Wyoming, Michigan: a New York name and the 28th Street strip

Wyoming, Michigan, has nothing to do with the western state. It’s named for Wyoming County, New York, which the area’s early settlers carried west with them — a transplanted name for a transplanted crowd. For a long stretch it stayed exactly what the name suggests: farm country, organized as Wyoming Township, just southwest of Grand Rapids.

Then the postwar years filled it in with factories and subdivisions, and in 1959 the township became the City of Wyoming. Its growth ran in a straight line — literally — along 28th Street, the wide commercial road that turned into one of West Michigan’s busiest shopping strips.

The most famous thing that strip ever held is gone now, but it’s worth remembering. Studio 28 opened on Christmas Day in 1965, the work of Grand Rapids cinema operator Jack Loeks. It started as a single enormous auditorium and just kept adding screens until it hit 20 — for a time it was billed as one of the largest movie theaters in the world, a megaplex before the word existed. Falling ticket sales finally closed it in 2008, and the building came down in 2014. There’s a strip mall where the marquee used to be.

Wyoming is about as clean a case study as you’ll find in how metro Grand Rapids spread out after the war: a farming township that grew into a city around a car-friendly retail corridor, one parking lot at a time. If you live there, the 28th Street story is the story of how your whole town took its shape.