A new four-story building is coming to Front Street in downtown Traverse City.

Miller Snowden Development Group will construct the $5 million building in the open space between its existing four-story building at the corner of Front and Park and Cali’s to the west. The new structure will tie into the existing building and will share a common lobby and elevator.

The first floor of the new structure will include two spaces for restaurants and/or retail. The three floors above will be office space. The 30,000 square-foot building is expected to break ground in October and be complete in January 2018.

The new building’s first tenant will be Hagerty, which will lease the second and third floors, along with the second floor of the existing building for a total of 25,000 square feet of office space. Hagerty staff will begin moving into the existing building in January 2017. It will give the global insurance company three downtown Traverse City locations: its core campus at River's Edge, the former Bank of Northern Michigan building at 130 S. Union, and now 250 E. Front, which also currently houses Chase Bank and the National Cherry Festival.

“We’re expanding our workforce at our headquarters and need the best space for our employees to continue to work. When the opportunity to occupy a renovated, fresh space on Front Street was presented, it was a natural fit,” says Hagerty CEO McKeel Hagerty.

Adam Miller of Miller Snowden says expansion of the existing building was always the vision.

“When we purchased the property at 250 Front in 2013, we were drawn to…the opportunity to expand the building around an anchor tenant like Chase. Hagerty's creative use of space and dedication to this area make them an ideal second anchor for our expansion project.”

Building ownership recently completed a landscaping makeover around the existing building, including the addition of a walkway, stone benches, and a public piano along Park Street, which building owners hope will help alleviate the loss of the open space where the new structure will be built.

“We love that the bulding is a kind of community area, and we don’t want to take that away, which is why we’ve invested in the ‘micro park,’ street piano, and landscaping around there,” says Miller.

Downtown Development Authority Executive Director Rob Bacigalupi says the building and its largest tenant signal good news for downtown Traverse City, noting that shopper traffic had often stopped at Park Street instead of continuing to stroll further east to shops on the next block.

“Putting in a new building right along the sidewalk and improvements to the east of the building will, we hope, draw pedestrian traffic into the 300 block of East Front,” he says. “And sometimes it’s not always easy to accommodate a growing business like Hagerty downtown, so I’m happy to hear about that, too.”

The other challenge the new building presents is aesthetic consistency; the historic Cali’s building on one side was built in the 1890s, while the four-story Chase building on the other reflects its 1970s origins.

Cornerstone Architects’ John Dancer, who designed the expansion building, notes, “It’s really an expansion of the Chase building, so the floors have to line up with each other. But we’ve also intentionally moved the façade [of the new structure] out to line up with historic downtown, and we’ve attempted to reduce the scale by having the brick façade on only the first three levels, with the fourth floor recessed back.” The building utilizes brick to harken to history, but transitions to glass to fit with the more modern office building.

Originally built by National Bank & Trust, the Chase building had been owned by the Napleton Group of Westmont, Ill, which sold to the current ownership group in 2013. Current owners include Miller Investment Company, Snowden Companies, and MiLocal Investments.

The general contractor for the new building is REI of Traverse City.