Grand Rapids Attractions, Ranked by What They Are Worth

Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. One hundred and fifty-eight acres opened in 1995, combining a major outdoor sculpture collection with a five-storey tropical conservatory. It is the region's largest visitor attraction and the only one here that routinely draws people from other states on its own. Allow three hours, four with children. Adult admission has been running in the low twenties; confirm before you go.

Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. On the west bank, opened 1981, and the only presidential museum in the National Archives system that does not sit with its own library — the archive is 130 miles east in Ann Arbor, which makes this the rare presidential museum built for visitors rather than researchers. Ford grew up in this city and he and Betty Ford are buried on the lawn. It reopened after a substantial renovation. Two hours.

Grand Rapids Art Museum. Opened in October 2007 and certified LEED Gold the following year, the first art museum anywhere to hold it. The building is the point as much as the collection: daylight handled seriously, a clear plan, and a front door that opens onto Rosa Parks Circle. Local reporting in recent years has covered significant repairs the building needs, so admire it without assuming perfection. Ninety minutes to two hours.

Do these three and you have seen Grand Rapids. Everything below is what makes a second and third day good.

Three of the most interesting things in Grand Rapids cost nothing, and two of them are better than plenty of ticketed attractions elsewhere.

Meyer May House. A Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie house of 1908 to 1909, standing on a corner in Heritage Hill. Steelcase — the office-furniture company founded in this city in 1912, which in the 1930s manufactured Wright's steel furniture for the Johnson Wax headquarters — bought the house in the 1980s and returned it to the original drawings, down to reproducing the textiles and the leaded glass. There is no charge to tour it. Days are limited and reservations are encouraged, so check the current arrangement rather than turning up.

Calder Plaza. La Grande Vitesse, installed in 1969, forty-two tons of steel in twenty-seven sections, around fifty-four feet long and forty-three high. The title translates roughly as "the great swiftness", which is what "Grand Rapids" means in French. The plaza was named after the sculpture, not the other way round.

Rosa Parks Circle. Maya Lin's Ecliptic: an amphitheatre in summer, an ice rink in winter, and set into the surface a map of the stars over this city on 1 January 2000.

You can walk all three in an afternoon and spend nothing but the parking.

The west bank and the land beyond it hold the attractions that get you outside, which matters more here than in a city with better weather.

John Ball Zoo opened in 1891 on forty acres left to the city by John Ball, a lawyer and land agent who had crossed the continent in the 1830s. It now runs to around a hundred and forty acres up a wooded hillside, which is unusual and makes the visit a genuine climb; a funicular carries you to the treehouse at the top. Half a day with children.

Blandford Nature Center sits about six miles north-west of downtown on 264 acres of woods, meadow and a working farm, with trails that are quiet on a weekday and genuinely good in autumn. Free parking, modest admission for the buildings, and the best place in the city to put a restless afternoon.

Millennium Park, out toward Grandville, is a reclamation project of roughly fourteen hundred acres with about six miles of Grand River frontage — old gravel pits and industrial ground turned into lakes, beach and trail. It is the largest urban park in the region and almost nobody from out of town knows it exists.

Provin Trails Park and Riverside Park fill the same role closer in: short, unfussy walks for an hour you did not plan.

In a city built on domestic manufacturing, the housing stock is part of the collection.

Heritage Hill begins three blocks uphill from the office towers and holds around thirteen hundred historic properties across roughly a square mile, the earliest from the 1840s. It is one of the largest urban historic districts in the United States, and it exists because residents fought off an urban renewal plan in the 1960s that would have cleared much of it. More than sixty architectural styles are represented, which sounds like a tourist-board number until you walk four blocks and count Italianate, Queen Anne, Chateauesque and one Frank Lloyd Wright in the space of a few minutes.

Wealthy Street and Eastown, further east and south, are the commercial streets that came back: independent restaurants, a repertory cinema, record shops, and taprooms in buildings that were something else first.

Monroe North, north of the arena on the east bank, is old warehouse ground now holding breweries and offices.

None of these charge admission and none of them take a whole day. Put one on the end of an afternoon rather than treating it as a destination, and eat there afterwards.

Downtown Market opened in 2013 at the south end of downtown and was the first public market in the United States certified LEED Gold — a sentence that tells you a good deal about how this city likes to build. Inside are around twenty food merchants and restaurants under one roof; outside, in season, a farmers' market shed that takes fifty-odd vendors. It works best as lunch rather than as a sight, and it is a short walk from the Amtrak station.

Van Andel Arena opened in October 1996 and is the reason downtown has the evening economy it does. It seats somewhere around eleven thousand for hockey and up to roughly thirteen thousand for a concert, which puts it in the band of venues that get touring acts too big for a theatre and too small for a stadium. The Grand Rapids Griffins play here, and an American Hockey League game is a genuinely good and cheap winter evening — the sort of thing visitors overlook because they assume it is for locals. It is for locals. That is the appeal.

Check what is on before you travel. A big arena night changes the availability of every restaurant table and parking space within three blocks, in both directions.