Before Ann Arbor was a city of restaurants, it was a city of gas stations. “If there was a corner, you had to have a gas station on it,” recalls Jake Kooperman, who with his brother Joe ran several local stations from the 1940s to the 1960s. The first gas station appeared in Ann Arbor in 1918. By 1938 the town supported sixty-six of them. Most stations were owned by big gas companies, which rented the buildings and equipment to local operators. Rent was either a flat rate or a few cents per gallon sold. “It was an inexpensive way to go into business and make a few bucks,” explains Kooperman. With “a couple hundred in your pocket [and] a little mechanical ability, you could succeed.” That was an attractive proposition during the Depression, when business opportunities were scarce. “Most neighborhoods had a gas station with their own clientele,” recalls Ted Palmer, who grew up in Ann Arbor. “I knew just about everyone [who came in],” says Warren Staebler, who for many years ran a station at Packard and Arch and also worked at several others. Though cars eventually transformed Ann Arbor, they were slow to catch on at first. “This is a peculiar town,” complained the city’s first car dealer, Edward Staebler, in 1906. “Our population is 18,000 and we have not over a dozen machines here. Half of those are used but very little.” The first local drivers bought their gas in small quantities from local grocers--either from Staebler’s brother, Fred, at 120 West Washington, or from Dean and Company at 214 South Main. In 1904 both Staebler and Dean installed curbside pumps, but rising demand soon overwhelmed their capacity. On weekends, when drivers tended to go on excursions, the line of motorists waiting to get gas would often stretch several blocks, and a policeman was needed to keep order. In 1918 Standard Oil opened the first drive-in station in town, on the northeast corner of Huron and Fifth Avenue (now part of the City Hall parking lot). The same year, the Staebler brothers organized the county’s first wholesale gas and oil company after a supplier threatened to cut them off. At first they operated out of Edward’s store, but in 1921 they moved into more spacious quarters in the old Philip Bach mansion at 424 South Main. The following year, the Staeblers turned their wholesale office into a retail operation by installing gas pumps on the mansion’s former front lawn. The next year, 1923, Hortaio Abbott, a local real estate agent and postmaster (also, coincidentally, a Democratic activist, as was Edward Staebler), opened a rival gasoline wholesale company; Abbott would eventually supply ten Ann Arbor gas stations as well as others in the county. A third early local chain was the Michigamme Oil Company, with headquarters in its station on the corner of Huron and Division. Staebler grew the fastest, eventually owning eighty-three stations in southeast Michigan. By 1928 Ann Arbor had thirty-five gas stations, most of them in or near downtown. (The exceptions were three stations north of the Huron in Lower Town, two west of town on Jackson Road, and Titus Schneider’s station on South Main, across from what is now Pioneer High.) It was not unusual for a busy intersection, such as Division and Huron or Packard and Hill, to have three competing stations. Then as now, gas stations and car dealerships clustered near highways. But at that time, the highways passed right through the heart of town. East-west traffic entered Ann Arbor on Washtenaw and exited on Huron (the route still followed by today’s Business I-94). East-west traffic was not terribly heavy, however, because Michigan Avenue, the main road between Detroit and Chicago at the time, took a more southerly route through Ypsilanti and Saline. East-west traffic was further eased after Stadium, then called the “bypass” or the “cutoff,” was built in the mid-1920s, allowing drivers to pass south of downtown and connect with Jackson Road at Maple. North-south traffic was a bigger problem, because anyone heading north to Flint or south to Toledo had to pass through downtown Ann Arbor. Traffic followed the route that is today Business US-23: cars coming from the south on what is now Carpenter Road would turn west onto Washtenaw, follow Washtenaw and Huron downtown to the county courthouse, and turn north again on Main Street. Cars were often held up at the north end of town, where the narrow Whitmore Lake Road bridge crossed the Huron River. “If a truck and car were crossing at the same time, somebody had to put their wheels on the sidewalk,” recalls Maynard Newton. And even after they crossed the river, travelers were still not in the clear. “It was gravel up to Brighton and not in a straight line like [modern] US-23,” says Bill Lewis. Washtenaw County’s first pavement was laid in 1918 on Jackson Road west of Ann Arbor and on Michigan Avenue east of Ypsilanti. In the 1920s, flush with cash from the booming auto industry, the state launched a huge road-building effort. Using convict labor, the highway department paved most of the principal roads leading out of town, including Whitmore Lake Road, Plymouth, and Washtenaw. Á The changes required to accommodate the automobile ripped huge holes in Ann Arbor’s nineteenth-century streetscapes. Along main traffic routes, homes and business blocks alike were demolished and replaced by gas stations, car dealerships, and parking lots. Cheap and easy to put up, gas stations became the signature buildings of the automotive age. The first ones were often primitive. Hoists weren’t invented until 1925, and not all stations could immediately afford them. Instead, mechanics climbed into pits in the floor to work under cars. Illi’s Auto Service, at 401 West Huron, still has three of the five pits used when the building was the Atwell and Son gas station in the 1930s. The pits are now covered with boards. “We had a robbery here once, and they pried the boards off. They must have thought we hid the safe under there. They must have been surprised when all they saw was the basement,” laughs owner Ray Roberts. Some followed Staebler’s example of locating in old houses. Michigamme Oil Company had its main gas