Walk the interior of Boardman on a September evening and you could set your watch back fifty years. The Victorian frame houses along the tree-lined blocks between State and Webster still carry the same clapboard silhouettes they had when lumber barons built them. The neighborhood's historic district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, covers roughly 174 structures, many of them the original homes of Traverse City's early lumber-boom families, including Captain Henry Boardman himself, along with the Havilands and the Hulls. The district declined through the 1920s as larger houses split into rooming houses, then came back to life starting in the 1970s. Since then, the core of the neighborhood has barely moved.
Walk two blocks in any direction and that stillness ends. On the river side, a $23 million reconstruction of the Union Street Dam is entering its final phase. On the Webster Street side, a 1913 schoolhouse is finishing a six-owner condo conversion. On the Boardman Lake side, a decades-old bike shop is relocating into a brand-new development already selling condos. All three projects look nearly finished if you just glance at them from the sidewalk. None of them are. Each one has a specific, non-obvious reason the real opening date sits well past what the visible progress suggests, and that gap, not any single ribbon-cutting, is the thing worth understanding if you live here.
Three Projects, One Loop
The three sites sit close enough together that a single walk or bike ride touches all of them:
- FishPass, replacing the Union Street Dam where the Boardman-Ottaway River meets downtown
- The Boardman Building, the former Ida Tompkins/TCAPS Administration Building at 412 Webster Street
- The Mill District, a new mixed-use development at 1032 Woodmere Avenue on Boardman Lake
Each has a different developer, a different funding structure, and a different reason for running later than its first public timeline. Here is where each one actually stands as of this month, not as of the press release that announced it.
| Project | Location | Visible Progress Right Now | Actual Opening Target | What's Actually Gating It |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FishPass | Union Street Dam | Old dam demolished, spillway built, in-river work wrapping up | Full site, including the education building, by August 2027 | Upland park and education building now under a direct contract with Spence Brothers, signed June 2026 |
| Boardman Building | 412 Webster St | Renovation visibly underway on all three floors | Spring occupancy was the target set in November 2025, now passed with no confirmed move-in yet | Six-owner condo association must close before any unit occupies |
| Mill District | 1032 Woodmere Ave | Groundbreaking held, condos already selling before public listing | Commercial building targeted for March 2027 | City-required trail, sidewalk, and parking improvements must finish before occupancy permits issue |
The River's New Deadline
FishPass has been the neighborhood's longest-running story. The Army Corps of Engineers originally priced the in-stream construction at $19.3 million back in 2020, but a lawsuit over whether the dam site counted as protected city parkland pushed the actual start of work to 2024, and the price climbed to $23.3 million by the time crews finally broke ground. That much is old news to anyone who has lived here through it.
What changed this year is who is running the final stretch. On June 9, 2026, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission signed a direct contract with Spence Brothers, the same Traverse City firm that built the in-river phases, to handle the upland work: pathways, an education pavilion, and a research and education building. The Army Corps stepped back from that piece entirely, since the scope no longer required their heavy in-water construction expertise. City commissioners approved the contractor's right of entry on June 15. By late June, Spectrum News was reporting that in-river work was expected to wrap within weeks, with attention shifting toward the upland park features residents will actually use. The full site, including that education building, is now targeted for completion by August 2027, not the "2026" residents heard for years.
The spring 2026 flooding that washed out a bridge over the river near Beitner Road did more than damage infrastructure downstream. The Fishery Commission's own project notes show that the same high water fouled the horizontal submerged screen weir at the salmon weir with sediment, cutting sea lamprey capture rates below what the team saw in 2025. Staff still processed more than 19,000 fish between April and June and pushed the total number of tagged fish in the monitoring system past 4,000, so the science kept moving even while the weather worked against it.
For anyone still fishing this stretch, the practical detail hasn't changed: the river remains open through October 1 this year, and the lower river below Sabin Dam stays open year-round regardless of what the calendar says about the upper river.
A School Building Becomes Six Owners
The Boardman Building has a longer backstory than most residents realize. Built in 1913 as Boardman School and later renamed for longtime educator Ida Tompkins, the structure sat with the Traverse City Area Public Schools until the district decided to consolidate its administrative offices elsewhere. Architect Ken Richmond and contractor Eric Gerstner, who had known each other as neighbors on Webster Street since the 1990s, made a late $750,000 offer to save the building rather than let it be demolished for new construction, and TCAPS accepted it in 2023 over higher bids that would have torn it down.
