Launch at 1671 South Shore Drive, and the Trust-Fund-backed lakefront improvements the plan calls South Shore Community Landing, with a universally accessible kayak launch, green space, and benches. Boating rules along this shore are the lake-wide bands mapped in the no-wake rules guide.

Living on the South Shore

The buying questions sort by place. Near the Village, the questions are urban ones, what the district's plan intends and what the paper trail at city hall shows. In Central Park and the township's resort-era streets, they are cottage questions, the winter-readiness homework the year-round living guide lays out. Everywhere on this shore, the water words in a listing deserve the document-chasing habit from the lakefront vs waterfront guide, all the more where a development's brand and a district's name sound alike. For the lake those addresses share, start at the Lake Macatawa living guide.

Common Questions