Bay Harbor is a huge resort development stretching for five miles along Little Traverse Bay on eleven hundred acres that was reclaimed from industrial use. Previously, Dundee Cement Company quarry and plant (Penn-Dixie plant) operated two seventy-foot-deep quarries of several hundred acres excavated into Charlevoix limestone of the Traverse Group. Now, with its golf courses and clubhouse, marina, yacht club, shopping center, inn and houses, and equestrian center, Bay Harbor aspires to be a world-class resort. It is the largest reclamation project in North America. CMS Land Company (a unit of CMS Energy Corporation and a subsidiary of Consumers Power Company, a Detroit utility) and Victor International Company, led by David V. Johnson of Bloomfield Hills, developed Bay Harbor. In 1994–1995 the developers dynamited the cement factory's silos and undertook a massive site cleanup; put in roads, sewers, and utilities; carved out the one-hundred-acre yacht harbor (Bay Harbor Lake) from the two former limestone quarries, linked it to Lake Michigan and built a yacht club; and, with environmental permits from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, moved and stabilized millions of tons of cement kiln ash as the foundation for championship golf courses.
Bay Harbor comprises twenty-five separate community clusters with more than 535 houses and condominiums and 800 housing units anticipated in all. Architectural styles borrow from late- nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century resort architecture on Mackinac Island and at Harbor Point.
Boyne USA developed the huge Inn at Bay Harbor (1998, Fuller-Nichols of Harbor Springs; 3600 Village Harbor Drive) in The Village, the residential and commercial district. The inn is based on the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. Terraced into a hillside and parallel to the Bay Harbor Lake shoreline is the large stone- and wood-shingled Bay Harbor Yacht Club (1995–1996; 4300 Vista Drive). The stuccoed and stone clubhouse of Bay Harbor Golf Club (1996; 5800 Coastal Ridge Drive) overlooks the golf course's eighteenth hole. Jim Nordlie of Archiventure Group in Denver designed both. Under a long, horizontal gambrel roof, the Olympic-class Bay Harbor Equestrian Club (1997, Fuller-Nichols; 5251 U.S. 31 South) hugs the ground on its hilltop site.
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