Grand Rapids

Lia found Grand Rapids on a list of America’s best beer cities and refused to believe it until we’d seen it ourselves. We arrived on a Thursday evening, checked into a converted furniture warehouse turned hotel, and walked out into a downtown humming with more energy than either of us expected from a city its size. The Grand River splits it in two, fish ladders and pedestrian bridges knitting the halves back together, and everywhere we looked, old industrial brick had been repurposed into breweries, galleries, and restaurants without losing its bones.

Beer City, USA

Grand Rapids didn’t earn its self-proclaimed title by accident — the city has more craft breweries per capita than almost anywhere in the country, and we set out to test as many as reasonably possible. Founders Brewing, all reclaimed wood and roaring taproom energy, felt like the city’s beating heart; we wedged into a communal table over their All Day IPA while a local band tuned up in the corner. Across town, Brewery Vivant occupies a converted funeral chapel, stained glass windows glowing above Belgian-style ales, which struck us as the most Grand Rapids sentence we could imagine before we’d even said it aloud. By the second night we’d learned to pace ourselves and stick to flights.

ArtPrize city and the river

Every fall, Grand Rapids turns itself inside out for ArtPrize, an open competition that scatters massive public art installations across downtown storefronts, bridges, and parks — we happened to be there the week banners were still up from the previous year, and the murals alone told us how seriously this city takes its creative identity. We spent an afternoon along the Grand River Whitewater project, watching the city’s ambitious effort to restore rapids through downtown, kayakers testing the current below the Blue Bridge. The Grand Rapids Public Museum, perched right on the water in a building shaped like a ship’s prow, gave us a rainy-hour detour and a surprisingly good carousel.

Eastown and the neighborhoods

East of downtown, the Eastown and East Hills neighborhoods trade breweries for vintage shops and taquerias, Wealthy Street lined with the kind of independent storefronts that make a Saturday stroll worthwhile. We ducked into San Chez for tapas, then wandered until we found ourselves at Palazzolo’s, a family-run gelato and ice cream parlor going on eighty years old, eating waffle cones on a curb as the streetlights came on. It’s the kind of neighborhood that reminds you Grand Rapids, for all its brewery fame, is still fundamentally a Midwestern city of front porches and long summer evenings.

Getting There

Gerald R. Ford International Airport sits about ten minutes southeast of downtown, with direct flights from most major U.S. hubs. Driving from Chicago takes roughly three and a half hours around the southern edge of Lake Michigan via I-94 and I-196, while Detroit is closer still, about a two-hour run west on I-96. Downtown itself is compact and walkable, with the river and its bridges forming a natural spine between the west and east sides.