Just how much does the Traverse City business community rely on the region’s key thoroughfares? It’s a question that got tested this year as the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) launched an ambitious rebuild of East Front Street/Grandview Parkway.

The project, which cost nearly $25 million and spanned 2.2 miles of highway in the Traverse City core, is not complete. From its March start, work on the Parkway isn’t expected to finish up until November. But with peak tourism season over, now seems like a good time to ask: Just how impactful was this project on local businesses? The TCBN asked five different organizations located along the impacted corridor – a retailer, a restaurant, a nonprofit, a business office and a motel – for their opinions.

The first of these is below, but be sure to check out The Traverse City Business News (The Ticker's sister publication) for more reactions and tons of additonal content. Click here to subcribe and click here to find out where you can pick up a copy. 

The business: Blue Goat Wine & Provisions
The classification: Retail
The impact: 4/5

The first week of construction was a rocky one for The Blue Goat, the wine shop that sits at the corner of Peninsula Drive and East Front Street.

Early sidewalk removal in front of the store destabilized one of the building’s foundation walls, causing it causing a crack up the building’s exterior stucco. Speaking to TCBN sister publication The Ticker at the time, Blue Goat owner Sebastian Garbsch said it appeared that when the sidewalks were repaired in the past, concrete was poured directly up to the building; ripping that sidewalk out caused the destabilization.

“It was funny: Four to six weeks before the project, I mentioned to the building owner that it might not be a bad idea to build a few extra supports in the basement, just in case,” Garbsch said. “Boy, did that pay off. In the end, the building was never unsafe, according to engineers that looked at it, and although repairs were needed, it was just another one of those inconveniences. We had a large mountain of back stock that we had to keep on the upper level, for example, but we finally cleared that in mid-August.”

The building damage wasn’t even the peak of The Blue Goat’s construction-related troubles, though. When asked to grade the severity of road closure impacts on a scale of one to five – with one being the least severe and five being the most – Garbsch notes that the latter weeks of the project were actually slower for business than the earlier ones.

“I would say a two for the first three months, but a five the last month,” Garbsch said. “The last month (of the project’s first phase) was June, and that’s when we begin relying on tourists. It’s usually one of our busiest months. But given that June was also when construction on our intersection was being done, the way to get to us was very difficult for customers to find and changed quite often. The first three months had us thinking things would be fine, and then the last five or six weeks surprised us and ended up being much more difficult.”