Construction is planned to break ground in July on a new luxury boutique hotel on West Front Street – a project that would fill a long-vacant hole next to J&S Hamburg on one of downtown’s last undeveloped parcels.

Eric Helzer of Advanced Redevelopment Solutions – representing property owner Great Lakes Capital – shared new details on the project Thursday with the Grand Traverse County Brownfield Redevelopment Authority (BRA) board. The four-story riverfront hotel spanning 124 and 290 West Front Street will have underground parking and 140 “keys” – a typical industry term for rooms – on the upper three floors, Helzer said.

While plans for the ground floor are not “100 percent” set in stone yet, Helzer said the current approach calls for offering a “signature restaurant,” a French café, and a private whiskey club. Helzer showed the BRA board photos of upscale design elements intended to be used throughout those spaces and the rest of the building. Most of the property’s north side facing the Boardman River will be left open, Helzer said, with a planned courtyard in back. Helzer said the “very experienced development team” working on the project has overseen multiple other hotel projects throughout Michigan and the U.S.

Developers plan to break ground in July – “We’ll have to dance around Cherry Fest,” Helzer noted – with vertical construction starting next September. “The grand opening is going to be the first quarter of 2027,” Helzer said. While some environmental cleanup work has already taken place on the site, more is planned to follow – including excavating contaminated soil to make way for the underground parking. The site was previously occupied for decades by Grand Traverse Auto, with a repair facility and underground storage tanks creating contamination that eventually qualified the property as a brownfield site. Grand Traverse Auto was demolished in 2007, with the property sitting vacant since then.

The planned hotel is also downstream from an offsite pollution plume to the south connected to a former dry-cleaning facility. Developers are working with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) to install a vapor mitigation system along the front portion of the building on Front Street to protect both the hotel and the river, Helzer said. Great Lakes Capital must submit the design for that system to EGLE – along with documentation of secured project financing and a general contractor – by the end of January as part of EGLE grant and loan funding requirements for the project.

The property is covered by an existing BRA brownfield plan, which is expected to come back before the board in April for budget line adjustments. BRA Executive Director Anne Jamieson-Urena says because the plan already exists for the site and is not anticipated to have any formal amendments, it would not have to go through the BRA/city/Grand Traverse County approval process again – nor would it trigger a required vote if Proposal 1 passes next week. That proposal would require a public vote when creating, amending, or extending any tax increment financing (TIF) plans in Traverse City, including brownfield plans. While that would affect future new brownfield projects in the city – or major changes to existing ones – status-quo plans already in place would not be affected, Jamieson-Urena says. Helzer said developers also plan to keep the building under 60 feet with no special variances, meaning it wouldn’t trigger the public vote required for structures over that height.

As previously reported by The Ticker, developer Jeff Smoke of Great Lakes Capital initially pursued plans for a mixed-use development on the West Front Street property that would have offered both market-rate and affordable/workforce housing units. He said the team’s inability to secure a variety of local and state incentives led to the change in plans. “It’s very challenging to build (affordable) housing development without a true offset,” Smoke previously said. “I think it was over four years that we tried to make it work, but the numbers just didn’t pencil out.”

Smoke said a hotel would likely be a better long-term use for the riverfront property. “The land is so expensive up there, a hotel is a better product for super high-valued land,” he said. “We also think there’s a real need in the market for a premium, boutique hotel.” Another hotel project is also underway across the Boardman River in the Warehouse District on two properties fronting Grandview Parkway. The four-story hotel, dubbed The Syndicate, will be a Marriott Tribute hotel with 110 rooms, a ground-floor restaurant, a spa and fitness center, a banquet room, three board rooms, and a rooftop bar. An adjacent condo complex called TC Continental is also planned for the site.