Getting to Know JML
Me and my husband, Jim
My name is Michelle Liggett and my husband and I live locally here in Allegan, MI but have both lived in West Michigan all of our lives.
We have owned buildings in Allegan since 2001 when we started manufacturing adventure products out of our first 13,000 sq. ft. property and shipping them all over the world from right here in our small town. We’ve spent the better part of the next 15 years with our heads down, growing our businesses.
As our business continued to grow, it led to the need to acquire a larger place in Allegan to manufacture our products. In addition, we decided to also officially make Allegan our personal residence and moved from the smaller town of Martin to be able to both live and work here.
Allegan Event Riverfront Zip Line
Allegan Event Family Entertainment Center
We had no idea how cool Allegan really was until we put down roots here. But, on our first encounter with downtown on a sunny Sunday afternoon kept us wondering... why wasn’t there more activity going on down by the riverfront?
We were approached by the City of Allegan eight years ago to manufacture, install and operate the downtown riverfront Zip Line that is now entering it’s 5th summer of operation. From there we had a vision of operating our indoor family adventure center, Allegan Event once we purchased our second manufacturing location (the former Rockwell site) off River Street. Because it’s tucked away in a quiet neighborhood, it is not the best or ideal location to operate a family entertainment center, but we thought the building and surrounding land had a lot of potential and is worth giving it our best shot. Today we are excited to see spring break, summer tourists, and day trip visitors coming from all over the state and beyond!
In the meantime, I have also moved my office downtown. From my office windows, I have a great view of the river and all the great foot traffic that walks around here daily. It’s exciting to see the number of riverfront visitors continue to increase. It has taken a few years, but the energy that the City has toward continuing to grow the positive attributes of Allegan and the opportunities for really cool small businesses here has never been better.
So now that I got my background out of the way, I wanted to share the intent of this blog with you: it is my goal that this be a place that you can go to get the story of what’s going on with the development of certain properties that we own in town. In particular, I wanted to share our latest update on 245 Hubbard. We are super excited that our new storefront windows were partially installed over the last 2 weeks. (We have a few more to go since those are a special order.) Since the front windows have been installed, I love that the brick of the building is now the feature that pops. If you’re curious about what this building is or will be: We have two retail spaces for rent on the first floor and two apartments on the second floor. There is a 1000 sq. ft. two bedroom apartment and a 750 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment. I will continue to share details and more pictures to come as we progress.
245 Hubbard Street Renovation Underway
