Why Grand Rapids is called Furniture City

“Furniture City” is more than an old nickname for Grand Rapids. The Grand Rapids Public Library says the city was a center of the furniture industry from the 1870s through the 1930s. Factories made the furniture, but designers, catalogs, trade magazines, and showrooms helped turn the city into a place where buyers came to see what was new.

That selling side mattered. The Grand Rapids Historical Commission dates the city’s first furniture market to 1878. Dedicated exhibition buildings followed in the 1890s and early 1900s, giving manufacturers a way to show whole lines of furniture to visiting buyers. Furniture City was as much about design and selling as it was about saws and wood.

The industry changed, but the name did not become an empty souvenir. The library notes that many major office-furniture companies remain in West Michigan. Steelcase began in Grand Rapids in 1912 as the Metal Office Furniture Company, and the company still lists its headquarters in the city.

You can see a piece of that history at the Grand Rapids Public Museum. Its second-floor Furniture Factory has a Porter lathe and artifacts from the museum’s former Furniture City exhibit. If you want to go deeper, the Grand Rapids History Center at the public library keeps company records, trade catalogs, design books, and other furniture-industry material.