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12/10/2006
Bakery, winery coming to CommonsPleasanton Brick Oven Bakery and vintner find homes
Jennifer Ulbrich and husband Bryan Ulbrich plan on opening the Left Foot Charley Winery in a renovated Grand Traverse Commons building. The couple is pictured with 1-year-old daughter Ella Ulbrich. TRAVERSE CITY — Bread and wine, building blocks of communities throughout the world for thousands of years, are the newest cornerstones of a European-style village sprouting up at the Grand Traverse Commons. In the shadows of massive Building 50, a pair of small but successful local entrepreneurs are toiling to add two more unique entries to developer Ray Minervini's eclectic mix of people and places at The Village of Grand Traverse. "What makes a village more than a bakery?” asked Gerard Grabowski, who's relocating Pleasanton Brick Oven Bakery from his family's home north of Manistee County's Bear Lake into the ex-fire station at the former state hospital grounds. Right behind him is local winemaker Bryan Ulbrich, an award-winning vintner on the Old Mission and Leelanau peninsulas for the past 11 years. He's converting the ex-laundry building at the old state hospital grounds into what he calls an "urban winery” called Left Foot Charley, Ulbrich's childhood nickname earned for a tendency to trip over his left foot. The bakery and winery, both slated to open next summer, will create two new uses in the growing, yet compact complex that includes housing, restaurants, offices and galleries, a proposed hotel and plans for more unique businesses ranging from a cheese factory to a dessert shop. "It's more of a whole community, not just retail, lawyers and real estate agents,” Ulbrich said. "We think it's an exciting place in terms of being historic and all the different uses here.” To Minervini, the bakery and winery are perfect complements to the vision he's had for Grand Traverse Commons since he started to redevelop the site more than three years ago. His goal was to create a mix of homes, retail shops and professional offices in a historic setting where the various uses interact with and rely on each other. "As a developer, what's important to me is to get the right people in here ... people who are excited about what they do,” Minervini said. "We have the opportunity to go after tenants who bring value to other people's businesses as well.” Grabowski and his wife, Jan Shireman, built a dedicated following of customers over the past 14 years with a variety of organic breads baked in a wood-fired brick oven. They've sold their bread at local farm markets and specialty stores like Oryana. "We've been riding the wave of people who think about where their food comes from,” Grabowski said. "This is the way they've made (bread) for 6,000 years.” Their success led Grabowski to search for a new bakery location. "What we're giving up is charming, but we've outgrown it,” he said. The search ended at Building 66, the old fire station at the former state hospital grounds, where Grabowski and his helpers carefully piece together a new brick oven that will be baking bread long after he's hung up his apron. The in-town location, the century-old history of the structures and the wooded Commons campus make it a perfect site, he said. "In five years, we would regret not being part of this,” he said. Ulbrich and his wife, Jennifer, started Left Foot Charley two years ago to craft wines from grapes grown on the Old Mission Peninsula, in addition to his work as a winemaker at Peninsula Cellars and for Gill's Pier Vineyards in Leelanau County. They considered various sites around the region before settling on The Village. "It took me about two seconds to decide this is where I wanted to be,” Ulbrich said. A winery would seem to have little in common with a laundry building, but Ulbrich said it was a "perfect” match for his plans. The building is equipped with large drains needed to make wine, and has space for a tasting room, retail sales, storage and a front deck overlooking a creek that winds through the property. Both families said they're excited to be part of the snowballing energy surrounding the Commons. "We're so happy to be part of all this,” Ulbrich said. "Everybody across the board up here has been interested in what we're doing and they are behind us.” [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
