FURNITURE CITY HOTELS: From Wood to Brick to Luxury & Glitz by Pam VanderPloeg (Michigan Postcard Club Newsletter 9/2025)

Economic prosperity and abundant early fires changed Grand Rapids hotels from wood to brick structures with luxury appointments. One of Grand Rapids’ earliest was the EAGLE HOTEL built in 1834 at Louis and Waterloo (Market). Open until 1933, it had countless managers, but only one known for killing a guest (1864). An 1883 fire destroyed the wooden structure, later replaced by a $25,000 red brick building.

By 1835, the HINSDALE HOTEL welcomed guests on a site early settler Louis Campau sold to Hiram and Myron Hinsdale for $200. The Hinsdale’s new owner, Canton Smith renamed it the NATIONAL HOUSE in 1840 and then promptly left town to prospect for gold in California. The National House burned in 1872 and Smith descendent, George Morton, built its replacement the 5-story MORTON HOUSE.  President William McKinley stayed there in 1899, on a Republican Party campaign tour.  

In 1874, a young J. Boyd Pantlind was the Morton House bell hop and porter who came to Michigan at age 14 to help his uncle, A. V. Pantlind run the Michigan Cental Railroad eating houses.  A.V. and Farnham L. Lyon took over the Morton House. J.Boyd inherited it and bought out Lyon.

In 1900, Pantlind bought SWEET’S HOTEL, opened in 1869 by early Grand Rapids mayor, Martin Sweet, who staged a grand ball that year, charging guests $5 a plate for a “pyramid of roast quail with the wings still on.” Two famous chefs were hired away from Newport’s Gilded Age resorts. Wood-burning stoves heated each room and up to 6 men sawed the wood, depending on the guest count.  

Two years later, in 1887, cousins of “Buffalo Bill” Cody, opened the CODY HOTEL at Division and Fulton. “Buffalo Bill,” a frequent hotel guest, donated the decor, a bevy of huge buffalo heads for the lobby. Owners claimed the Cody had the world’s most comfortable beds. 

Edward Lowe opened the LIVINGSTON HOTEL that year at the opposite corner.  An impressive six-story brick structure, it featured 104 leaded beveled glass windows, but only 9 baths. On April 1, 1925, guests tried to escape a devastating fire by jumping to safety from the roof.  Seven to nine lives were lost, depending on the account.  The burned ruins were a grim reminder until cleared way in the 1930s.

In 1902, J. Boyd Pantlind remodeled SWEET’S HOTEL and renamed it the PANTLIND HOTEL to honor his uncle, A.V.  It reopened for the June 1902 Furniture Market with 97 guest rooms as the first European Plan hotel in the nation (no breakfast).  The “finest in the city,” its popular restaurant generated so much food waste that Pantlind fed the mountains of garbage to the pigs on his farm outside the city, until mayor George Ellis won a court case that claimed city pigs should eat city waste (Lost Restaurants of Grand Rapids by Norma Lewis). 

The booming furniture industry and convention trade convinced the Pantlind Hotel Company to buy the entire city block, from Pearl to Lyon. Warren & Wetmore, New York’s Grand Central Station artchitects, were hired to design a larger, grander Pantlind with Beaux-Arts details. It opened on New Years Day 1916 with  550 rooms and one of the largest lobbies in the nation.  Even as 200 more rooms were added in 1923, a new MORTON HOUSE, designed by the Chicago Palmer House architects Holabird & Roche, was H under construction. It featured a brick and stone facade over a fireproof structural steel skeleton.  Fred Rowe of Valley City Milling, that year, opened the 300-room ROWE HOTEL on Michigan, where other hotels and a colony of blacksmiths once stood.

It was a hotel restoration which jumpstarted Grand Rapids’ downtown revitalization in 1981. The Amway Corporation extensively restored the Pantlind as the AMWAY GRAND PLAZA, hiring the famous Carleton Varney of the Dorothy Draper firm to give it new glamor and glitz.  Marvin DeWinter designed the new glass tower. Pam VanderPloeg will share more hotel history at the December 1, Michigan Postcard Club Meeting.