Grand Rapids City Hall is one of the finest examples of Richardsonian Romanesque civic architecture in the Midwest. Grand Rapids City Hall was completed in 1888, its red Berea sandstone walls and round-arched windows a deliberate statement of permanence and authority from a city that had grown from a fur-trading outpost to an industrial powerhouse in a single lifetime. The architect was Elijah Myers, who also designed the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing and the Texas and Colorado capitol buildings — a man with a serious portfolio of public ambition.
The clock tower that crowns the building has kept time over Monroe Avenue for more than a century. Look at the heavy stone arches at the entrance and the corbeled turrets at the corners, hallmarks of the Romanesque Revival style that architect Henry Hobson Richardson popularized across America in the 1870s and 1880s. Inside, the council chambers have witnessed debates over furniture union contracts, highway routes through historic neighborhoods, and, more recently, the extraordinary growth of the city's craft brewing industry.