station in front of an old house at Huron and Division; Mallek and Hoppe’s first station was a little house where Jackson and Dexter merge with Huron. Others built small wooden or metal buildings alongside the pumps. Concerned citizens, not just in Ann Arbor but around the country, began complaining that these hastily constructed buildings were a blight on the landscape. Gas companies reacted by commissioning more elegant designs. In 1925 Waldo Abbott built a gas station at William and Maynard designed to look like a Greek temple. A few years later, the Atwell station (now Illi’s) was designed to resemble a castle, complete with parapets and turrets. Houselike stations were especially popular, on the theory that they could blend with residential neighborhoods. Paul’s Service Station, built in 1930 at the northwest corner of Ann and Fourth, was done in Tudor style, complete with a brick facade and slate roof (partially obscured by a later cinder-block addition, the building is now Adam’s Garden of Eden). The prettiest local example has to be the 1927 Tuomy Hills station at Washtenaw and Stadium, which local architects Lynn Fry and Paul Kasurin designed for Bill and Kathryn Tuomy. Built of stone in a style reminiscent of an Irish gatehouse, it was so distinctive that a copy of it was displayed at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Today, owned by University Bank, it’s the city’s most elegant ATM. Early Staebler gas stations were built in a Spanish style, complete with red tile roofs. Although obscured by later additions, the stations at the corner of Liberty and Ashley (now Dream On Futons) and Fourth and Detroit (now Argiero’s) still reveal traces of their original style. Other Mediterranean-style buildings included Erle Koons’s station on the southeast corner of Liberty and First (now Painters Supply & Equipment) and the stucco-and-tile Hunter station at Huron and First (now Fine Flowers). Eventually, such elaborate attempts at disguise became a public joke. In the 1937 movie A Damsel in Distress, Gracie Allen visits an English estate and remarks, “It’s pretty enough to be a gas station.” Changing fashions combined with economic pressures to radically alter gas station architecture during the Depression. With a growing number of stations forced to share a shrinking market, stations put more emphasis on repair services. Typically a station added a pair of service bays, one with a hoist and another for tire repairs and other light mechanical work. Space was also needed to sell auxiliary products, called by the trade “TBA” (for “tires, batteries, and accessories”). Some stations added service bays to existing houselike buildings, while others tried to apply homely details to the new, boxier structures. The Sinclair station at State and Packard (now Bell’s Pizza) is a rectangular box decorated with turrets and a tile roof. But most companies opted for buildings that were easily identified as gas stations, completely reversing their initial goal of blending into the neighborhood. In the 1930s and early 1940s enameled-steel facades became popular. Locally the Staeblers led the way in 1933, tearing down the Bach mansion and replacing it with an ultramodern enameled station designed by local architect Douglas “Pete” Loree, who also helped design the bus depot. The same year the Staeblers put up a duplicate at the corner of State Street and Jefferson (before the construction of the U-M’s LS&A Building, Jefferson went through to State). Casey’s gas station on the corner of Huron and Fourth (now Vault of Midnight Comix and Rosey’s barbershop) was built in 1937 with glazed tile and appears to be another creation of Loree’s. Former owner Clan Crawford says that the late architect Dick Robinson told him that he designed it when he was just out of school and working for Loree. Unlike most other gas stations, it was designed to hold other businesses as well--an appliance store and a watch repair shop. “It was built to get rent until they could tear it down and get something decent there,” Crawford says, “but no one has.” The major oil companies hired architects to design stations that could be replicated all over the country. In 1937 Walter Dorwin Teague created a rectangular green-and-white Texaco station with large glass windows that was heavily influenced by the International style. Texaco stations with Teague’s design soon became ubiquitous, and other companies followed suit with similar buildings, all with an art deco or streamline-moderne flavor. Most of Ann Arbor’s remaining enameled stations have been covered up, but at the former Schneider’s Amoco (now Rainbow Creations) across from Michigan Stadium, the panels can still be seen beneath a coat of yellow paint. The distinctive square towers that once marked Pure Oil stations are easy to spot on Japanese Auto Professional Service at Main and Madison and Victory Lane Quick Oil Change at Packard and South Boulevard. Station operators kept busy in their newly enlarged stations, because cars needed much more service than they do today. Not only did they break down more often, but also routine maintenance, such as oil changes and tune-ups, had to be done more frequently. Staebler’s station at Main and Packard lured customers by offering pickup service. An employee on a three-wheeled motorcycle would pick the car up at the customer’s home or business and drive it to the station, towing the motorcycle behind him. After the repairs were done, he would return the car the same way. Stations also cultivated customer loyalty by offering premiums such as carnival dishes, glass tumblers, Pepsi, and trading stamps. Attorney John Hathaway worked at Warren Staebler’s station as a young man, and he and his wife, Mary, still have a set of Czechoslovakian Christmas ornaments from the station. People who were around before World War II don’t remember downtown traffic then as any big problem. Ted Palmer recalls that it was even easy to find a parking place at the county courthouse at Main and Huron. “You didn’t have to drive around the block like you do today,” he recalls. “I used to drive an old Model T that I got for fifteen dollars to high school.” Although he often arrived at Ann Arbor High, then at the corner of State and Huron, at the last minute, “I could always park opposite the door.” One big reason for the light car traffic was that trains were the preferred way of getting to other towns, even for people with cars. Freight also was usually sent on trains, not trucks. Many people in town still walked to stores and workplaces. And except among the very rich, multicar families were still in the future. Gas stations held their own during the Depression, when, if operators didn’t get rich, they could at least eke out a living. Other car-related industries did not fare as well. Road paving stopped except for a little work done by Works Progress Administration crews, and car sales dipped very low. During World War II all available materials and labor went into building war-
