Why Every New Business in Hudsonville Keeps Choosing the Same Half-Mile
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
"It just had a bunch of old car lots and little commercial buildings."
That is how Kong Khammanivong, owner of Rock n' Thai, remembers driving through Hudsonville before the city changed course. He has watched the stretch along Chicago Drive turn from a pass-through into a place people actually stop, and this year the turning kept going. Huddy's ice cream shop cut the ribbon on Harvey Street in April. New Holland Brewing announced its Pinwheel Kitchen concept is coming to Terra Square this fall. Both openings land on the same half-mile of the city, and that is not a coincidence. It is the second wave of a bet Hudsonville made almost a decade ago, before a single business had agreed to move in.
Most downtowns grow because businesses show up first and infrastructure catches up later. Hudsonville did it backward. City leaders bonded five million dollars to acquire a distressed stretch of Chicago Drive, tear out an old auto showroom footprint, and build a walkable core before there were any storefronts to fill it. The centerpiece was Harvey Street, redesigned as what planners call a woonerf, a Dutch term for a shared street that treats pedestrians as the priority rather than an afterthought to car traffic. The city extended Harvey Street east until it connected with Terra Square, its farmers market and event center, and converted the western stretch to the same pedestrian-first design.
That is an unusual amount of risk for a small city to take on without a tenant lined up. It is also why the businesses that eventually arrived clustered so tightly around this one corridor instead of spreading out along the older commercial strip.
The Hudson Center building on Harvey Street was the proof of concept. Zeeland-based Geerlings Development put up a three-story, 25,000-square-foot building, and the ground floor filled with Wing Doozy, Dorados Mexican Grill and Bar, and 317 Coffee, with the women's boutique Lou + Marie moving in next door. Those openings gave the city its first real read on whether people would actually use a street built for walking instead of driving through. They did, and the momentum never fully stopped.
Almost a decade after the first shovel went into that old car lot, the corridor is filling in again. Huddy's opened its doors on April 22 at 5340 Plaza Ave, a locally owned ice cream shop serving Hudsonville Ice Cream, the same brand local farmers began crafting in the city back in 1926 before the company's operations moved to Holland. The shop's co-owner, Matt Van Woerkom, also sits on the city's Downtown Development Authority board, which means the person championing Harvey Street's growth from a civic seat is also the one who opened a storefront on it.
A few months later, New Holland Brewing announced that its Pinwheel Kitchen concept, a fast-casual spinoff built around the brewery's best-selling pizza pinwheels, is coming to Terra Square at 3380 Chicago Drive this fall. It will be the concept's second West Michigan location. An exact opening date has not been announced, but construction is underway and the company says updates will follow as the build-out finishes.
That is two more storefronts choosing the same corridor the city seeded years ago, rather than the older stretch of Chicago Drive where Hudsonville's business district has existed since the 1950s.
The older commercial strip along Chicago Drive grew up as a highway corridor, back when it served as the main north-south route between West Michigan and Indiana. That history left a pattern of detached, single-story buildings built for cars passing through, not people stopping to stay. Khammanivong has run Rock n' Thai through the years the city spent trying to change that identity, and his read on the shift lines up with what city leadership has said publicly: the goal was never to compete with a mall, it was to give people a reason to stay in one place instead of racing off to find gathering space somewhere else.
That history matters for anyone trying to read where Hudsonville's growth is actually headed. The new restaurant and retail openings are not distributing evenly across the city. They are stacking onto the one corridor the city deliberately engineered for foot traffic, while the older stretch of Chicago Drive continues to function largely as it always has.
The clearest sign that this corridor works is not the restaurant openings. It is who is moving in to live there. Prospect Flats, a residential development just off the downtown core, brought 41 units online by pairing a previously blighted building site with vacant city and Downtown Development Authority parcels nearby. The development is nearing full occupancy, which is the kind of demand signal that is harder to fake than a ribbon cutting. People are not just visiting this half-mile for ice cream and pinwheels. Some of them are choosing to live inside walking distance of it.
Business View Magazine spotlighted Hudsonville this year as a model for how small cities can approach downtown growth, pointing to the two completed three-story mixed-use buildings on Harvey Street and a larger, roughly $35 million multi-building development already underway nearby. The city has also picked up a Michigan Municipal League Community Excellence Award for the effort. Awards and magazine features do not build a downtown, but they are a useful outside check on a claim that could otherwise sound like civic boosterism. An engineering firm building a pedestrian street is one thing. A national business publication holding it up as a template for other cities is a different kind of validation, and it lines up with what has actually filled in along that corridor over the past several years.
If you already live in Hudsonville, the practical takeaway is simple: the newest, most walkable version of the city keeps showing up on Harvey Street and inside Terra Square, not scattered across the older commercial stretch. That is where Huddy's is scooping ice cream, where Pinwheel Kitchen is under construction, and where the existing Hudson Center tenants have had years to build a regular following. It is a small enough footprint that you can genuinely walk it end to end, which is exactly what the woonerf design was built to encourage.
The city's fall and holiday calendar, including the seasonal events that run through Terra Square, tends to draw people to that same stretch, so keeping an eye on Harvey Street is a reasonable way to catch whatever opens next before it shows up everywhere else. You can browse more on what makes Hudsonville tick, including how the community's fall calendar fills in around this same downtown core.
If you want to talk about what downtown Hudsonville's growth might mean for your own corner of the city, Lindsey Eppink is always up for that conversation, maybe over a cone at Huddy's.
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