Bohemian Like You

For real this time - Hotel Indigo is breaking ground.



Years ago, when the idea of a boutique hotel was proposed my initial reaction was one of "don't do it! - let's not lose the warehouse district". Like what Chirstopher Hutchins felt about the West Village in Vanity Fair,

Every successful society needs its Bohemia, a haven for the artists, exiles, and misfits who regenerate the culture. With the heart of New York’s West Village threatened by developers, London, Paris, and San Francisco have a message for Manhattan: Don’t do it!

(See: Last Call, Bohemia)

Cities need an incubator. A sanctuary. Marine sanctuaries are a place of refuge to replenish fish populations. A city needs an area where ideas and businesses can be replenished. A place to grow. A space where failure is an option and success is a chance. Often this means low-rent areas. Often this means empty warehouses. Historicaly these were the bohemian areas. The sections of the city that may have looked downtrodden but flourished with the people who worked with their hands. What we now euphemistically call the creative class. And as those creatives aged they became productive entrepreneurs. And this is why every city needs a place for its misfits. Those who want to go in an unlikely direction.

Traverse City had a literal little bohemia 100 years ago. This spawned the institutions of Sleder's and Lil Bo's as well as the entire Slabtown neighborhood. Though "bohemian" is not much used today - a better term might be "little Detroit".

For all the sadness and desperation surrounding that once great American city there are creatives in the core who are using the low rent area to grow their ideas. They can take these chances due to the existing low cost infrastructure. And manufacturing is coming back there. Bicycles, watches, leather goods, and so much more. Yeah, it might lead to gentrification someday but is that better than the alternative?

Traverse City had a warehouse district. Hotel Indigo will change the warehouse district in a big way. Like a suburban street named after a forest that was cut down for cul-de-sacs. But that is not the end of a lamentable story. And this is why I changed my mind.

I think Traverse City has a next little-Detroit area. An area of the City for risk takers to make their experiments.

Woodmere Avenue and the area east of Boardman Lake. Maybe beyond.

The Woodemere Ave corridor has had its redesign. The Boardman Lake trail is in place on the east side of the lake. And there is warehouse space available such as "The Glacier Dome" (The Ticker has a story of 70's bands playing there.)

And now Traverse City is about to get its Hotel Indigo. I hope the Hotel Indigo is successful and the people it will draw to downtown and the bayfront support all of our local businesses. Plus, Ballantine restaurant sounds interesting ("an American Gastropub and Belgian Bier Bar"). My initial fears of losing some sort of "authenticity" were misplaced.  Traverse City still has room for bohemians, a little Detroit, and if some new development gentrifies that area then perhaps a new area will become the incubator.

I just hope we, as a town, never lose areas to serve as our sanctuaries and incubators.

The Dandy Warhols inspired the title for this post:







Additional reading:

Record-Eagle: Chain hotel in works for Grandview Parkway
TCBusinessNews: Major chain hotel proposed in Traverse City's Warehouse District
TV 7&4: Four-story hotel coming to Traverse City?
TV 7&4: Local businesses speak out about proposed hotel
Fox33: Upscale hotel planned for Traverse City's warehouse district
Record-Eagle: Letters to the Record-Eagle editor in opposition
Record-Eagle: Proposed Hyatt hotel divides opinions
Record-Eagle: Downtown hotel plans hit roadblock
Record-Eagle: New hotel planned for Warehouse District
MyNorth: Hotel Indigo – Warehouse District
ICH: About Hotel Indigo
IPR: Warehouse District Ready To Boom
UpNorthLive: Hotel plans move forward at GT Commons
Downtown TC: Garland St input
Ticker: New Shops, New Brewery for Warehouse District
IPR: Woodmere Renaissance

Detroit links:
Freep: Ad agency Campbell Ewald headed downtown, with 600 jobs
FasctCoCreate Remaking Detroit: Can Creative Companies Save an American City on the Brink? and Meet The Makers: Rebuilding Detroit by Hand 


 

More Surveys

or as Doug E Fresh might say - ain't no reason for teasin' because it IS survey season.

-planning for a new Discovery Center to host the Maritime Heritage Alliance, The Watershed Center, Great Lakes Children's Museum, and Traverse Area Community Sailing: Discovery Center Great Lakes Community Survey

-MyNorth: 2012 Red Hot Best of Northern Michigan

-Northern Express: 2012 "Best of Northern Michigan"

(you know you're from northern Michigan when the highlight of your year is the Northern Express 'Best Of' survey)

Surveys Say

A couple of community surveys are available.

