Walk the Boardman Lake Loop on any weekday evening and you already know the rhythm. Runners peel off the boardwalk near Medalie Park. Dogs pull their owners toward the water access stairs. Somebody's always locking a bike outside Oryana Community Co-op or grabbing a pint at Right Brain Brewery before finishing the last mile home. It has worked this way since the final stretch of trail closed the loop in July 2022, connecting neighborhoods on both sides of the lake into one four-mile circuit.
But if you've kept walking south past the University Center toward South Airport Road, you've probably noticed the part of the loop that never quite caught up. Logan's Landing has sat there for years, half full, half boarded, the kind of place locals mention almost apologetically. That's the piece of the story that just changed, and it changed in a way that says more about who this trail actually serves than any tourism brochure ever has.
The Loop Took Thirty Years to Finish. This Corner Took Even Longer.
The Boardman Lake Loop Trail was three decades in the making before TART Trails, the City of Traverse City, Garfield Township and Grand Traverse County finally closed the gap in 2022. That's a long runway for a four-mile path, and most of it paid off immediately. By the first eleven months of 2023, TART Trails had already logged 212,243 trail counts at the Medalie Park and Logan's Landing crossing alone, a volume of foot and bike traffic that would make most commercial corridors in the region jealous.
Logan's Landing itself tells a different story. Built in the 1960s, it straddles the Boardman River with two separate halves connected by a pedestrian bridge that's been closed off for years, structurally sound but unused. The complex is grandfathered in as a nonconforming structure under Garfield Township zoning, which has scared off buyers who might otherwise have converted it into something denser. So you had a trail pulling in six-figure annual foot traffic passing directly by a property that couldn't get out of its own way.
That mismatch is exactly what just got interesting.
Short's Brewing Bought the East Side, and They're Not Chasing Front Street's Crowd
In April 2026, Short's Brewing announced it had purchased Logan's Landing East along South Airport Road, teaming up with Keen Technical Solutions under a new partnership called South Boardman Lake District LLC. The plan is a taproom with a riverside deck, using roughly 10,000 square feet of the 16,000-square-foot site, with a target opening in spring 2027.
What makes this worth paying attention to isn't the square footage. It's who Short's says they're building for. Scott Newman-Bale, the company's CEO, was direct about it:
"We are here to create people, bring people together. Not just to drink, but to eat, to enjoy the outdoor space, to shop at other places around us."
Newman-Bale pointed to Short's own Bellaire location, where he says about half of visitors don't drink alcohol at all, as the model for what he wants on Boardman Lake: affordable, consistent, and built for people who live nearby rather than for a tourist season. He's also framed the Bellaire footprint as having helped revive a downtown that was once roughly 70 percent vacant. Whether that repeats itself on South Airport Road remains to be seen, but the intent is on the record. This is a bet on locals as the core customer, placed deliberately away from Front Street.
Tim Pulliam of Keen Technical Solutions put it in terms that locals walking the loop will recognize immediately. He doesn't think of the trail as a trail at all anymore.
"Everyone talks about the loop, but I really look at it as like a hub," he's said. "And it's a hub that connects all of our neighborhoods."
The Mill District Is the Same Bet, Placed on the Other End of the Loop
Pulliam isn't just involved at Logan's Landing. He's also the developer behind the Mill District, a four-building mixed-use project going up at the former TC Millworks site on Woodmere Avenue. The Traverse City Commission approved the project's planned unit development in August 2025, and crews broke ground that November.
Taken together, these two projects aren't a coincidence sitting on the same trail network. They're the same developer making the same argument twice: that the loop's real value isn't as a scenic amenity for weekend visitors, but as daily infrastructure for the people who already live within walking distance of it. Pulliam has said as much directly, calling the Logan's Landing project a catalyst alongside the Mill District to help "create activation around the entire loop."
The Trail's Busiest Weekend Just Happened
If you wanted proof that this corridor already belongs to residents more than tourists, look at Labor Day weekend. The Traverse City Track Club's Loop the Lake race returned on September 4, 2026, presented by Munson Healthcare, with a new vendor this year, Playa Bowls, serving finishers. It's an evening race, starting at Hull Park on the lake's north side, timed deliberately to open the stretch locals have taken to calling the start of "locals' summer," the slower, quieter weeks after the tourist calendar empties out.
That timing matters. A race built around a 6 p.m. start on a holiday weekend isn't designed to catch visitors passing through. It's designed for people who already know the course, who've already walked past the boardwalk over the lake dozens of times, and who show up because it's become an annual fixture of their own calendar rather than a destination event.
The Construction You Might Still Remember Is Already Behind You
If your last memory of this stretch of trail is orange cones, that's fair. In June 2026, the city ran utility work near Hull Park and the trail's northern access point, closing the segment between Hull Park and Franklin Street for several hours at a stretch to pull in a new force main pipe, with additional excavation work on Hannah Avenue running through late June. Pedestrians and cyclists were detoured through Railroad Place and Woodmere Avenue while it lasted. That work wrapped by the end of June, well ahead of both the Logan's Landing announcement gaining traction and the Labor Day race.
It's easy to read utility construction as background noise, but it's worth connecting to the bigger picture. Infrastructure upgrades like this tend to show up right before, not after, a corridor absorbs more density. The pipe work wasn't really about the trail. It was about making sure the ground underneath it can support what's about to sit on top of it.
What You'll Actually Notice on Your Next Walk
None of this changes the loop itself. It's still the same four-mile circuit past Medalie Park, the University Center, and the wooded eastern stretch that locals have used for laps, commutes, and dog walks for years. What's changing is what sits along it. Here's the short version of the timeline:
- Spring 2027: Short's Brewing's taproom targeted to open on the east side of Logan's Landing, with a restored riverside deck.
- Now through completion: The Mill District's four buildings under construction on Woodmere Avenue, following an August 2025 approval and November 2025 groundbreaking.
- Already resolved: The June 2026 utility work near Hull Park that temporarily rerouted trail traffic.
- Annual and growing: The Traverse City Track Club's Loop the Lake race, now a fixture of the Labor Day weekend calendar with a new food vendor added in 2026.
The pattern underneath all of it is the same. Investors are betting on the people who already live near this water, not the ones visiting it for a week in July. For anyone who's spent the last few years wondering when the south end of the loop would catch up to the rest of it, that's the answer. It already has, it's just still under construction.
If you're watching this stretch of the lake change and wondering what it might mean for property values or timing nearby, that's a conversation worth having before the taproom opens rather than after. Schedule a consultation with Traverse City Real Estate and we'll walk you through what's actually happening on the ground, block by block.