related products such as tanks and airplanes. Gas was strictly rationed, as were tires. Some stations kept alive by retreading tires. After the war, though, people made up for the years of abstinence, buying new cars as fast as they could be made. The surge in vehicle traffic hit Ann Arbor particularly hard, as thousands of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill to enroll at the U-M. The resulting parking problem was temporarily solved by mayor Bill Brown, who in 1945 instituted meters on the streets to raise money for building parking lots and structures. But the problem of the increased traffic pouring through town as the economy picked up was not so easily solved. Bob Kuhn, who lived on Ann Street near the courthouse, recalls that big trucks hauling cars from Flint to Milan would “try to turn at Main and Huron and make a big clang and bang.” A woman who moved to a new house near Pauline and Stadium in 1955 recalls that she had trouble sleeping because the car haulers were so noisy. “They’d backfire as they went down the hill, day and night.” “In the fifties the downtown was jammed. They were going through because there was no other way to go,” recalls Jack Dobson, who was a member of city council at the time. He and his colleagues were planning to solve the problem by routing traffic on a loop west of downtown, going on Beakes and Ashley to Packard. On the state level, legislators were discussing building a turnpike similar to ones being built in Pennsylvania and New York. All the discussion became moot in 1956 when Congress passed President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway Act. The act created an entirely new network of limited-access highways, with the federal government covering 90 percent of the cost and the state the remaining 10 percent. According to Michigan Department of Transportation records, Washtenaw County’s portion of I-94 was built in stages from 1956 to 1960, while US-23 north of Ann Arbor was built in 1957, with the southern part finished in 1962. “With so much work in a seven- or eight-year period, it’s all due at the same time for repairs,” remarks Bob Tetens, director of the Urban Transportation Study Policy Committee. The expressways marked the end of the golden age of downtown gas stations. “One by one, they were sold,” recalls Kooperman. Small stations were the first to go. “The bigger ones could undersell little ones. They could get gas cheaper,” recalls Warren Staebler. Even before the expressways, gas stations and car dealers had begun moving farther out of town, especially along Stadium and Washtenaw. As styles changed again, the surviving downtown stations made another attempt to blend with neighborhoods, using residential details like the mansard roof on J.B.’s Auto Service at Liberty and Second, or the Colonial cupola on Mallek’s at the Jackson-Dexter fork. The other big design change in recent years is the return of canopies. Early gas stations usually had canopies as an integral part of the building, but in the 1930s architects began leaving them off, disliking the way canopies interfered with the clean lines of their enameled boxes. Canopies returned to Ann Arbor when Alden Dow designed the Leonard station (now Total) on the corner of Arbordale and Stadium. “Leonard was new in town. It was a brand no one knew. They had to sell the name, so they had canopies and cheaper prices,” recalls Harlan Otto, who ran the Amoco station in Ypsilanti for forty years. Canopies became nearly universal after the switch to self-service in the 1970s. Total is now planning to demolish Dow’s station. Plans filed with the city call for replacing it with a new building with more sales space. Coming full circle from the days of Fred Staebler and Sedgwick Dean, most stations now make more money selling groceries and snacks than they do from gasoline. Last January an Observer survey found that the number of gas stations in Ann Arbor had fallen from eighty-seven in 1950 to fifty in 1980 and just thirty today. As stations have closed, their buildings have been either torn down or converted to other uses. Former gas station buildings still standing, in addition to those already mentioned, include Copy Quick on Packard, Old Brick Quality Refinishing on Detroit, the Ann Arbor Convention and Visitors Bureau on Huron, and Econo-Car on Division. Many others have found new life as food-related businesses, including DeLong’s Pit Bar-B-Q on North Fifth Avenue, the Main Party Store, the Big Market on Huron, and Ali Baba’s, Jimmy John’s, and the Cottage Inn, all on Packard near State. With a new awareness that pollution left by leaking underground tanks requires massive cleanup, building new structures on gas station sites has become more problematic. In 1990 the Washtenaw County Historical Society had to do a major cleanup on the former station site at 303 North Main before moving an old house from Lower Town to become its museum. Several sites have been converted to parks. Warren Staebler’s old gas station on Packard is now Franklin C. Forsythe Park, named after the first president of the Jaycees. Liberty Plaza is a gas station site. Two other stations, the old Clark station at Division and Detroit and Ben Wilkes’s station at Summit and Main, are being considered for the same use.