-The Traverse City Corridors Improvement Study has Questionnaires for Residents and Businesses.

-Vasa Trail Five- and Ten-Year planning process

Candidates 2011

Below are the Traverse City Commission and Mayoral Candidates for 2011.

I don't know who I am voting for yet. I know who I won't be voting for but that still leaves some vacancies. At this point I'll vote for whoever is the most reasonable person.

To help organize my voting decision I've linked to the candidate profiles in the Record-Eagle, their answers to the MyWheelsAreTurning.com survey, the 2011 Candidate Forum answers at the TC Chamber, and a meta search which will search for the candidate's name at local web sites (TCLP, City of TC, MWaT, PlanForTC, MLUI, GT County, UpNorthLive, TheTicker, TC Biz News, Record-Eagle).

*note that PDF's from the City of Traverse City are generally image files rather than text files and therefore are not searchable, which is a pain

At the bottom you can use my custom domain search if you'd like to search the above domains for your own queries. For more political insight you can also use the Fundrace tool which allows you to search political contributions by name and address.

Budros: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

Carruthers: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

Donick: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

Easterday: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

Ford: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

McGuire: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

Werner: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

Estes: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

Soffredine: TC Chamber forum responses / Record-Eagle profile / MWaT answers / meta-search

Search Traverse City news and government web sites:

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Well Done Jackson, WY

Traverse City had the "Your Bay, Your Say" sessions in 2005 and we're still waiting for implementation of a bayfront park.

The Teton Boulder Park was conceived in 2009 and opened before the end of 2010.



[Via Adventure Journal: Teton Boulder Project Comes to Life in the Heart of Jackson Hole]

Love it. A great idea and a great looking park and it went from idea to implementation quickly because the City and Businesses all got behind it.

Another reminder of how slow things are here in Traverse City is the Hotel Indigo. News of a hotel in the warehouse district came in 2008, today's update at MWaT: The Hotel Indigo Tunnel Returns indicates the hotel may not happen at all.

How Seattle Does Urban Farming

Via Grist: Seattle’s new urban-ag models are sprouting in friendly soil

Curbside Composting

Bay Area Recycling for Charities received a grant to bring curbside composting to Traverse City.

And earlier this year I heard a story on NPR about how restaurants are cutting costs with curbside composting: Compost Startup Helps Restaurants Cut Costs

3P has more on this topic: Curbside Composting Programs – Why We Need Them and Where to Start

I look forward to seeing BARC start this soon. What I hear is the compost will be used at The Commons community garden.

Parks

I started this post back in December, and after seeing Gary's post: Do you know where your closest city park is? which includes a map of Traverse City parkland, I decided I should get this wrapped up.

The big news is each Traverse City bay is poised to get revamped parks. The Acme Shoreline Park has a goal of turning one mile of East Bay into a blue mile of beachfront with volleyball courts, a playground, public marina, and open space; all connected to a TART trail spur.

See the Record-Eagle: Shoreline site in Acme to become new park

For West Bay, there is much hope for a completely new bayfront to connect downtown Traverse City to the water.

The new Bayfront Park design was recently revealed. See: bayfront plans are done

The conceptualization hits many highlights for me including a natural play area, an artesian spring and stream, an improved boat launch that will be friendlier to canoes and kayaks, more vegetation, keeping the emergent wetland at the mouth of the Boardman, dark-sky compliant lighting, fish cleaning station, improved access to the park with tunnels, etc.

However, it does appear that this was a great opportunity to develop a dedicated Farmer's Market space in the area but it isn't in the final plans. Also, to make the area more inviting to visitors of all types harness the artesian well in such a way so that boaters and others could fill up their containers with potable water. Much like how travelers stop north of Petoskey on US 31 to fill up with the well by the side of the road there. And I am not sure we need so many roundabouts but that is a topic for another post. You can't have it all I suppose.

I believe a new Bayfront will be a great addition to Traverse City and could serve as a multi-modal hub for the entire region. I hope it gets done. Even better would be tying this in to re-naturalizing the Boardman as it goes through downtown and then tie that into a whitewater park between Cass and Union.

Grand Rapids is trying it. (Grand River as downtown Grand Rapids whitewater course?)

There is a Facebook group for the Traverse City Boardman River Whitewater Park effort.

