A stroll across the front lawn at the Grand Traverse Commons

By MIKE NORTON

Whew! Another National Cherry Festival has passed into history. It was a great time, but what an intense week of activity! It’ll be good to have a few days to catch our collective breath.

One of the best places I know to do a little relaxing in is the Grand Traverse Commons, our own little “Central Park” on the west end of town. And that’s appropriate, since the Commons was designed to be restful and relaxing - after all, it used to be our mental asylum! I put some photos of the Commons up on our Facebook page a couple of weeks ago, and it sparked a lot of interest, so I thought I’d add a little bit more here.

Once known as the Northern Michigan Asylum, and later as the Traverse City State Hospital, this sprawling expanse of forest, meadows and cream-colored Victorian buildings is being transformed into an entire town of shops, restaurants, galleries, apartments and condominiums. And its 500-acre campus serves as a vast urban park where the spires of the old hospital buildings soar like the turrets of romantic castles above its miles of walking paths and trails.

Hikers on one of the many Grand Traverse Commons trails.

Few historic sites are so well-suited to such a second life. The buildings of the former asylum were purposely designed to be brighter and more spacious than other 19th century structures - thanks to a Victorian visionary named James Kirkbride, who believed that the sufferings of the mentally ill could be eased by fresh air, hard work, abundant natural lighting and beautifully landscaped surroundings. The Traverse City facility, established in 1885, became a huge park, filled with Victorian-Italianate buildings of golden brick and planted with exotic trees collected from around the world.

It was also a small, self-sufficient city in its own right, with its own farms, gardens, fire department and power plant. At one point it boasted 3,500 residents — which was more than Traverse City’s population at the time. When the place was closed in 1989, local residents quickly banded together to preserve the expansive forested grounds and stately castle-like buildings. It was a daunting task. Many of the crumbling structures were in scary condition — in fact, several photographs of them taken by Traverse City artist Heidi Johnson ended up as props in the 2003 horror film “Gothika” — and for several years no one knew exactly what to do with the place.

That changed in 2000 when developer Ray Minervini approached the community with a plan to turn the sprawling complex into a “walkable, mixed-use village” that would include a broad variety of residential and commercial opportunities - retail stores, professional offices, restaurants, apartments and condominiums. After two years of negotiations, work on the project finally began in 2002. It’s been a slow process and it’s far from over, but the developers have had little difficulty finding tenants who are willing to reserve space in the restored buildings — sometimes years in advance.

One of the first tenants was Trattoria Stella, a “neighborhood bistro” started by Paul and Amanda Danielson that’s become Traverse City’s signature fine dining restaurant. If you were trying to come up with the perfect spot for a romantic dinner, the cellar of an abandoned asylum might not be your first choice — but romantic is precisely the word for Trattoria Stella. With its vaulted ceilings, deep-set windows and ancient brick walls whose gold patina glows in the flickering candlelight, it seems to be a place out of space and time. As you linger over your aperitif, it’s easy to imagine yourself in some Tuscan monastery or a castle in Calabria.

Nearby is the Mercato, a meandering subterranean shopping arcade packed with tiny shops, art galleries and boutiques. The upper floors, with their tall windows and high ceilings, are home to beauty salons and health clubs, posh office suites and luxury apartments. Even the outbuildings have been put to use - the former laundry is home to a coffee roaster and an “urban winery,” there’s a pastry shop and restaurant in the old potato-peeling shed, and a brick-oven bakery now operates out of the old fire station. And plans are in the works for an 84-room boutique hotel that will make use of two castle-like brick “cottages” and a connecting dining hall.

Lunch in the Mercato

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Meanwhile, the buildings and grounds are being used for a wide variety of events and celebrations - in summer there’s a Farmer’s Market on the lawns and this year there are several big “foodie” events:” the Aug. 14 Mario Batali food celebration, the Aug. 21 Traverse City Wine & Art Festival, and the Aug. 27-28 Traverse City Microbrewery & Music Festival. There’s a spring dairy festival at the site of the gigantic barns where the asylum’s horses and cattle were once stabled, and a March snowshoe stroll where participants follow a candlelit trail through the forest at night. And when school is in session, children from the surrounding communities come on field trips in search of rare trees, wildflowers and migrating songbirds.

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The Commons is still very much a work in progress, and the job of reclaiming the once-empty buildings will take at least another decade. But Minervini is confident that the project has more than enough momentum to carry itself to completion.

“It’s been wonderful to see these places come alive again, one by one,” he says.

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The red-tipped spires of Building 50 at the Commons

Grand Traverse Commons: Fun Facts

World Champion Cow
Of the thousands of inhabitants of the former Traverse City Asylum, only one is known to history - and she wasn’t even insane. She was Traverse Colantha Walker, a grand champion milk cow who belonged to the hospital’s extensive herd. When she died in 1932, staff and patients held a banquet in her honor and erected a large granite tombstone over her grave.

Munson Arboretum
James Decker Munson, who served as director of the asylum from 1885 to 1924, was an inveterate collector of rare trees and shrubs, and regularly brought back specimens from his travels to plant on the grounds. Dozens of them still survive, and are now over a century old, including a grove of rare copper beeches and mature specimens of sweetgum, English oak and tulip tree that are almost unknown at this latitude.

The Crimson Spires
The red-tipped spires that give the old asylum buildings their distinctly feudal appearance are not simply for decoration. They’re the vestiges of an ingenious 19th century air circulation system that used natural convection to draw cool air up into hollow spaces between the hospital’s two-foot-thick walls of the hospital; stale, hot air was expelled through the rooftop spires.