Marquette Music House
We’re looking for our dream place!
Help us find the Marquette Music House!
You can also follow the project at @marquettemusiccollective.
The Marquette Music Collective is looking for our dream place to set up a rehearsal room, practice space, and indoor/outdoor music venue.
The idea is a permanent home for Marquette’s music community: somewhere musicians can rehearse, practice, teach, record, organize, hang out, and put on shows.
My ideal is a setup similar to the Oakley House in Boulder, Colorado: a place where the music venue, community space, and residential side of the project all live together.
The goal isn’t just to find somewhere that can host events. We want somewhere people can actually use all the time!
Where would it be?
The best location would be within about 10–15 minutes of downtown Marquette/NMU: close enough that students and local musicians can use it regularly, but far enough from dense residential areas that music, rehearsal, and occasional events are realistic.
Bikeable or plausibly walkable from town would be a major plus, but not absolutely required, as long as people find it accessible.
We do imagine the correlation between musicians and functioning automobiles may not be particularly strong.
In a dream, a downtown location would be awesome. The difficulty is that outdoor shows would probably not be possible in most downtown locations, and outdoor music was a huge demand in our community surveys.
So the sweet spot may be somewhere that is surprisingly close to town while still having some breathing room around it.
The big hang-up is noise. A property outside the city boundaries, somewhere with fewer immediate neighbors, natural sound buffers, favorable neighbors, or a building that can be seriously soundproofed would all be major advantages.
We’re interested in places near other noise-tolerant uses too: commercial or industrial areas, agricultural land, train tracks, highway frontage, campgrounds, churches, lodges, or simply larger rural lots.
What kind of property?
We’re very open-minded.
A good property might be:
- A farmhouse with a barn or large outbuilding
- A lodge or former retreat center
- A campground-style property with a main building
- An old church, schoolhouse, hall, or community building
- A mixed-use house/commercial property
- A large home with a detached garage, pole barn, or workshop space
- Some strange property nobody has thought of as a music space before
A conventional commercial venue is not necessarily what we’re looking for.
Part of the idea is finding a place where living, practicing, organizing, and making music can coexist.
The important guts
Ideally, we’re looking for some combination of:
- A main house or lodge with space for 3–6 resident stewards
- A large common room for meetings, workshops, jams, and small gatherings
- One or more outbuildings that could become soundproofed practice rooms
- Space for lessons, rehearsals, gear storage, and possibly recording/demo work
- Adequate parking for small events
- Enough distance from neighbors to make music use realistic
- Bathrooms suitable for public use, or the ability to add them
- Utilities capable of supporting regular public/community use
- Clear access in winter
- Zoning that could plausibly allow some combination of residential use, lessons, rehearsal, workshops, equipment rental, and occasional small events
Flex goals
And then there are the things that would be wonderful, but aren’t absolute requirements:
- Barn, pole building, garage, or workshop – Hoedowns!
- Acreage
- Outdoor gathering area
- Garden space
- Fire pit / camp-style area
- Guest space for traveling musicians
- Room for future cabins, yurts, or camping
- Minimal immediate neighbors
- Space that could someday accommodate larger outdoor music events
We don’t need everything on day one. A lot of this could grow over time.
What probably doesn’t work
A normal house in a dense residential neighborhood is probably not a fit unless there is already some kind of mixed-use, commercial, institutional, or otherwise unusually music-friendly situation.
At the other extreme, a beautiful rural property that is ideal in every way but 25–30+ minutes from town is probably too far away for the daily community use we want.
In fact, we think proximity matters enough that we would rather seriously investigate an unusual property right in town than build the perfect music compound somewhere nobody actually goes.
The people we most want this place to serve include younger musicians, students, and people who don’t necessarily have easy access to transportation. The Music House only works if people can actually get there.
The ridiculous dream
The dream is that somewhere just on the other side of the Dead River there are a bunch of grandkids who inherited their granddad’s farm and barn, have had no idea what to do with it, and one day we reach out to them about this project.
It’s almost walking distance from NMU.
It’s isolated enough for music.
There’s an old barn waiting to become rehearsal rooms and a venue.
And instead of selling it off or watching it slowly fall apart, they think:
“Yeah. Turn it into the Marquette Music House.”
That property may not exist…
But we have a suspicion that the best lead for this project may be something exactly like that: a property that isn’t listed as a venue, isn’t being marketed for this use, and maybe isn’t even currently for sale.
Know somewhere?
This is where we could use Marquette’s collective brain.
If reading this made you think of:
that weird old lodge,
somebody’s barn,
a vacant church,
a former campground,
a building by the railroad tracks,
your uncle’s property,
something sitting empty outside town…
we want to hear about it!
You don’t need to know whether it’s zoned correctly. You don’t need to know whether the owners would sell. You don’t even need to know exactly who owns it.
A weird lead is still a lead.
If you own a property, know someone who does, are a realtor, work with an organization sitting on underused space, or simply have an idea we haven’t thought of, please reach out.
Help us find the Marquette Music House!
You can also follow the project at @marquettemusiccollective.