It’s been a roller coaster of a month for the Folded Leaf, the bookstore, art gallery, and ”snuggery” that opened its doors in downtown Cedar earlier this year. After an outpouring of public support briefly saved the business from unexpected trouble with its lease, Folded Leaf owner Rachel Zemanek announced on Facebook yesterday that “immediate building limitations”  have the business once again searching for a new home. The issue could also affect the two other tenants in the building, Bee Well Leelanau and jeweler Dana Fear.

The Folded Leaf opened on April 26, and quickly made a name for itself with a “community living room” model that emphasized live music and other types of community events. The store grew to such a degree that, on December 5, Zemanek announced she was “beginning the urgent search for a new, larger location in Cedar, Maple City, or Lake Leelanau.”

“My lease doesn’t end until May 29, 2026, but over the last seven months, it's just been such an amazing revolving door of love, support, acceptance, and joy here that I wanted to start talking early about lease renewal,” Zemanek says. “The landlords responded by saying that they felt like I had outgrown the space.”

An outpouring of community support prompted the Folded Leaf’s landlords to reconsider, and on December 9, Zemanek shared the news that she had been offered a one-year lease extension. That offer came with conditions – namely, that Zemanek have the building inspected by the Leelanau County Building Department. The Tuesday morning inspection went badly, and by mid-afternoon, Zemanek was sharing the “devastating news” that, “due to immediate building limitations, The Folded Leaf must stop hosting any events, gatherings, or workshops with more than 10 people in attendance (including staff, performers, and artists), effective immediately.”

Explaining the situation to the Leelanau Ticker, Zemanek says that, because the Cedar Station building only has one bathroom to serve all three of its tenants, the health code technically only allows 25 people to be in the entire building at a time.

“We can continue to operate as a retail space; we’re grandfathered in on that front,” Zemanek says. “The problem is that about 75 percent of our business operations are event and community space based. So, this news undercuts the majority of our business operations and ability to have any income.”

The immediate fallout of the news is that “all upcoming larger events, workshops, and performances” at the Folded Leaf “are currently on hold or cancelled.” The exception is a concert planned for this Friday by local singer-songwriter May Erlewine, which the Folded Leaf will host at the Old Art Building in Leland rather than at the store as planned.

Longer term, Zemanek says the Folded Leaf is turning its focus to finding a new home.

“There is no way we can stay there without being able to host events,” she tells The Ticker. “I have until May 29 to get out of this space, and that is not a lot of time. I spent the last seven months building a business, and now I have to spend the next five months taking it down.”

Zemanek has a few leads on potential new locations. She’s limited by the fact that she’s not willing to move to a community that already has an independent bookstore, taking towns like Suttons Bay, Northport, Leland, and Glen Arbor off the list. She'd also greatly prefer to stay in Cedar, but isn’t sure if doing so is feasible – at least not without significant community support.

“Maybe we can find a way to crowd-fund a true community center, where we build a new building to house all three businesses [located at the Cedar Station],” Zemanek says. “But right now, we're kind of at a loss for what to do, because all three businesses stand to be pretty severely financially affected by this.”

For her part, Bee Well owner Liz Neddo is optimistic that the Cedar Station could be modified to serve the needs of its three tenants. Opened on Black Friday 2024, Bee Well recently renewed its lease on the building’s basement space, where it operates a retail store and a “nonprofit community space for families to use seven days a week.” Similar to the Folded Leaf, Neddo says most of Bee Well’s work would be impossible given the newly-discovered capacity limitations. She’s planning to hire an architect to look at the building and give her a sense of what kinds of renovations or expansions are possible.

“Hopefully, a professional will be able to look at the building, look at our business plan, and say, ‘These are your options to make this all work,’” Neddo says.  

Dana Fear, who runs a jewelry shop and studio next door to the Folded Leaf, is the only business of the three that isn’t directly affected by the new restrictions. As a five-and-a-half-year tenant of the Cedar Station, though, Fear is concerned about losing neighbors that complement her business in positive ways.

“I rely a lot on people stumbling upon my shop, and it’s hard to imagine having another neighbor with the same level of impact as the Folded Leaf,” Fear says. “The potential is always there for one of these spaces to turn into something that's not even a retail business. The space downstairs, it’s been a child psychologist’s office and a handyman’s storage facility in the past. What Rachel is doing is completely different than anything that has been in this building – or in Cedar – as far as the attention and energy she’s been able to draw to the area. So, my firm belief is that what’s good for her is what’s good for all of us.”