The redevelopment that followed split the building into a six-owner condominium association. Richmond and Gerstner retained oversight of 12 workforce apartments on the lowest floor, income-restricted for renters earning between 60 and 100 percent of the county's area median income, with projected rents starting around $1,000 for a studio. Ford Insurance is lined up for the middle-floor office space. The top floor became four high-end residential condos with soaring ceilings, oversized windows, and exposed brick. None of it pencils out without the brownfield tax increment financing the city approved, since the developers' own projections showed the workforce units losing money without that support. Traverse City commissioners signed off unanimously, and multiple Boardman Neighborhood Association members spoke in favor, citing both the building's preservation and the developers' contractual ban on short-term rentals in the original structure.
The November 2025 announcement targeted spring occupancy for the first tenants. That spring has now come and gone, and this is the piece worth watching over the next few months: whether the building's first residents are actually moving in on schedule, or whether Boardman gets another season of scaffolding on Webster Street.
The Lake Side: Brick Wheels Finds a New Home
The Mill District sits on the former TC Millworks property, a narrow, oddly shaped 1.6-acre lot with three street frontages that owner Tim Pulliam of Keen Technical Solutions bought in 2022 after the millwork company outgrew it and relocated to Aero Park Drive. City commissioners approved the planned unit development in August 2025, and a groundbreaking followed that November. Construction through 2026 has focused on the commercial building, now targeted for completion in March 2027, with three residential buildings to follow.
The project's best-known tenant is Brick Wheels, the decades-old bike shop that owner Andy Weir bought in 2022 and is now relocating from Eighth Street into what Pulliam describes as a local adventure hub, alongside bike and paddleboard rentals and a planned restaurant and brewery space. Weir has already secured a liquor license covering the property. A coffee shop called The Loop is set to open alongside it in spring 2027. According to reporting from the Traverse Ticker, condo sales inside the development were already underway in August 2026, months before the listings even went public.
The detail that matters most for anyone who walks or bikes this stretch is the trail connection. The project includes a new non-motorized path linking Carver Street to the Boardman Lake Loop Trail, with switchbacks built in for ADA compliance. TART Trails specifically praised the extension for reaching beyond the Mill District into the Traverse Heights neighborhood. But city planning commissioners attached a condition to that approval: the trail, the Carver Street sidewalk, and the Sheffer Street parking paving all have to be finished before any occupancy permit can be issued for the buildings. The infrastructure isn't a bonus that arrives after the businesses open. It's the gate they have to pass through first.
One More Piece: The Campus Across the Lake
Boardman Lake's edge has one more piece in motion that has nothing to do with construction cranes. Northwestern Michigan College's Board of Trustees voted in December 2025 to begin negotiations with the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians to sell NMC's Boardman Lake Campus off Cass Road, the building that served as the college's University Center for three decades before those programs moved to the main campus last fall. The tribe has said it plans to convert the site into a centralized governmental services center for the county and surrounding region. It's a different kind of transaction than a bike shop moving buildings, but it's the same underlying pattern: another institutional owner on this same lakefront renegotiating what its footprint looks like, in the same calendar year as everything else.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of these four threads changes the character of the historic core. The Victorian houses on the interior blocks aren't going anywhere, and the National Register designation that has protected them since 1978 isn't up for renegotiation. What's changed is the edge, and the lesson from watching all four projects at once is that visible progress and an open door are two different things. A dam can be demolished and a spillway built and the site still be a year from finished. A building can be under visible renovation on every floor and still have no confirmed move-in date months after the season it was supposed to happen in. Condos can be selling before the building has a public listing and the doors still won't open for another six months.
The practical takeaway for this fall and winter: watch Webster Street for actual move-in activity at the Boardman Building, watch the river for the pedestrian bridge that follows this summer's sheet pile removal at FishPass, and don't expect Brick Wheels' new home or The Loop coffee shop to open before spring 2027 no matter how finished the site looks from Woodmere Avenue. In this neighborhood, the visible construction is never the clock. The permits, the contracts, and the condo closings are.
If you're curious how any of this is shaping values or timing on the streets closest to the river and the lake, The Mitten Group keeps a close eye on this exact stretch of Traverse City and is always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground.
