Traverse City: The Cherry Capital's Second Act

Traverse City has spent the last two decades quietly transforming from a cherry-farming hub into one of the Midwest's more sophisticated small-city food and wine destinations, all while keeping the cherry orchards that gave it a name. Wrapped around the base of Grand Traverse Bay and flanked by two wine-producing peninsulas, it functions as the de facto capital of Up North Michigan — the town every surrounding village measures itself against.

The National Cherry Festival

Every July, the National Cherry Festival takes over the downtown waterfront with air shows, concerts, and a fairground's worth of cherry-adjacent food, a tradition dating to 1925 that reflects the region's status as one of the largest tart cherry-producing areas in the country. Grand Traverse County's sandy soil and lake-moderated climate, nearly identical to the conditions that built Leelanau's wine industry, happen to suit cherry trees just as well.

Two Wine Peninsulas

Traverse City sits at the base of both the Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas, each a narrow finger of land extending into the bay and each lined with tasting rooms taking advantage of the lake-effect microclimate. Old Mission, the less-visited of the two, runs a single road up its spine to a lighthouse at the 45th parallel — precisely halfway between the equator and the North Pole — with vineyard views on both sides for nearly the entire eighteen-mile drive.

A Restored Asylum and a Working Downtown

The Grand Traverse Commons, formerly the Traverse City State Hospital, is a sprawling 1885 Kirkbride-plan asylum complex that has been converted into shops, restaurants, and condominiums, its ornate Italianate towers preserved rather than demolished — an adaptive-reuse project unusual in scale even by Midwest standards. Front Street downtown, meanwhile, has maintained a genuinely walkable commercial core, its independent bookstores and restaurants surviving the chain-store pressure that hollowed out comparable Main Streets elsewhere in the state.