A rainy day in Grand Rapids
Rain is the best thing that can happen to a Grand Rapids weekend. Everything good here is indoors and within about a mile of everything else.
Start where the building is the exhibit
The Grand Rapids Art Museum is the obvious first stop and it is worth going even if you do not much care about the collection, because the building itself is the point — it was the first art museum in the world built to LEED Gold standard, and on a grey day the way it handles daylight is the whole argument. It sits right on Rosa Parks Circle downtown, so you can leave the car once.
If you want the better story, drive ten minutes southeast to the Meyer May House in Heritage Hill. It is a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie house from 1908, restored to the studs by Steelcase, right down to the furniture and the art glass. Tours are free. It is one of the most complete Wright interiors anywhere in the country and most people who live here have never been.
The museum that is really three museums
The Grand Rapids Public Museum is where you take anyone under twelve, and also where you go alone and lose two hours. Downstairs there is a restored 1928 Spillman carousel that runs along the river through a wall of glass — you can ride it, adults included. Upstairs, Streets of Old Grand Rapids is a full reconstruction of the 1890s city, and the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium is attached, named for the Grand Rapids astronaut who died in the Apollo 1 fire.
Give it longer than you think. The building is on the west bank of the Grand River and the walk back over the bridge is good even in weather.
A long lunch is not a filler
The Downtown Market on Ionia is a two-storey market hall and it is the correct answer to lunch when nobody in the group wants the same thing. It is also indoors, which today is the entire criterion.
Afterwards, do the thing people actually do here on a wet afternoon: dig through records. Grand Rapids has kept a real crate-digging culture — a handful of long-running independent shops within walking distance of downtown, all of them happy to let you stand there for an hour. Ask whoever is behind the counter what came in this week.
Finish somewhere warm
Founders Brewing on Grandville Avenue is the default and it deserves to be — it is one of the breweries that made this city's reputation, the room is enormous, and the sandwiches are better than they need to be. If you want something quieter, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum sits on the river downtown, and Ford and Betty Ford are both buried on the grounds. It is a genuinely good museum and it is nearly empty on a Tuesday.
Grand Rapids is compact in a way that rewards a bad forecast. You can do three of these in a day without ever driving more than ten minutes, and you will not once wish you were outside.