Guides
10 long-form guides to Grand Rapids, each one signed and dated so you can see how current it is. They answer the questions that do not fit on a listings page: how the place is laid out, what you will actually be charged for, and which trade-offs are worth making.
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An open competition with no entry jury, hundreds of venues that are mostly not galleries, and a public vote worth a hundred thousand dollars. Here is how to see it without wasting a day.
Guide
An open competition with no entry jury, hundreds of venues that are mostly not galleries, and a public vote worth a hundred thousand dollars. Here is how to see it without wasting a day.
5 min readIlse Hoekstra
Guides
Guide
Late September is the best fortnight and the most expensive one. March is the worst month and nobody says so. Here is the year, month by month, without the tourism-board gloss.
5 min readMarguerite Vanderhoff
Guides
Guide
A grocery fortune bought 158 acres, a five-storey glasshouse and a 24-foot bronze horse built from Leonardo's unfinished commission. The calendar decides whether you enjoy it.
5 min readIlse Hoekstra
Guide
Eight breweries inside one downtown walk, a district of converted warehouses north of Michigan Street, and a list of closures that most beer articles have not caught up with.
7 min readTheo Brandsma
Guide
Two nights, one car, and one hard constraint that decides the whole schedule: the free Frank Lloyd Wright house only opens to the public on Sunday afternoon.
5 min readMarguerite Vanderhoff
Guide
Michigan's second city is a furniture town that spent its furniture money on art. Here is how the address grid works, what is walkable, and what needs a car.
6 min readMarguerite Vanderhoff
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Seventy-odd inches of snow, the cloudiest January of any month, and a city that responds by putting a hundred art installations outdoors and flooding a Maya Lin park into an ice rink.
6 min readMarguerite Vanderhoff
Guides
Guide
Four very different towns sit within forty-five minutes of downtown. Picking the wrong one for what you want is the most common way a Michigan beach day goes flat.
5 min readTheo Brandsma
Guides
Guide
A restored Frank Lloyd Wright house, an art museum one day a week, the first artwork the NEA ever helped pay for, and a Maya Lin park you can skate on. None of it costs anything.
5 min readIlse Hoekstra
Guide
The zoo shuts for the winter, the carousel does not, and the best hour of a family day here costs three dollars and runs on a platform out over the river.
5 min readMarguerite Vanderhoff