Every mid-sized American city used to have a hotel like this, and most of them lost it. The Radisson Plaza Hotel at Kalamazoo Center is the town’s de facto grand hotel: 340 rooms in a full-block downtown complex joined to the convention centre, with restaurants, a full-service spa and salon, an indoor pool and most of Kalamazoo’s formal social calendar under one roof. It is where the galas, the recruitment dinners and the graduation brunches happen, and the building carries that role with more polish than the brand name suggests.
You can eat well without crossing the street, which is rare at this latitude of the market. Brick + Brine handles the steaks-and-oysters end of proceedings and holds its own against anything else downtown, while Old Burdick’s Bar & Grill does the game-on-the-screens duty. Rooms upstairs are comfortable in the better corporate sense, dark woods, proper desks, decent linen, with the higher floors looking out over the low Kalamazoo skyline towards the university hills.
The real luxury is position. The Kalamazoo Mall, the first outdoor pedestrian shopping street in America, starts at the corner; the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and the Valley Museum are within a few minutes on foot; and Bell’s Eccentric Café, mothership of one of the country’s great breweries, is a ten-minute walk east. The Amtrak station sits a few blocks north with direct trains to Chicago. For Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College weekends the hotel books out months ahead, and deservedly: nothing else in town comes close.
