MichiganRadio

Reinventing a Former Mental Insitution TRAVERSE CITY, MI (Michigan Radio) - It's pizza night the Pleasanton Brick Oven Bakery in Traverse City. Once a week, the baker closes shop early then opens the kitchen to the people in the neighborhood. Ray Minervini always helps the little kids cook their pizzas in the brick oven. "That's what's fun for me," he says. "I see the little kids and their eyes light up, that's pretty cool."

Kids are running in and out of the bakery and people sip red wine while they nibble pepperoni pizza. But things did not always look like this.

It used to be the Northern Michigan Asylum. For more than one-hundred years this place was a state-run mental hospital. In fact, the bakery is just a stone's throw away from what used to be the asylum's main building Building 50. It is massive and it looks like a huge haunted-house.
The hospital closed in 1989. In fact, many mental hospitals across the country closed during that time. Soon enough the structures here started to crumble and the community had a big tug of war over what to do with the property.

The buildings here caught Raymond Minervini's attention. He was moved by their history and beauty. Actually, he says these buildings, well, they speak. "They've told us that it's better when people are in them," he says.

That's basically what he's doing getting people back into the buildings. Raymond runs the Minervini Group along with his father Ray the pizza guy. They bought Building 50 and a couple of smaller buildings for one dollar and then turned around and spent $1.5 million putting new roofs on the structures.

Today it's called The Village at Grand Traverse Commons. It's modeled after the idea of old neighborhoods, where there's a main street studded with different stores, and people live above those stores. Raymond Minervini says he loves the idea of these old neighborhoods.

"We want that mix, so you are not segregated by what you need to do over the course of the day but you can do a lot of it in the same neighborhood, and more importantly you can do it hopefully without getting in your car."

Keith Schneider says the idea of centralized neighborhoods is something Michigan needs to do, and fast. Schneider writes for The New York Times about the economy and smart-growth urban design. Schneider says some places in Michigan already understand this idea.

"Grand Rapids has gotten this story, Ann Arbor has gotten this story, Traverse City has gotten this story but Detroit we haven't gotten this story. We have to do that and I think this project: reconstruction of an old state hospital into something entirely new a village, a neighborhood, is the kind of values and principles that has to be applied to our cities."

Schneider says the Minervini Group has made this place extremely walk-able and done their renovations in an environmentally-friendly way. Schneider says once Michigan can embrace these ideas and does these things with its cities, then it will recover.

Raymond Minervini, the guy doing all of this, agrees. He says you cannot save a historic building for the fun of it. He says there has to be an economic benefit. Minervini says his company is making a little money by selling the condos they've redeveloped in Building 50 and by leasing out the buildings to offices and stores. He also says they're bringing jobs, business opportunities, money, and energy to the area.

Minervini says if this project wasn't happening, this place would just be a bunch of crumbling buildings.


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