State Street’s hidden “Venetian palace”

"The prettiest building in town” is the way Elizabeth Dusseau remembers Foster’s Art House at 213 and 215 South State. Today the two original buildings are thoroughly obscured by later additions, and few passersby ever notice that lurking behind the slate-roofed first floor are a Prairie-style storefront on the north and an Italianate house on the south.

From 1914 to 1941, the elegant structure of Dusseau’s memory was a favorite shopping destination for Ann Arbor’s cultured elite. Owners Clarice and James Foster sold pictures and frames, pottery, statuettes, jewelry, stationery, leather goods, and, as their letterhead boasted, “rare odd things.” They imported brass from India and dishes from England, Japan, and Germany. “People took out-of-town guests to see it,” Dusseau recalls. “They didn’t have anything cheap. Everything was a treasure.”

“Even though I was strapped for money, I loved to go in,” Augusta Dillman recalls. She still remembers purchases she made there: a sixteen-piece set of Blue Willow china from England and a piece of jade, which she still has. Dusseau remembers that her sister fell in love with two brass lamps--a table lamp and a floor lamp. She kept an eye on them until they went on sale, bought them, and kept them her whole life. Jesse and Emily Dalley, who worked in the store and became lifelong friends of the Fosters, still have several pieces of Rookwood pottery they bought there.

The Fosters came to Ann Arbor in 1903 and a few years later moved into an Italianate house at 215 South State. Built about 1872, the house was originally the home of the Benjamin Brown family. At the time the Fosters moved in, that section of State Street, between Liberty and Washington, was still partially residential, and the main shopping area was on the west side of the street closer to William.

James Foster, the son of a Methodist minister in Moore Park, south of Kalamazoo, was in his thirties when he came to Ann Arbor. Jesse Dalley recalls him saying that although he was a Yale graduate, “he had no job” before arriving in Ann Arbor. “He sold things door to door--flatirons--but he never did well. He set up a lending library at the back of his house for two or three years. It wasn’t until he started selling art goods that he was really successful.”

Former customers credit Foster’s wife, Clarice, with much of the art store’s success. Dillman describes her as “a lovely, gracious, refined lady.” Jesse Dalley concurs, saying, “She was a lady of the first order and very artistic.” Clarice Foster worked in the store, helped select the merchandise (the main buying trip was a fall visit to Chicago to order for Christmas), and was responsible for the displays. “Things were not just piled up,” Dusseau recalls. “They were one of a kind, maybe on a polished surface, like one demitasse cup.”

The Fosters started the art store across the street from their house on the corner of State and Liberty (where Discount Records is now). In 1913, they hired Emil Lorch, dean of the U-M School of Architecture, to design a store on the north side of their house. Lorch, who was responsible for the U-M School of Architecture (now Lorch Hall) and many private residences, was an admirer of the Prairie style of architecture. He designed an elegant, simple building with clean lines that fit surprisingly well with the Italianate house. In a thank-you note to Lorch, Foster wrote, “It stands as peaceful and well-balanced as a Venetian palace, in spite of surroundings and the turmoils attending its erection.” (He doesn’t say what the turmoils were.)

