Van Andel Arena

The Griffins are the Detroit Red Wings' American Hockey League affiliate and have played in this building since it opened in 1996. That relationship is the whole appeal: the roster is prospects working toward the NHL and veterans working back to it, so the hockey is fast and the personnel change through the season.

Tickets are a fraction of an NHL price and the building is small enough that a cheap seat is still a good seat. The season runs from October into April, with playoffs beyond that in a good year, and the club has won the Calder Cup. Friday and Saturday home games are the busy ones; a Wednesday in January is quiet, cheap and perfectly good.

The crowd skews local and family-heavy, and there is a promotional bit most nights. It is not a pilgrimage for a neutral, but for a visitor with a free evening in Grand Rapids between October and April it is a better use of three hours than almost anything else downtown.

Check the schedule before assuming there is a game: the AHL plays a lot of road trips and the arena also has to fit concerts, basketball and volleyball into the same winter.

The arena takes touring shows across the size range, with capacity up to about 13,184 for a centre-stage configuration and nearer 11,000 to 12,000 for an end-stage one.

Practical notes for a show night. The upper bowl is steep and the sound at the back of it is honest rather than flattering; if you have the choice, the lower bowl corners are the value seats. The concourse is a single loop and it is narrow at the west end, so intermission queues build. Bag policy at arenas changes frequently, and this one has run a clear-bag rule at points, so check before you leave the hotel with a rucksack.

Doors typically open an hour before the advertised time. Parking ramps around Fulton and Ionia empty slowly after a sold-out show, and the streets funnel awkwardly toward US-131; if you are not in a hurry, walk somewhere for twenty minutes and let it clear.

There is no dedicated arena car park. Everything is a public ramp, a surface lot or the street, and rates rise on event nights.

It is rare to be able to point at one building and say a city centre turned on it, but Grand Rapids can.

Ground was broken in February 1995 and the arena opened twenty months later, in a downtown that had been hollowing out for decades. More than five million people came through in the first five years. Restaurants opened to feed them, then bars to keep them, then the residential conversions that followed the bars. The Monroe North brewery district, the Downtown Market, the Monroe Center rebuild and the riverfront work all came afterwards, and all of them were arguing from a premise the arena had established: that people would come downtown at night.

Jay Van Andel co-founded Amway in nearby Ada, and the Van Andel and DeVos names sit on a large share of the city's public buildings, which is its own kind of civic story and one that Grand Rapids residents have complicated feelings about.

For a visitor, none of that needs explaining at the door. But if you are wondering why a mid-sized Midwestern city has this density of restaurants, breweries and museums within a twelve-block square, the answer starts here in 1996.