By the time construction begins on the new Freshwater Research and Innovation Center in approximately December 2025, Traverse City’s Great Lakes Children’s Center will have found a new home.
The 5,000-square-foot building in Greilickville that the Children’s Center now inhabits, as well as the building that houses the Discovery Center & Pier and a couple of pole barns that are being leased by the non-profit Maritime Heritage Alliance, will be razed to make way for the construction of the Freshwater Institute on the Discovery Center’s 17-acre campus on the west side of S. West Bayshore Dr., according to Discovery Center Director Matt McDonough.
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The Children’s Center has operated on a year-to-year lease and the decision by the museum’s board to move to a new location has been amicable and in the works for several years, he said.
Michael Long, the executive director of the Children’s Museum, said he and his board have tentatively identified a new address for the museum, but he declined to reveal the location because he said he didn’t want to put the museum’s capital campaign at risk.
Long said the museum has identified a 14,000-square-foot building with about 8,000 square feet of gallery space, which would be substantially larger than the 3,500 square feet of gallery space that the museum now has.
“We’ve known since about 2020 that this was going to happen,” he added. “This was not unexpected.”
Long said he is looking forward to moving into a larger space and meeting his board’s goal of turning the museum into a venue that is “all things Great Lakes from a child’s perspective.”