By Nick Beadleston Executive Director @ Commonplace
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.”
- Closing Time, Semisonic 1998 (and also, yuh know, Senica, 63AD)
For a handful of hopeful years, Commonplace was proud to call The Box home. Now the time has come for us to say goodbye to this historic building.
After lengthy conversations with the current owners of The Box, we have jointly agreed that February will be our last month managing the 2nd floor office space. The offices will stay but Commonplace and our coworking and community meeting rooms will be moving fully across the street to our newest location in the Commongrounds building.
We are excited to hand over management of the 2nd floor of The Box to Doug Petersen who has many years of intimate involvement with the building. (He’s literally put blood, sweat, and tears into the place.)
Before we talk about the future of The Box, let’s take a minute to uncover it’s past.
A Concise(ish) History of The Box
1920 was an auspicious time to build a new building in Traverse City. Though the Great Depression was still several years off for the rest of the nation, the abrupt exodus of the timber industry hit Northern Michigan hard. A few years later, the Oval Dish Company moved out of the area, taking with it even more local jobs.
At that point, all we had left were the smokes. Bales and bales of Canadian tobacco, likely from Leamington, Ontario, had been coming into the area since the early 1900s for processing by the area’s dozen or so cigar manufactures. The US population, and with it cigar consumption, was soaring and savvy entrepreneurs were cashing in.
Okay so this is a photos of a cigar factory in Bay City . In 1914. And it shows tobacco not cigar boxes. But other than that, it’s the perfect picture…
It was during this cigar boom that Edward Kluzak and Charles Vader stood up the Traverse City Cigar Box Company. They constructed The Box in 1920 to expand their operations and to meet the increasing demand. Along with other similar ventures, they provided steady employment for under-skilled laborers from around the area.
Potentially a photo of Kluzak and Vader. But who the hell knows, those guys almost never posted to social…
Many women from the Boardman neighborhood experienced their first work outside of the home at the Traverse City Cigar Box Company. This may have contributed as much to the rising tide of gender equality as the recently ratified 19th Amendment.
“Woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but self-development, is her first duty in life; and this, not primarily for the sake of others but that she may become fully herself.”
- Matilda Joslyn Gage, 1893
(Though lest we put too rosy a spin on it, female workers were paid significantly and unjustly less than their male counterparts. Thanks to Ross Boissoneau for a great piece on this.)
But the writing was already on the wall for the Traverse City Cigar Box Company. Following the First World War, consumer preferences began shifting; returning GI’s had acquired a taste for cigarettes and the cigar industry began declining. Shortly before the Second World War, the Traverse City Cigar Box Company closed it’s door for good.
The next several decades of The Box’s history were less exciting. It past from various owners and was often used, very inauspiciously, for storage. In one of its sexiest incarnations it was even a power company service building. During the 1950s and 60s, The Box was rented by Wilsons Furniture Co. According to public records, they eventually purchased the building in 1974 for a whooping $25,000.
Was there ever a color that screamed “Welcome to the 1950s!!” louder than this?
Protection efforts, led by Sara Hardy, kept the building from being demolished more than once. In the early 1980s, she wrote a letter to the Michigan State Historical Preservation Office to have the building listed on the official registry, but was shot down.
The second floor of The Box eventually became the home of a very progressive physical therapy studio lead by (later Commonplacer) Jeff Haas and others. In addition to seniors and folks recovering from surgery, The Fitness Center helped train local residents with physical and mental developmental challenges.
Buy him a beer and Jeff will tell you heartwarming stories of taking these aspiring and inspiring athletes around the state to compete in places they hadn’t previously been welcome. (Editors note: Jeff also claims to have old TV ads for the space on VHS, but we can’t get him to hand em over…)
It was during this era of the building when Doug Petersen first walked through it’s doors as a trainer. But more on Doug in a bit.
Burgundy is a much more appealing color, don’t you think?