The first floor of the new building was the main sales area, while the second floor sold furniture. The Fosters kept the second floor of their home as living quarters, but the basement and first floor were given over to store functions. Former customers remember fondly the elegant tearoom on the first floor of the house. A Miss Betts was the hostess, while Katherine Schaible cooked, helped by Jean Jacobus, who made the salads in the family’s kitchen. When the store closed at 5 or 5:30 p.m., the Fosters, along with several student boarders who lived with them, ate dinner in the tearoom, where they also had breakfast.

Jesse Dalley was one of the student boarders from 1925 to 1931. A Utah native, he followed his older brother’s footsteps in finding employment at the art house. “From the first, it felt like a home away from home,” he recalls. “It was a joy to sit at the table for meals. There was great conversation--no frivolity. Mrs. Foster was very bighearted and genteel. She set a high standard.”

Dalley did whatever was needed. He stoked the two furnaces, unpacked incoming shipments and packed outgoing ones (the Fosters had a large mail order business, mainly among U-M alumni). He also made frames for the artwork sold in the store, and turned out the front display lights every night at ten o’clock. He remembers that many shipments came in big wooden barrels, packed in grass hay. James Foster thriftily instructed him to save all the packing materials to reuse.

Dalley met his wife-to-be, Emily Benson, when she started working at the store, clerking and helping in the tearoom. When Dalley finished his degree, he couldn’t get a job because by then the Depression had hit. Foster told him, “You have a home here,” so Dalley stayed and earned a master’s in education. Even after he and Emily married and moved out of town, they remained friends of the Fosters.

Before retiring, Foster added a third architectural style to his building: Tudor. He hired a young architect, Ward Swarts, to design a single-story addition that filled in the remainder of the lot around the house and store. Swarts’s wife, LeRea, worked as a saleswoman in the store.

In 1939, when Foster was seventy-two, he sold both buildings to Goodyear’s, which wanted to open a campus branch of its well-established Main Street apparel shop. Foster continued running his art store in the north building for a few years longer, retiring entirely in 1941. Dalley remembers that Foster gave up the store “reluctantly.” Goodyear’s did some remodeling before moving in, but they kept the tearoom as it was--in fact, Clarice Foster continued to run it for a while.

James Foster died in 1949, Clarice in 1962. Goodyear’s stayed there through the 1950’s, after which the building saw a variety of uses: children’s clothing store, restaurant, drugstore, bookstore. Today the building is owned by the Big Market’s Mohammed Issa and functions as a sort of mini-mall, with three street-level storefronts: Mr. Greek’s on the north, Route 66 in the middle, and Kaleidoscope Books on the south. Hinodae restaurant is at the back, and the upstairs rooms of the house, including the attic, are used for several other small stores. Issa has remodeled the building since he bought it in 1994, carefully keeping what remained of its original elegance, such as the banister on the stairs to the second-floor stores and the fancy ceiling in the former tearoom (Route 66). Lorch’s geometric windowpanes can still be seen at the tops of the first-floor windows.

(-Grace Shackman, with research help from Susan Wineberg)

The following articles appeared in the February 1996 issue of the Ann Arbor Observer:

• AIDS Cases [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9
• Subjects:
  • AIDS (Disease)
  • Statistics
  • Washtenaw County

  Keywords:

  • K.C. Quirk
  • HIV/AIDS Resource Center
• Deadly Drivers [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9
• Subjects:
  • Ann Arbor Public Schools
  • Ann Arbor Police Department
  • Transportation
  • Busing

  Keywords:

  • Diane Khumayyis
• Cleaning Up [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9
• Subjects:
  • Ann Arbor Public Schools
  • Ann Arbor Public Schools - Budget
  • Pioneer High School

  Keywords:

  • Marriott Food Service Corporation
  • School Lunch Program
  • Mike Miller
  • Huron Valley Correctional Facility
  • Oak Dale Recovery Center
  • Bob Moseley
• Foreign Pizza [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9
• Subjects:
  • Franchises
  • Pizza

  Keywords:

  • Domino's Pizza Inc.
  • Tim McIntyre
• Room to Grow [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9-10
• Subjects:
  • Ann Arbor - City Planning
  • Ann Arbor - City Government Departments, Agencies, Commissions, etc.
  • Real Estate Development
  • Annexations

  Keywords:

  • Karen Hart
  • Employment
• Home Sales: December 1995, by Kevin Duke, page 10
• Subjects:
  • Houses - Cost of
  • Real Estate
• Whose Hair? [Inside Ann Arbor], page 11
• Subjects:
  • Franchises

  Keywords:

  • Hair Replacement
  • HRS
• Hip To Be Square? [Inside Ann Arbor], page 11
• Subjects:
  • Ann Arbor District Library
  • Books

  Keywords:

  • Trends
  • Fads
• Mindful Medicine [Inside Ann Arbor], page 11-12
• Subjects:
  • Medicine
  • Health
  • Mental Health
  •  

