Order a cone at Ziggy's this month and you're doing more than waiting in the line that wraps around the building on South Saginaw Street most summer evenings. Ziggy's has held that corner since 1987, and the wait to place your order has always been part of the point, a chance to catch up with whoever's standing next to you. That corner has a closing date coming. Nobody, including the people who run the businesses on it, seems to agree on exactly when.
A few doors down, Carlette Broaddus has spent 30 years working at the Crossbow Inn, long enough to say the restaurant never had a real makeover in all that time. Both buildings sit inside the footprint of a project that's already reshaping this stretch of downtown, and this August carries two separate countdowns for anyone who lives here. One is counting down the days left with these two names on South Saginaw. The other is counting up to the single busiest week Grand Blanc has all year, when a country music headliner and a PGA Tour Champions field descend on Warwick Hills at the same time.
The Corner Downtown Is Losing
The city approved site plans for a three story, 48,000 square foot mixed use building called La Piazza, a $23 million project that will replace both Ziggy's Ice Cream and the Crossbow Inn with new living space, retail, dining, and community areas. For a restaurant that's operated out of the same building for three decades, the upgrade list is long overdue.
"They've always wanted to do outdoor seating here and we never had the parking space to do it. So now we'll have outdoor seating and we'll have the parking space and we'll have windows, which is a big complaint here, there's no windows," Broaddus said.
Some pieces of the old building are expected to move into the new one, though not everything survives the transition. Ziggy's is planned to get a new home inside the same development once it's finished.
Nobody Can Agree on the Exact Day
The reporting on this doesn't cooperate with a tidy timeline. Broaddus told ABC12 back in April that Crossbow was closing while the project moved forward, with demolition planned for June 1, a date that's already come and gone by now. A separate report from that same week had the whole La Piazza site breaking ground in September instead, with Ziggy's staying open long enough to finish its full season first.
Those two accounts never lined up, and nothing in the coverage since has settled which one held. What that means for you is simple. This corner has either already started coming down or it's still weeks from breaking ground, depending on which spring report turned out to be right, and the only way to know for certain is to drive past. If you've been telling yourself you'll get there before it changes, treat that window as closing now, not sometime later this year.
What's Already Moving in Around It
Downtown isn't just losing names this year. It's gaining a few, and the timing on one of them has already shifted once.
Anna's House, the Michigan breakfast and lunch chain known for gluten free pancakes and vegan scrambles, is taking over the former Big Boy space in downtown Grand Blanc. Early reports out of the chain's home market pointed to a summer 2026 opening, but ABC12's more recent reporting in April pinned the timeline to this fall. If you've been telling friends it's opening any week now, the correction is worth passing along.
On Holly Road, Duke's, a new steak and seafood concept, is moving into the space at 185 Holly Road that Da Edoardo occupied for 25 years before closing in June 2025. That's a long run for any restaurant to hold one address, and the sign now up on the building is the clearest evidence yet that the space won't sit empty much longer.
And at 210 Reid Road, Irene's Craft Kitchen & Biergarten has become the kind of spot that didn't exist downtown a few years ago. Owners Sara and Erik Perkins named it after Erik's grandmother, a German immigrant, and built the concept around Eastern European comfort food alongside American bar staples. The biergarten runs live music Thursday through Saturday with additional sets during Sunday brunch, bar manager Tim Dijkstra keeps a rotating tap list, and the TopGolf Swing Suites give the place something none of its downtown neighbors offer.
The Week That Makes All of This Collide
None of this turnover happens in a quiet month. The Ally Challenge presented by McLaren returns to Warwick Hills Golf & Country Club August 24 through 30, an official PGA Tour Champions stop that brings 78 professionals to compete for a $2.2 million purse. Warwick Hills has hosted professional golf since the Buick Open years, first from 1958 to 1969 and again from 1977 to 2009, with past champions on that leaderboard including Tiger Woods, Jim Furyk, Ben Crenshaw, Fred Couples, Vijay Singh, and Billy Casper.
This year's headline act plays Saturday. Keith Urban, a four time Grammy winner with 15 Academy of Country Music Awards, headlines the ninth annual Ally Community Concert on the driving range following Saturday's round, with the Wildflowers performing Friday night at the Concert @17. Since the tournament's 2018 debut, it has donated more than $9.6 million to charities across the greater Flint area, which is part of why the week draws crowds well beyond golf fans.
A few things to know if you're planning around it:
- Public parking runs through shuttle lots at Cook Elementary School and the Grand Blanc High School East Campus, roughly two miles from Warwick Hills, with continuous shuttles during tournament hours.
- Parking costs vary by day, and proceeds from the high school lot go directly to Grand Blanc High School programs.
- Grounds tickets include admission to both the Friday and Saturday concerts, so a single ticket covers the Wildflowers and Keith Urban.
Timing Your Own August Around Both Clocks
Put these two threads together and the smart move for anyone who already lives here is straightforward. If Crossbow or Ziggy's are still standing when you read this, treat any visit as one you might not get to repeat until the new building opens. Whatever's left of that corner only gets harder to reach once Saginaw Street fills with tournament traffic the week of August 24. Once that week wraps, Anna's House, Duke's, and Irene's give you somewhere new to redirect that same routine, whether it's a Thursday night with live music at the biergarten or a fall morning waiting on a table at the new breakfast spot in the old Big Boy.
This corner of Grand Blanc won't look the same twelve months from now. Exactly when it changed, or is still changing, depends on which spring report turned out to be right, but the direction was never really in question. Worth a drive past while there's still a chance to see it.
If you're watching this stretch of downtown shift and find yourself wondering what it means for property values or timing on the block, that's exactly the kind of question Jeremy Taljonick fields from Grand Blanc buyers and sellers every week. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's changing in this market and what it means for your next move.
