Skip to main content

Rumors Behind The Grand Castle Are...A Huge Nothingburger?

The internet is great for a lot of things.  It allows the collective experience of humanity to be recorded and saved for posterity.  It allows collaboration and sharing thoughts across borders and across oceans.  It allows fact-checking, and corroboration of rumors.  Unfortunately, it also allows the dissemination of fake news, vigilante justice, false hype, and some of the worst misinformation grifts humanity has ever seen.  I used public records, freely available on the internet, for the vast majority of the research on this post.

The famous Grand Castle in Grandville, Michigan, is polarizing.  It's unique, sure, but some consider it to be an eyesore.  It's certainly a distinctive bit of architecture.  And, because it's so weird, a lot of rumors have sprung up about it.

There are entire threads of rumors that have been brought up on the Grand Rapids Subreddit, ranging from accusations of money laundering, to political grift, to covering up structural inspections.  And, it's weird, don't get me wrong, but as I've dug into this article, I couldn't find any distinctive or alarming weirdness.  Everything I've found has been pretty standard boilerplate, late-stage capitalist corporate shell games (for tax purposes and stuff).

About the shadiest thing I've found was that the architect behind the building passed in 2021, and is still listed as director of one of the LLCs involved in the project.  That can be explained away as a paperwork error.  Having worked in construction myself, I've been contacted months and years later by contractors asking for information on specific jobs...like, homie, I don't work there anymore.  It's not that unusual to have incorrect contact information on jobs like this.

The rumor that the project went nearly 100% over budget, and that the owner of the castle also owned the precast concrete company (therefore, the owner was paying himself via investors...which is embezzlement...which is a crime) seems to stem from the fact that the company who owns the Grand Castle has a main office in an industrial park that shares an address with a precast concrete company.

Accusations of grift seem to stem from one of the directors of Land & Co being "politically connected," according to a local paper.  His wife is Terri Lynn Land, former Michigan Secretary of State.

While everything seems fishy on an idealistic, superficial level (you know, like how the average Redditor looks at everything)...this is how business is done.  This is how projects get financed, started, and completed.  There are reasons the wealthiest people among us throw their assets around in various LLCs - it benefits them by minimizing their taxable assets (and they can pay accountants to pistol-whip their income statements and balance sheets into shape).  I'm cognizant enough to recognize that these things happen all around me, but I'm also aware of the fact that I'm not smart enough to do this for myself.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Eddie Bentz Bank Robbery

Prohibition is one of the most storied periods in American history. Urban myths and legends abound nationwide, with tales of folk heroes like Al Capone, Babyface Nelson, and John Dillinger. Tall tales are woven around organized crime, wild bootleggers, underground saloons, and well-dressed gangsters. There's something uniquely American about the DIY ethos of taking matters into your own hands, making illegal alcohol, and selling it through clandestine channels; stickin' it to the man like those in the illegal alcohol industry did. These stories are immortalized in movies like The Road To Perdition and Public Enemies, as well as TV series like HBO's Boardwalk Empire and, well, PBS's Prohibition. Many lakeshore towns in Western Michigan have tales of organized crime and bootlegging. Easy access to Lake Michigan meant that bootleggers had easy access to boat routes, safely out of reach of authorities. Booze was funneled in from Canada, then taken by boat to cities all aro...
Post a Comment
Read more

XFinity Sucks. Or, Why I'm Excited For Holland BPW Fiber To Come Through Our Neighborhood

 The whole thing started in October - we hit the data cap for our XFinity plan in 2 or 3 days. I didn't know we had a data cap on our XFinity plan, so I was befuddled. Problem is, you can't just call XFinity, you must escalate your ticket up their chain of command: Start with their AI chatbot, escalate to a human typing on the other end of the chatroom, get transferred to an AI phone operator, escalate that to any number of human phone operators. Somewhere in that initial escalation, they discovered that we weren't on an actual plan from them, and the services we had weren't even offered by them anymore - our account had slipped through the cracks. Their "solution" to the massive data leak was to give sell us the premium tier service with no data cap...which didn't actually solve anything, it just passed the buck down the road. By October 6 or 7, we had blown through another terrabyte of data, so I reached out to Customer Service agai...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cedar Swamp Village

Holland has only been a settled city for a little over 170 years. But, it's got a dense, unique history. I took an interest in local history during my college years at Northern Michigan University, and was able to take that interest back home after graduation. Recently, I began researching for this blog, and hanging out at the library, poring through the Local History section. I found an old, forboding looking book, entitled Memorials Of The Grand River Valley, flipped open to a seemingly random page, and read the passage "The Indian village, near the southeastern limits of the city,w as also a prominent landing-place. The log-houses, built by the Indians, were of great service to the newly arrived immigrants; and, as it appears, there never has been any trouble between the Red man and the Dutchman." This piqued my interest, as I live near the southeastern limits of Holland. Was there an Indian village in my own neighborhood that history forgot? Memorials ad...
Post a Comment
Read more