Howell's downtown won a national Main Street award

A few blocks of brick storefronts around an ornate Victorian courthouse don’t sound like national news. But in 2018 the people who run America’s downtown-revival program gave Howell their top honor. It named the city one of just three winners of the Great American Main Street Award that year. A national jury picks them, weighing how a small downtown brings itself back to life. Howell’s stretch of Grand River Avenue beat out plenty of bigger places to get it.

The judges look at the whole package. Filled storefronts. Restored historic buildings. A calendar of events that pulls people in, and the unglamorous money work behind it all. Howell had spent years on exactly that. At the center sits the 1890 Livingston County courthouse — red oak woodwork, marble floors, a clock tower — the anchor the rest of downtown grew up around.

The recognition kept coming. In 2024 a USA Today readers’ poll voted Howell the best main street in the country. That kind of contest leans on people who actually walk the sidewalks. The shops, the restaurants, the easy scale of a downtown you can cross on foot in a few minutes.

It adds up to a county seat that didn’t hollow out. A lot of them did, once the malls and the highways came. Come for the Melon Festival in August, or just on an ordinary Saturday. You’ll find the thing the awards are really about — old buildings that are full, lights that are on, and people with a reason to park the car and stay a while.