  Keywords:

  • Michigan Heart and Vascular Institute
  • Institute for Psychology and Medicine
  • Meditation
  • Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • Buddhism
  • Glen Burdick
  • SteveThiry
  • Dr. Eddie Erlandson
  • Stress Reduction
• Indie Power [Inside Ann Arbor], page 12-13
• Subjects:
  • Recording Studios
  • Music

  Keywords:

  • Record Companies
  • Indie Bands
  • Happy Hour Records
  • Wendy Case
  • Blind Pig
  • The Ark
  • Cross Street Station
  • Ten High
  • Freddy Fortune
  • Fortune and Maltese and the Fabulous Pallbearers
  • Kiss Me Screaming
  • Hentchmen
  • Navarones
  • Schookids Records
  • Bootsey X and the Lovemasters
  • Loose Stools
  • Lustre Kings
  • Professor Schmiddy and the Elements
  • Prodigals
  • Skillet Records
  • Impatients
  • Dan Carroll
  • WhirlingRoad
• Rockers Redux [Inside Ann Arbor], page 13-14
• Subjects:
  • Music
  • Musicians

  Keywords:

  • Iguanas
  • Iggy Pop
  • Jim Osterberg
  • Ann Arbor High School
  • Jim McLaughlin
  • Don Swickerath
  • Nick Kolokithas
• Cough Stops [Inside Ann Arbor], page 14
• Subjects:
  • University Musical Society
  • Humor
  • Concerts

  Keywords:

  • Catherine Arcure
  • UMS
• Fresh Start [Inside Ann Arbor], page 15-16
• Subjects:
  • University of Michigan - Athletics
  • University of Michigan - Faculty & Staff
  • Sports
  • University of Michigan - Alumni

  Keywords:

  • Baseball
  • Geoff Zahn
  • Bill Freehan
  • Coaches
• Crime Map: December 1995, page 17
• Subjects:
  • Crime & Criminals
  • Ann Arbor Police Department
• Audrey Kishline [Ann Arborites], by Eve Silberman, page 19
• Subjects:
  • Biography
  • Human Interest
  • Alcoholism
  • Authors

  Keywords:

  • Moderation Management
  • Support Groups
  • Alcoholics Anonymous
  • AA
  • Brian Kishline
  • Lindsey Kishline
  • Sam Kishline
• Foster's Art House [Then & Now] , by Grace Shackman, page 21
• Subjects:
  • Local History
  • Historic Buildings
  • University of Michigan - Students
  • Retail Stores

  Keywords:

  • Elizabeth Dusseau
  • Clarice Foster
  • James Foster
  • Augusta Dillman
  • Jesse Dalley
  • Emily Dalley
  • Benjamin Brown
  • Emil Lorch
  • Miss Betts
  • Katherine Schaible
  • Jean Jacobus
  • Emily Benson
  • Ward Swarts
  • LeRea Swarts
  • Goodyear's
  • Mohammed Issa
• Death and Life of Merian Frederick, by Michael Betzold, page 23-31
• Subjects:
  • Health
  • Laws & Legislation
  • Courts - Michigan Supreme

  Keywords:

  • Euthanasia
  • Physician-Assisted Suicide
  • ALS
  • Jack Kevorkian
  • Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
  • Lou Gehrig's Disease
  • Kenneth Phifer
  • Unitarian Universalist Church
  • Geoffrey Fieger
  • Connie Plice
  • Merian Brown
  • Julian Frederick
  • Jim Frederick
  • Rick Frederick
  • Connie Frederick
  • Linda Frederick
  • Carol Frederick
  • Carol Poenisch
  • Dave Lamoreaux
  • Vietnam War
  • Hemlock Society
  • Thanatron
  • Death Machine
  • Margo Janus
  • Medicide
  • Ola Frederick
  • Bonnie Weil
• Children's Champion, by Michael Betzold, page 33-35
• Subjects:
  • Child Welfare
  • University of Michigan - Faculty & Staff
  • Laws & Legislation
  • Divorce
  • Authors
  • Courts - Washtenaw County
  • Biography
  • Statistics

  Keywords:

  • David Chambers
  • Child Support
  • Welfare
  • Friend of the Court
  • Making Fathers Pay
  • Deadbeat Dads
  • Kent Weichmann
  • Kerner Report
• My Stuff's My Anchor, by Al Stove, page 37-39
• Subjects:
  • Human Interest
  • Biography
  • Travel & Tourism
  • Mental Health

  Keywords:

  • Julie Detwiler
  • Bob Detwiler
• Kerrytown Triptych: The Bistro, the Grille, and Cafe Pastiche, page 41-43
• Subjects:
  • Restaurants - Reviews

