A salt room, elder fitness, tai chi, and more
IT’S TAKEN A couple of years but finally, it appears, a much anticipated wellness facility on Third Street is getting ready to open.
It’ll be called Be Well, and it’s scheduled to open its doors early next year. It’s the brainchild and passion project of Chris Ray, a nationally renowned massage therapist, and his partner, Kate Lewandowski, who has an extensive background in the healing arts, dance and veterinary medicine (“We’re all animals!” she tells you).
Be Well will be comprehensive, to say the least–offering Yoga, massage, tai chi, dance, body flow, elder fitness, qigong, halothrapy, life coaching, and more. Lewandowski’s now looking for a capoeira instructor–that’s someone who teaches Brazilian martial arts (not the hitting and hurting kind).
“We don’t want this to be a place for just people with money,” Lewandowski says. “We don’t want it to be trendy, we won’t be selling Spandex, we don’t want it to be just for hippies. We want it to be for everybody. We want everybody to be comfortable here.”
She and Ray are also trying to come up with programs that would serve people who normally couldn’t afford them.
Be Well will also be offering a Salt Room–and as far as we can tell, it’ll be the only one in the U.P. Salt Rooms are said to help patients with respiratory and skin problems.
And there’s more! Next door will be Be Well Elixirs. Juices and drinks of all sorts to promote health.
All in all, it’s an ambitious and expensive venture. Opening in the dead of winter.
“Are we going to pull it off?” Lewandowski asks. “Absolutely. It’s been tough. We’ve gone into debt, but we’re committed to what were doing. And we believe good health is not really that complicated, and that people will leave here feeling inspired and uplifted.”
mBank needs more space
A MAJOR TRANSFORMATION taking place on West Washington Street.
By the end of the year, the former Mathews Floor Fashions will become the new operations center for mBank in Marquette. Departments that work behind the scenes–marketing, facilities, IT, deposit operations–will all be under one roof. About 30 employees there to start, with room for more.
“We were just running out of space in Marquette and Ishpeming and we’re continuing to grow,” says Bethany Cody, mBank’s marketing officer.
mBank, which is headquartered in Manistique, now has 29 branches with assets totaling $1.3 billion.
The new operations center is located within a mile of two mBank branches. It’s also located a mile away from the new Embers Credit Union corporate headquarters now under construction and due to open its doors next year.
Big doings in the banking industry here, and from what we’re told, more are likely on the way next year.
Marquette may not be an escape from “climate change”
A SEEMING CONTRADICTION.
A month ago, a national report suggested that the Upper Peninsula might be a good spot for folks wanting to escape the worst effects of climate change. Last week, we took a different slant, highlighting the impact that intensifying storms and rising lake levels were already having on Marquette..
And now Bridge Magazine, the highly regarded nonpartisan online publication, has just published an article titled “Marquette girds for climate change in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.”
More flooding, more bacteria-laden runoff, more pests–that’s what could lie ahead, according to the article. Including mosquitoes that could spread the West Nile virus. Wait, what?
Fortunately, the article also outlines some of the steps being taken to counter the effects of climate change, and the seriousness with which we are confronting it.
No point in denying it–climate change is happening right here at our door step (We’ll leave it to others far better qualified than us to determine the precise causes). Now, we’ll all just have to figure out how to deal with it.