The world was a very different place just 25 years ago. In the mid-90s, the worldwide web was coming into common usage, with the debut of eBay, and email becoming a familiar everyday tool. Seinfeld, ER and Friends were all the rage on TV, and Bill Clinton was reelected President in 1996.

In Traverse City, the ‘90s saw a host of developments, changes, and newsworthy events, and The Ticker explores all in our third and final Sunday lookback.

Grand Traverse Mall and the Horizon Outlet Mall opened in 1992. The National Cherry Festival was named a Top Ten Event by USA Today in 1997, ‘98 and ‘99. And in the last year of the decade, the Traverse Area District Library opened its doors, welcoming readers to its new location on Woodmere.

It was a quarter century ago that the State Theatre closed its doors. The screen remained dark at the downtown fixture for over a decade. During that time, it was purchased by Barry Cole and the State Theatre Group, with plans to convert it into a performing arts complex. Seven years later, the State Theatre Group and Interlochen Center for the Arts announced a partnership to renovate the theater. The building wound up in the hands of Rotary Charities, which donated the theater to the Traverse City Film Festival in May 2007. 

Big box stores arrived in Traverse City in 1996 with the opening of the Grand Traverse Crossings shopping center on South Airport Road across from Grand Traverse Mall. Today Home Depot, Walmart and Staples remain there; Toys R Us, Office Depot and Borders Books are gone.

In 1996, Mike and Denise Busley opened the first Grand Traverse Pie Company. The two were tired of their corporate lives in San Diego and after visiting meeting and working with the owner of Julian Pie Company in Julian, California, they returned to their home state. The first Grand Traverse Pie shop opened July 19, with six employees. It added other bakery items and a café in 2000. Today there are 15 Grand Traverse Pie shops scattered across Michigan and Indiana with more than 300 “pie people.”

It was also in 1996 that Rick and Lori Dubro purchased Papa J’s & Roosters Chicken in Grawn. They changed it from carry out and delivery to a full service sit-down restaurant. Today their Rico’s Cafe’ uses the same pizza recipe as the one Dubro and high school friend Tom Griffin used when they purchased their first restaurant, a pizzeria in Roseville, in 1978.

Another downtown landmark found new ownership when the Traverse City Rotary Club sold the Park Place to Regency Inns Management Inc. of Sioux Falls, S.D., and Milestone Hotel Investments of Minneapolis, Minnesota that year. Rotary had used funds from its Rotary Charities operations to buy the hotel at a bankruptcy court auction sale six years prior and had reopened in 1991 after a year-long, top-to-bottom renovation. Regency Hotel Management still owns the Park Place today; its own multi-million dollar renovation completed in 2018 included a 16,000-square-foot addition and the removal of the famed dome.

Centre Ice opened in 1997, and has been going strong ever since, helped by the Detroit Red Wings choice to hold the team’s pre-season hockey training camp there starting that same year.

Fires became major stories in the mid-90s. In 1994, a fire broke out in a pizza shop in the Hickory Corners plaza on Fourteenth Street. Despite the efforts of the Traverse and Elmwood Township Fire Departments, the wind-driven fire destroyed the entire building.

The biggest story – and largest fire – erupted when a tire-shredding machine at Carl's Retreading in Grawn ignited nearby scrap tires on Dec. 29, 1996. The tires were piled as high as 30 feet high in some areas, and the smoke was visible for miles as some 750,000 tires burned for weeks, reaching temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Nearby neighborhoods were evacuated.

Multiple fire departments responded, and the National Guard was eventually called in as well. Initial efforts to put the fire out used Aqueous Film Forming Foam (AFFF), but when that proved ineffective the fire was sprayed down with water and the burning tires were buried. The effects linger today, as the foam left behind a PFAS plume, which impacted nearby wells. Some affected homes have been connected to the Blair Township water system. 

In January 1996, the region stepped into the nascent world of craft beer when Jack Archiable opened Traverse Brewing Company in Williamsburg. It was the seventh licensed craft brewery in the state (there are now more than 300), and it produced the first beer brewed in northern Michigan since prohibition. Many of the area’s leading lights in the brewing industry worked there, including Brewery Terra Firma founder John Niedermaier, Joe Short of Short’s Brewing Company and Russell Springsteen, who would go on to found Right Brain Brewery.

Not far behind, Mackinaw Brewing Company, the city’s first brewpub, opened in 1997. North Peak Brewing Company soon followed.

Photos courtesy John Russell