It’s always a thrill for me to get a chance to tour one of the top 100 (Golden Eagle) agurbs® that our research identified as outstanding communities. I always go with a bit of trepidation, not wanting to find that our Golden Eagle might be a Mole instead. Traverse City, MI didn’t let me down.
I could tell that it was a special kind of town when I walked into the airport. I have seen a lot of airports in the past year and theirs is one of the coolest I have seen for a town of 14,532. It utilizes the local stone as an accent to the northern lodge look for the airport. It is definitely not a sterile, typical airport.
Bob Gluszewski, Area Manager for Consumers Energy gave me a whirlwind tour on our way to the Rural Partners of Michigan Conference on small towns and rural development. Traverse City is a regional draw with lots of big boxes, but what I really loved was their vibrant downtown area. I didn’t see any vacancies and noticed a number of dwelling units both in upstairs apartments and nearby condos that are helping to create a very unique “sense of place.” They are redoing their old opera house into a community center. They do a summer music festival in the downtown area that is nationally known. I rated it as the second best downtown I’ve seen of this size, second only to Oxford, MS.
They’ve developed as regional retailing, ag, golf and medical center. Their many area lakes make them a great tourism destination. They’ve leveraged their status as the Cherry Capital of the World (70% of the cooking cherries and 50% of the sweet cherries are grown within a 50 mile radius) to develop the Cherry Festival, which is held for one week around July 4th to bring in over 130,000 visitors each year. The area has recently also become a winery cluster with 14 already operating, including one owned by Madonna’s dad.
A local family is building a new baseball stadium to host the Beach Bums, a new class A team. Great Wolf Lodge has a huge waterpark and there are plans for another 2 more in town. Do I sense another cluster starting?
It was quite impressive for an agurb® of less than 15,000 population.
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