  Keywords:

  • Kerrytown Bistro
  • Kerrytown Grille
• Quick Bites, page 43
• Subjects:
  • Restaurants
  • Holidays

  Keywords:

  • Chinese New Year
  • Beijing
  • Champion House
  • Dinersty
  • Emerald City
  • Great Lake
  • Great Wall
  • Hunan Gardens
  • Lai Lai
  • Old China
  • Sze-Chuan West
  • Craig Common
  • Moveable Feast
  • Common Market
• Fingerles Add a Product Showcase [Marketplace Changes], page 45
• Subjects:
  • Home Improvement
  • Building Supplies - Retail

  Keywords:

  • John Fingerle
  • Mark Fingerele
  • Larry Fingerele
  • Earle Fingerele
  • Colin Fingerele
  • Brian Fingerele
  • Cash-Way
• Fruit Shakes, NordicTracks, and Country Kitsch [Marketplace Changes], page 46-47
• Subjects:
  • Briarwood Mall
  • Retail Trade

  Keywords:

  • Angelo Roncari
  • Roncari Fine Jewelers
  • Surf City Squeeze
  • Carl Terry
  • Brookstone
  • Bath and Body Works
  • Body Works at Home
  • Fine Golden Needle
• Seifu Lessanework's Path from Ethiopia Now Stretches all the way to East Washington Street, page 48-49 [Marketplace Changes]
• Subjects:
  • Restaurants
  • Ethnic Foods

  Keywords:

  • Blue Nile
  • Braun Court
  • Chuck Muer
• Crescent Imports and Publications [Briefly Noted], page 49
• Subjects:
  • Retail Trade
  • Gift Shops

  Keywords:

  • Imports
  • Ashfaq Ibrahim
  • Gulshan Ibrahim
  • Colonial Lanes Plaza
• Mojo Clothing [Briefly Noted], page 49
• Subjects:
  • Clothing - Retail

  Keywords:

  • Bob Kosak
  • Randy Gilbert
  • Mike Dziac
• FurnitureMax [Briefly Noted] page 50
• Subjects:
  • Office Equipment & Supplies

  Keywords:

  • Oak Valley Shopping Center
  • John Fitzpatrick
• Art Works [Briefly Noted], page 50
• Subjects:
  • Picture Framing
• Close Calls [Marketplace Changes], page 51
• Subjects:
  • Restaurants
  • Picture Framing

  Keywords:

  • Al Balooly
  • Robby's At the Icehouse, Oyster Bar and Spaghetti Machine
  • Topinka's
  • Ron Bagwell
  • House of Frames
  • House of Framing
• Closings [Marketplace Changes], page 51
• Subjects:
  • Business - Closings

  Keywords:

  • Clothestime
  • Newton Furniture
  • Montgomery Ward Clearance Center
• Marc Maron: Salutary Nastiness [Comedy], by James M. Manheim, page 57
• Subjects:
  • Comedy
  • Nightclubs
• Al Hellus: Keeping the Faith in Saginaw [Poetry], by Keith Taylor, page 63
• Subjects:
  • Poetry
  • Authors

  Keywords:

  • Heidelberg Restaurant
• Valerie Mann's "Landmarks": Poetic Corn Husks [Gallery Review], by Martha Keller, page 69
• Subjects:
  • Art - Reviews
  • Art Galleries

  Keywords:

  • Matrix Gallery
• Eat Drink Man Woman [Movies], by Jennifer Dix, page 71
• Subjects:
  • Films
• La Traviata: Verdi's Surreptitious Swipe at Family Values [Opera], by Jim Leonard, page 76
• Subjects:
  • Music - Reviews
  • Opera

  Keywords:

  • Power Center
• Purim Party: Kick Up Your Heels [Holidays], by Nehama Glogower, page 79
• Subjects:
  • Holidays
  • Religion

  Keywords:

  • Jewish Community Center
• Tommy Flanagan: The Best Bop Pianist in the World [Jazz], by Piotr Michalowski, page 81
• Subjects:
  • Music - Reviews

  Keywords:

  • Kerrytown Concert House
• Sequentia: The Godmothers of the Hildegard Revival [Sacred Music], by Jim Leonard, page 85
• Subjects:
  • Music - Reviews

  Keywords:

  • University Musical Society
• Susan Werner: Catch a Rising Star [Nightspots Review], by Jeff Mortimer, page 91
• Subjects:
  • Music - Reviews

  Keywords:

  • The Ark

Many Ann Arborites today consider the First Congregational Church, on the corner of State and William, one of the most beautiful buildings in town. But the 1872 structure was lucky to survive the improving impulse of the early twentieth century. In 1924, a disdainful visitor wrote that it was “as inadequate, shabby, and disreputable as any church I have seen in such a [prominent] location.” Twice the congregation voted to replace it with a bigger, more modern structure, but the first plan was derailed by World War I, the second by the Depression. The delays gave the congregation time to realize what a gem they had. Today, in spite of limited parking and high maintenance costs, the Congregationalists are committed to staying in their historic church.