During the 2000s, Matt and Victoria Sutherland, recognizing the potential in the old building, purchased it and spent considerable time and money restoring it to it’s former luster. (They also added a lot of weirdly incongruous art around the place, but hey, your property, your decor choices.) The first floor became a short-term rental while the top floor served as the head quarters for their indie book magazine Forward Reviews. The Sutherlands put The Box back on the map as an architectural find and focal point of an otherwise bleak Eight Street.
Kate Redman expanded Commonplace from our original Lake Street location to part of the second floor of The Box in late 2017. During the next year, we grew to encompass the whole floor, with Forward moving to an adjacent property.
It was also during this time that Doug Petersen opened up his new physical therapy studio in the basement, welcoming in a whole new set of energetic and active folks to the building. Doug also helped build some of the cubicles in Commonplace and was always quick to keep the sidewalk shoveled and the entry way clean. The perfect building-mate.
The time-honored Northern Michigan Cubicle Raising inspired by the Amish.
Over the next several years, we were privileged to provide office, coworking and meeting space to so many great organizations, entrepreneurs and changemakers around our region. It was also around this time that we first began to look across the street and wonder what a brand new community building could look like there.
(Thanks to the Northern Express for originally digging up some of the info in this section.)
The Present and Future of The Box
From 2020 until…well really the end of 2022 were some rough times for Commonplace. But we don’t need to get into that here. (For more, please read Our Decade of Joyful Debt.) What matters is that we made our rent payments, if only just barely, and The Box survived to fight another day.
In 2022, the building sold to Jason and Julie Mattison. They were quick to reach out and communicate with their top-floor folks. Almost immediately, they also began investing in changes and improvements, beginning on the ground floor. A short note from Jason and Julie in one of our weekly members newsletters last year sums up the change.
”We are very happy to share our excitement as the proud new owners of The Box! Although we reside in Northville, MI, we have always felt Traverse City to be a second home to us. We have loved bringing our daughters up to Traverse for many years - and still feel as though we've only scratched the surface of all that TC has to offer.
We currently self-manage and own about 20 residential rental units--mostly in South-Eastern Michigan--through our LLC, RJLJ Properties. We're very excited to add the Box to our portfolio and start our expansion into the commercial/office space market.
We look forward to carrying on the Great legacy of the Box!”
Jason and Julie Mattison of RJLJ Properties
Around this time, Commonplace transitioned from renting the second floor to managing the space on behalf of Jason and Julie’s property holding company, RJLJ. Initially the arrangement worked out well: we were able to continue bring new mission-aligned organizations into the space and the Mattisons collected the revenue they sought as a return on their investment.
However, recently RJLJ and Commonplace has reevaluated our collaborative efforts and have reached the consensus that having one team managing the full building may provide a better overall experience for those who stay and work here.
Though we initially envisioned having two spaces on Eighth Street, we are grateful for the opportunity to focus even more energy and resources on making the experience at our Commongrounds location the best it can be.
Doug Petersen will do a fine job managing The Box’s offices. He has strong roots in the community and to the building itself. He’s spent years managing gyms and collaborating with other physical trainers. And, after all, how different is a shared office space than a shared gym, really. (Besides the sweat and everything.)
Boy we sure threw some good parties!
What This Means for You
At the end of February, all drop-in coworking and non-member meeting room rentals at The Box will cease. However, these services will continue across the street at Commonplace’s new space in the Commongorunds building.
As all current renters at The Box already know, all leases will remain in effect after we leave. And of course current (and past) renters at The Box are always be welcome to join our community-building events at our new location, like happy hours, quarterly breakfasts, and peer-learning opportunities.
The office space at The Box will likely become quieter, more conventional, and increasingly focused on professional service providers and remote workers. (Although there’s at least one exciting local artist moving in in April!)
So if this work environment appeals to you, please consider renting there. Currently, there are several vacant offices. If interested, please give us a shout and we can connect you with Doug. Or you can reach out to him directly: msudoug.petersen@gmail.com
We are very grateful for our time at such an amazing building with a rich local history.
We are also so incredibly grateful to those of you who helped weather a pandemic with us. And to those who chose to support community coworking at a time of great uncertainty. First and always Commonpalce is a community coworking space, and we wouldn’t still be here today without an amazing community of support.
See you across the street soon!
