When artist Kim Bazemore bought a former Traverse City dry cleaning shop with plans to convert it into a funky art gallery, she didn’t realize she was getting an architectural treasure too.

The Ticker followed Bazemore into the basement of Cogs Creek Gallery and Studio, which is housed in a century-old building on Maple Street that was formerly home to Coddington Cleaners. What we found? The huge vault where the owners of Coddington Cleaners each summer stored furs – minks, sables, ermines and the like – for the elegant wives and daughters of Traverse City’s early-century lumber barons and other well-to-do residents.

“People are blown away when they see the space,” says Bazemore. “There’s a 14-foot ceiling, the walls are two feet thick, and the ceiling is 14 inches thick.”

In addition to storing furs, Bazemore suspects that tanning operations may have also been conducted in the 6,000-square-foot vault. She’s found scraps of pelts and leather remnants, some with fur. Guarding the entrance to the vault is a mammoth locking door manufactured by the Anakin Lock Co. of Chicago.

A handful of other long-forgotten vaults/safes dot the dark basements of Traverse City historic downtown buildings, including one at 201 E. Front Street, where Northwestern Bank, and later, Federico’s Design Jewelers once operated. The century-old building, now owned by Jeff and Marie Schwartz and empty, houses a hefty vault and door manufactured by the Diebold Safe and Lock Co. of Canton, OH.

"Former banks provide the perfect setting for jewelry stores," says Karen Johnson, former General Manager of Federico's when it occupied the site. "Every night, we'd remove the jewelry from the cases and store it in the vault. It also housed all client information, repair and custom work."

Johnson's history with that vault extends back to her childhood in the 1960s, when her father served as a trust officer for the buildings then-resident, National Bank and Trust. She lets The Ticker in on a secret: "The building actually houses three vaults; the two downstairs are now decommissioned. My father's joke, when my two brothers and I would visit, was that there was a separate vault for each of us kids in case we misbehaved."

A short stroll down Front Street, at Robert Frost Shoes, is another aged repository. Two years ago the shoe store moved into the former home of Martinek’s Jewelers and inherited a pair of safes. One small unit was sold, but a floor-to-ceiling vault from the Grand Rapids Safe Co. is still there. Taped inside is the aged yellowed business card of Pinkerton Detective Agency superintendent R.H. Peterson of Detroit. It’s dated Nov. 1916.

With an impressive mechanism, the safe stands guard in a corner of the store’s brick-lined interior, but its duties are no longer as glamorous as they once were. Says manager Joe Frost, “We use it as a closet to store brooms and ladders.”