The Village at Grand Traverse Commons
Near Traverse City, Michigan
When Traverse City State Hospital closed in nineteen eighty-nine, most people assumed the huge asylum on the hill would be demolished. Instead it became one of the largest historic-preservation projects in the entire United States. In two thousand two, a developer named Ray Minervini and his family took ownership of the crumbling campus and began the slow work of saving it.
The scale is hard to grasp. The old hospital held roughly one million square feet of brick, wood, and stone, and Building Fifty alone, the one with the red spires, runs nearly four hundred thousand square feet, laid up from something like eleven million bricks that were fired locally in the neighboring settlement of Greilickville. Today the site is called the Village at Grand Traverse Commons, and the wards that once held patients now hold wine bars, bakeries, bookshops, apartments, and offices, wrapped by more than four hundred acres of parkland and walking trails.
The cleanup and restoration drew something like one hundred eighty-two million dollars in investment, and in two thousand eleven the project won Michigan's Governor's Award for Historic Preservation. A place designed to heal minds found, a century later, a second life.
