Local Guide

The Grand Traverse Commons

Building 50 is home to The Observatory. Here's what makes the Commons more than just our address.

The History

The Grand Traverse Commons began as the Northern Michigan Asylum, opened in 1885 and designed by renowned architect Gordon W. Lloyd in the Kirkbride style. That progressive philosophy held fresh air, natural light, and purposeful grounds to be essential to healing. The complex grew to over a dozen red-brick Victorian buildings set across a hillside west of downtown Traverse City, with farms, orchards, and a self-sustaining community of several thousand residents and staff.

After the state closed the facility in the 1980s, the buildings sat vacant for years. What followed is one of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the country: a nonprofit and the city partnered to restore the campus building by building, converting the historic structures into condominiums, offices, restaurants, and shops while preserving the architecture and the grounds. The transformation is still ongoing. A decades-long project that has brought the campus back to life without erasing what it was.

Where to Eat

The Grand Traverse Commons has a concentration of good restaurants that would be notable in any city, let alone a neighborhood on the west side of Traverse City. Trattoria Stella is the anchor: Italian done seriously, in a vaulted basement space inside Building 50, with housemade pasta and a wine list that leans northern Italian. Reservations are essential on weekends. Pepenero occupies another corner of the building with a menu that shifts by season, drawing on the same farm relationships that define TC's best dining.

Red Spire handles breakfast and lunch from a bright corner spot inside Building 50. Good coffee, excellent baked goods, and the kind of morning energy that makes it hard to leave. Higher Grounds is on the Commons grounds proper, a coffee roaster with a strong mission and a comfortable space. For drinks later in the day, Left Foot Charley pours their own wines and ciders, and Earthen Ales brews small-batch beer with local ingredients in a tap room open most afternoons. Salt 2 Sugar rounds out the options with a casual menu and a loyal local following.

The Shops

Building 50's long interior hallways — the same corridors that once connected wards — are now lined with independent shops. Landmark Books is the kind of bookstore that makes you want to stay in town another day: well-curated, locally focused, and staffed by people who actually read. Sweet Asylum handles the chocolate and confectionery side of things with housemade work that's worth picking up as a gift or just eating immediately. The Refillery TC stocks personal care and home goods in refillable containers, part of a broader Commons ethos that leans toward local and sustainable.

The shop mix changes as the restoration continues and new tenants arrive, but the character stays consistent — independent, thoughtful, the opposite of a mall.

The Grounds

The campus covers over a hundred acres on a wooded hillside, and most of it is walkable. A network of trails winds through old-growth trees and connects the buildings to the surrounding neighborhoods and the larger trail system beyond. The grounds have the feel of a park that happens to have buildings in it — open, quiet, with enough elevation to give views over the city and bay on clear days.

There are no chain businesses on the Commons, no franchises, no big-box adjacency. The covenants that govern the campus require it. That constraint is part of what makes the place work: every business here chose to be here, and the result is a coherence that most mixed-use developments can't manufacture.

Staying on the Commons

Most visitors to Traverse City stay in a hotel on Munson Avenue or downtown and drive out to the Commons to eat. Staying at The Observatory inverts that relationship — you're on the grounds, and everything else is a short drive or a longer walk. Dinner at Stella means walking downstairs. Morning coffee means crossing the courtyard to Higher Grounds. The trail system starts at the front door.

It's a different kind of visit: slower, more rooted in one place, and oriented around a neighborhood rather than a checklist of destinations. Guests who stay here tend to feel like they actually got to know Traverse City rather than just passing through it.