For more on the Bayfront park see:
TC bayfront plans take a step forward

Bayfront overhaul work could begin in 2011

Next, Traverse City residents clearly want a dog park. Recently in the paper there was this: Dog park project may be in the works

And when Mayor Bzdok made this post: Update for the week of November 29 to December 6 there were many comments from people wanting a dog park.

Not only would an off-leash dog park be good for the dogs but dog-walkers are great to have in the neighborhood. As mentioned in Why dog owners make the best citizens

After dark, the streets fill with dog walkers. A couple per block, at least. In the winter, they're the only people on the streets. Without them, the neighborhood would be lot emptier, and the streets would feel a lot more forbidding. Placing a couple of poodles -- and my neighborhood has a lot of poodles -- on the landscape really does wonders

I have the spot - next to the trail between Oryana and the library. An area some people are calling Old Town Park. My idea is a dog park on one side and let the other side which is already being used by beavers, rabbits, red-winged blackbirds, fox, be allowed to develop naturally. Build a high wall/fence next to the apartments to mitigate noise, though I believe the benefits to those residents having a place to exercise their dog outweighs any negatives.

I like this location because:
- it is centrally located to Traverse City's neighborhoods
- getting dog walkers in this area should help with the graffiti on the Community Sailing building and loitering on the bridge
- Oryana and McGough's should see increased sales of their pet supplies if dog owners are in the area more

And the natural area is important because it will act as a buffer when rail travel returns to the area.

Map (blue line is the park, other line is the natural area):

View Traverse City Dog Park? in a larger map

Finally, parks are great, but without a trail system connecting them (I've heard it described as a "string of pearls") it will not reach its full potential. So I hope that whatever is done is planned with TART so that all of these parks can be reached by non-motorized means.

Additional reading for inspiration:
INFRA: The Best New Urban Parks

NYT: Blueprints for a Better ‘Burb

These Are Related

R-E: County won't pay for Boardman trail studies

TheAtlantic: The Geography of Obesity

25% of Michiganders are obese and some Grand Traverse County Commissioners voted against studying an expansion of the Boardman Lake trail because "Many of my constituents have never seen this trail and probably never will in their lifetime".

Well, Commissioner, maybe if they did see the trail they wouldn't be so fat.

This reminds me of a comment overheard this past weekend while taking the shuttle from the Detroit airport to the parking lot across the street "My feet are killing me. That [the walk from the terminal to luggage claim] was the farthest I have walked since the last time we were at the airport".

Saving Fish With Fish Shares

Community Supported Fishing and City Chickens are the next big things it looks like.

More thoughts on saving fish with fish shares at the NYT: Fish Shares and Sharing Fish

More Community Supported Fishing

Mentioned this idea last March.

The idea is growing. See: Skipper Otto's Wild BC Salmon CSF

How much does it cost & what will I get?
The cost is $250.00/ year. You will receive approximately 35lbs of the best quality whole, fresh and/ or frozen salmon that is available that season direct from the fisherman. This amounts to roughly 7 fish at around 5lbs each (about $7/lb). Most years, you will receive nothing but sockeye salmon; however, if the sockeye runs are poor, you will receive an equivalent value of other salmon.

Via TreeHugger

The Best Cities - Smart People And Lots Of Fun Things To Do

Update 1/16/2009
And let's not forget great places to live need great places to relax.
Boston.com: How the city hurts your brain ...And what you can do about it

Traverse City has a good start in being a great small town. But it is not all the way there yet. Living here "feels" as though we're on the verge of either becoming a great place to live and an economic engine or a touristy follower-town.

What makes a place a nice place to visit usually makes it a nice place to live.

There have been some recent articles regarding what makes some cities always attractive and what a place needs to do to be more than a nice place to visit. What is comes down to is put together a lot of smart people and give them fun things to do.

Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia released a research paper titled City Beautiful (PDF).

...past studies have provided only indirect evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban development. In this paper we propose and validate the number of leisure trips to metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) as a measure of consumers' revealed preferences for local leisure-oriented amenities. Population and employment growth in the 1990s was about 2 percent higher in an MSA with twice as many leisure visits: the third most important predictor of recent population growth in standardized terms. Moreover, this variable does a good job of forecasting out-of-sample growth for the period 2000-2006. “Beautiful cities” disproportionally attracted highly educated individuals and experienced faster housing price appreciation, especially in supply-inelastic markets. Investment by local government in new public recreational areas within an MSA was positively associated with higher subsequent city attractiveness. In contrast to the generally declining trends in the American central city, neighborhoods that were close to “central recreational districts” have experienced economic growth, albeit at the cost of minority displacement.

