The Amway Grand and the Second Act of Grand Rapids

When the Pantlind Hotel opened on the Grand River in 1913, its lobby ceiling was covered in gold leaf and its dining rooms fed the furniture barons who had made Grand Rapids the workshop of America. When the furniture trade left, the hotel faded with the downtown around it, and the city's second act began in 1981, when a local fortune restored the Pantlind, raised a glass tower beside it, and renamed the whole thing the Amway Grand Plaza. The gold leaf is still on the ceiling. The city came back around it.

The hotel today is two buildings holding hands, the 1913 palace with its coffered lobby and ballrooms, and the modern tower with the river views, and the correct booking is a room in the historic side and a drink at the top of the new one. The lobby remains the town's living room in the old style, the place where the wedding parties, the conventioneers, and the locals meeting before dinner all pass under the same gilded ceiling, which is what a grand hotel is actually for.

The city around it has earned the visit on its own. Downtown Grand Rapids filled back in around the river, with a beer trade taken as seriously as anywhere in the country, a museum devoted to a president who grew up here, sculpture gardens on the edge of town that draw the whole Midwest, and a fall arts competition that once a year turns every lobby and sidewalk into a gallery. The Frank Lloyd Wright house museum on the leafy east side rewards the architecture pilgrim with one of his finest interiors anywhere.

Come in late summer or fall, when the city is at its best and the beer gardens are open, and take the classic Grand Rapids evening, a walk along the river as the lights come up, dinner downtown, and a nightcap under the gold ceiling where the furniture barons drank theirs. The second act of this city is well into its confident middle chapters, and its grandest room has been open the whole time.