"I wanna live in a garden city, marble and glass between heaven and hell. I wanna dream when the lights go down." (- Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, "Garden City")
Garden City became a village in 1927, and its planners wanted to style it after the English "garden cities" of the time. English garden cities such as this one in America were designed so that each house was set on a large 2-acre plot to allow for home gardening and farming. All the households were essentially given space to plant their own vegetables and fruits to help sustain themselves. Now, Bock Street and John Hawk Street are the only places you can still find these miniature homesteads, since the rest of the city has been redesigned to accommodate a larger population. If you are a "gardens, not lawns!" kind of person, Garden City could probably still give you a sympathetic platform. Who wouldn't want a tiny self-sustaining acreage within a modern town, full of amenities?
Garden City is home to quite a few commercial firsts: the first Kmart, the first Little Caesars, and the first dine-in McDonalds in Michigan