The researchers studied 15 variables to come to their conclusions:

Log Total

Employment in Tourism-Related Activities(1990)

Log Population

Log Number of Colleges

Poverty Rate

Log January Average Temperature (Average 1941-1970)

Log Average Annual Precipitation (1961-1990)

Share with Bachelors Degree

Share Workers in Manufacturing

Share Workers in Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate

Average Block-Group Distance to Park

Average Block-Group Distance to Recreation Sites

Log Historic Places per Capita

Coastal Share within a 10 km Radius

Mountain Land Share within a 10 km Radius

Boston.com has more on this research: Urban playground: As politicians weigh economic stimulus for cities, research suggests a surprising way to succeed: make it fun

In their paper, Carlino and Saiz found a statistical correlation between the number of leisure visits to a metropolitan area and the growth of factors like population and housing values. They controlled to determine that the tourism itself wasn't causing the growth, and argue in their paper that people move to the cities for the same reason they visit as tourists. They also demonstrate that investment by local governments in such "recreational capital" - spending on parks, cultural institutions, sports facilities, and other public-private spaces - has succeeded in making cities like Charlotte and San Antonio more attractive to tourists. They compute that a 10 percent boost in such spending yields a 2.3 percent increase in leisure visits, and, if the correlation holds, will also increase growth.
"If you have things that attract high-skilled, high-income individuals, they are more productive," said Carlino, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. "They are the ones who are likely to start up new companies."

And in the NYT Exonmix blog an entry on why NYC continues to thrive: New York, New York: America’s Resilient City

Homo sapiens are a social species; almost all of what we know we learn from each other. Dense cities, like New York, succeed when they take advantage of this fundamental aspect of our humanity. They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people.

The formula for a great city seems clear: create a city with a temperate climate near a coastline and with museums, colleges, parks, and downtown magnets -> create dense housing in an urban core -> smart people will come to the city -> human capital will make the city great.

Thinking About The Traverse City Farmer's Market

As the number of farmers at a market grows the more need there is for a dedicated manager.

See: PhysOrg - As Farmers' Markets Grow, So Should Management

Traverse City is obviously outgrowing the downtown farmer's market as there are cars looking for parking and people packed in the aisle. It is a good place to see people and be seen but for many folks it is too crowded. Setting up alternative, competing markets is not a fair solution to anyone. Where can Traverse City move the farmer's market? You need a place downtown to support the core businesses. Ithaca, NY has their farmer's market right on Cayuga Lake. It is a large covered structure and has its own dock. Could Traverse City use the old zoo space next to the marina as a sprawling farmer's market?

Other cities (e.g., Baton Rouge, Chapel Hill) have their farmer's markets in parking decks. Traverse City has a parking deck downtown too. The farmer's market could potentially be moved to the top level on nice days and an interior level on rainy/snowy days. Offer free parking until 5 PM and all of a sudden Traverse City has a farmer's market larger than the current one, with plenty of parking, and still within walking distance to downtown.

Food Festivals

MSNBC - America's best food and wine festivals

IHT - Food-themed festivals thrive as growing declines

There's a lesson here for the Cherry Festival. Be careful about focusing more on the idea of the festival than what it is supposed to promote. Just look at Gilroy for an example. It was once the garlic capital, now there are only 500 acres left of garlic farms. If cherry orchards keep getting turned into subdivisions all that'll be left in northern Michigan will be street names such as "Cherry View Orchard Lane" - but there won't be any view there.

Boardman Lake Is A Jewel

I am always surprised by how little activity Boardman Lake gets. But I have had tourist compliment me on how nice the east Boardman Lake trail is (as if I had anything to do with it) but they also lament that the trail does not circle the lake. I tell them, "not yet, but it will". And when Traverse City does get a complete Boardman Lake trail it is going to see a lot of use and love.

And when TACS finishes building a boathouse, boardwalk and a dock at the north end I wouldn't be surprised to see the combination of library, children's garden, boathouse, and urban trail get statewide and even national attention.

See the RE: Sailing group breaks ground

What Makes This Place Great

Traverse Magazine's web site on what makes life in northern Michigan great. MyNorth - 25 Reasons to Love Life Up North

Seattle's Example

Seattle Tilth

Seattle Tilth inspires and educates people to garden organically, conserve natural resources and support local food systems in order to cultivate a healthy urban environment and community.