Three years after first setting foot in Muskegon, Michigan, the @WanderingWilbo recalls walking around raw space zero.

I drove purposely for downtown Muskegon for the first time third week,
November 2007. I had time to kill before the interview and I went
looking for an old fashioned downtown, a downtown similar to Grand
Haven's Washington Street or Holland's River Street. I stopped, in all
places, at MAREC, the GVSU alternative energy research campus,
thinking I could use a public computer. I stood on the windy shore of
Lake Muskegon, marram grass shaking and waving, and surveying from Hot
Rod Harley Davidson to the Holiday Inn, I saw an absence. And I still
remember my consternation. I didn't know that after demolition of the
Occidental Hotel and most of Western Boulevard, the Muskegon Mall had
risen and fallen in that absence. Fortunately, in the next two years,
a city arose a third time, including a Chamber of Commerce building,
an office building, a streetscape and a culinary school. There's a
place where cities arise faster, ande that's on the backlot of the
studios in Burbank, California. Let's not forget the brilliant
sculpture, "Muskegon, Together Rising" at traffic circle where Third &
Western cross. I like it so much, I drive around that traffic circle
six or seven times, as if downtown Muskegon were an amusement ride!