"I'm sorry that it didn't happen. I feel bad that we couldn't pull it off."
That's developer Chuck Sekrenes talking about La Piazza, the three-story building he spent more than a year promising to Grand Blanc. If you've driven down South Saginaw Street past the Crossbow Inn and Ziggy's Ice Cream and wondered when the construction fencing was supposed to go up, the answer is that it isn't coming. The project was canceled in May 2026 after negotiations over one of the properties on the site could not reach terms that made the numbers work.
The Pitch That Never Got Built
When Sekrenes first brought La Piazza to the city in March 2025, it was pitched as the kind of project Grand Blanc had been waiting for. Roughly 48,000 square feet across three floors on nearly three acres between Reid and Center roads, combining restaurants, retail, offices, and apartments, with a rooftop patio on top. City Manager Wendy Jean-Buhrer talked about wanting a steakhouse and a seafood place, the kind of restaurants the city didn't already have. The city granted site plan approval that spring, and Sekrenes said he hoped to break ground that September.
The part that made it feel safe rather than disruptive was the promise attached to it: Crossbow Inn and Ziggy's Ice Cream, the two longtime businesses sitting on the site, weren't being displaced. They were being upgraded. Both were slated to reopen inside the new building at two to three times their current size, and Ziggy's would finally get four-season service instead of shutting down every winter.
That was the plan for over a year. Then, in May 2026, Sekrenes confirmed to WNEM that La Piazza was dead.
What Actually Killed It
The sticking point was the Ziggy's Ice Cream portion of the site, where negotiations between Sekrenes and the property owners could not be resolved. Sekrenes said the owners wanted $2 million for their share of the site, a number that made the math on a 47,000-square-foot building stop working. As he put it, for what they wanted, it wasn't feasible to make the project work.
A project that had cleared city site plan approval, carried a groundbreaking target, and included two well-known local businesses ended over the price of a single parcel. La Piazza is not on a delayed schedule. It is no longer planned, and the site's next chapter is the set of smaller projects below.
Three Smaller Projects Instead of One Big One
Sekrenes still owns the Crossbow property, and he's said he intends to build something there. Just not the same thing. Instead of one 47,000-square-foot building holding restaurants, retail, offices, and apartments, what's actually in motion now is three separate, much smaller moves spread across town:
- The Crossbow site itself, scaled down to something closer to 12,000 square feet, with retail and food service on the ground floor. Sekrenes has said he hopes Crossbow will still be part of it, though the four-season Ziggy's upgrade that made the original pitch appealing is no longer part of any confirmed plan.
- A separate building on Davis Street, a two-story, roughly 6,000-square-foot structure with retail and office space on the main floor and three loft apartments above. Sekrenes told Genesee County View he's already working with a fast-casual restaurant tenant for that spot.
- An undisclosed project in Grand Blanc Township, which Sekrenes described as including a restaurant and, he hopes, an Irish pub. As of his most recent public comments, he hadn't named the location or the businesses, only that an announcement could come within 30 to 60 days of late May 2026.
None of these three carries the scale or the built-in nostalgia of the original pitch. They're smaller buildings, smaller tenant lists, and in one case still no address attached to it at all. That's the actual state of downtown development in Grand Blanc right now: not one big transformation, but several partial ones moving at different speeds.
The Athletic Club Waiting Next Door
Sekrenes has one more project in the same stretch of downtown, and its timeline is also uncertain. The Sanctuary, an upscale athletic wellness and training facility backed by former NFL players Malik Taylor and Amani Cooper, was proposed for city-owned land at 237 Reid Road, 316 Union Street, and a vacant parcel behind the post office. The city accepted a $275,000 offer from Sekrenes and Taylor for that land in January 2026, beating out a competing bid from Dr. Rima Jibaly, who had proposed an Islamic Cultural Center for the same site.
By late May 2026, Sekrenes acknowledged The Sanctuary wasn't looking good, according to Genesee County View. If it falls through entirely, his stated fallback is a 40-unit townhouse development on Davis Street instead, with units renting around $1,995 a month at 1,000 to 1,200 square feet. Sekrenes has said Grand Blanc remains his preference for future development, and his Davis Street mixed-use plans are still progressing.
Meanwhile, Two Restaurants Are Actually Changing Hands
None of the La Piazza turbulence has anything to do with the two restaurant changes residents can actually plan around this fall, and it's worth keeping the two stories separate, because they're moving at very different speeds.
Anna's House confirmed it will open its 14th Michigan location at the former Big Boy site at Saginaw Street and Grand Blanc Road on October 26, 2026, according to ABC12. The West Michigan breakfast and brunch chain is bringing a full cocktail program and up to 60 new jobs to the space, its first location in Grand Blanc after more than two decades of operating elsewhere in the state.
Da Edoardo North, the Italian restaurant that overlooked Smith Lake at 185 Holly Road, closed for good on June 13, 2025, after 25 years under owners Suzie and Ed Barbieri. The family still runs Da Edoardo and Cafe Nini in Grosse Pointe and La Lanterna in downtown Detroit. What's been rumored to replace it is Duke's, a steak and seafood concept, but as of the most recent reporting a sign on the building is the only confirmed sign of progress. No opening date, no public menu, no filed business license that local coverage has been able to find. Anna's House has a date on the calendar. Duke's, for now, has a sign.
If you've been waiting on either one to plan a dinner around, the honest answer is that only one of them is actually close.
Downtown Grand Blanc is changing shape, just not in the single dramatic move that got announced back in March 2025. It's happening in smaller pieces, on different timelines, some confirmed and some still stuck on a personal dispute nobody could have predicted. Glover Agency keeps an eye on this stretch of Saginaw Street because our neighbors do too. If you want to know how any one of these projects actually affects the block you live on, ask us directly. We're following the same signs you are.