The church was designed by Gordon Lloyd, “one of the most prominent Gothic church architects of his time,” according to his great-granddaughter, Anne Upton, who lives in Ann Arbor. Other local examples of Lloyd’s work are St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Harris Hall, and the entrance to Forest Hill Cemetery. Around the state, his commissions included the Whitney home in Detroit (now the restaurant of the same name) and churches as far afield as Marquette.

Gothic Revival architecture, with its steep roofs and tall pointed windows, was rarely used for Congregational churches. The denomination traces its origins to the Pilgrims, and its prototypical church in New England was a simple wooden structure with a tall steeple. Lloyd made some concessions to this history in his design. “It’s simpler, more open, not typical Gothic Revival,” says retired assistant minister Dorothy Lenz.

First Congregational Church.

Although many of Ann Arbor’s early settlers came from New England, the Congregational church was not organized until 1847, more than twenty years after the town was founded. Under an agreement called the “plan of union,” the Congregationalists had originally deferred to the Presbyterians in organizing churches west of the Hudson River. But in 1847, forty-eight members left the First Presbyterian Church to start First Congregational. According to the Presbyterians’ history, the group that branched off “preferred the Congregational form of government [each church governs itself], they didn’t care for the recent revival, and they were more ardent in their antislavery feelings” than the Presbyterians’ current minister.

The new group purchased land at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington (now Bank of Ann Arbor), meeting at the county courthouse until their church was built. They remained strongly antislavery. In 1861, they hosted controversial abolitionist Wendell Phillips at a time when other churches refused to let him speak for fear that protesters would do physical violence to their buildings.

In 1876 the Congregationalists moved to their current location on William and State. (They sold their original building to Zion Lutheran Church, which itself had recently broken off from Bethlehem Evangelical Church.) At the time, State Street was still a dirt road, and although the university was across the street, the neighborhood was mainly residential. Most parishioners walked to services. Judge Thomas Cooley, a U-M law professor who also served on the state supreme court, lived right down the street on a site where the Michigan Union now stands.

Like Cooley, many of the church members were important in the development of the university or the town; the church’s form of self-government and tolerance of personal beliefs appealed to people who enjoyed dialogue and new ideas. Other prominent members included opera house owner George Hill, physician and hospital owner Reuben Peterson, and U-M presidents James Angell and Marion Burton. Walter S. Perry, the superintendent of Ann Arbor schools, headed the church’s Sunday school program.

This high-powered congregation hired challenging thinkers as ministers. The most famous in this century was Lloyd C. Douglas, minister from 1915 to 1921, who went on to become a nationally famous religious novelist. Many of his books were made into movies, including The Magnificent Obsession, The Green Light, and The Robe.

After leaving Ann Arbor, Douglas went on to preach in Montreal before his success as a writer allowed him to retire from the pulpit. “He always enjoyed being a celebrity,” says Ray Detter, who wrote his 1975 doctoral dissertation on the minister. Douglas eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he hobnobbed with actors who starred in his films, among them Arthur Treacher.

After his wife died in 1944, Douglas moved to Las Vegas to live with one of his daughters. “He described Las Vegas as a place where ‘the Ten Commandments are viewed as a forthright insult to the freedom of the human spirit--a hell of a place for an elderly prophet to end his days,’ ” Detter recalls. Not long before his death, Douglas wrote to a friend, “The happiest years of my life were spent in the Congregational Church of Ann Arbor.”

Douglas died in 1951 and today is memorialized in a chapel named after him. Before his death, his daughters contributed money to the church to build the chapel, part of an addition organized by Leonard Parr, minister from 1937 to 1957. Parr, a scholarly man who also wrote hymns, appreciated the beauty of the church building and developed plans to adapt it to the needs of the congregation. In 1941 the church underwent a major renovation, including the addition of more stained-glass windows (there were only two originally) and the removal of the side balconies. In 1953 the new wing was added. Designed by U-M architecture professor Ralph Hammett, it includes the Lloyd C. Douglas Chapel, Pilgrim Hall, and Mayflower Lounge, as well as offices and classrooms.

Near the end of Parr’s ministry, the church faced the big question of whether to join the United Church of Christ, a new denomination formed by the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Church. After much discussion, the Ann Arbor congregation voted in 1956 to remain separate. Today they are part of a national association of Congregational churches but remain free to make their own decisions.

In 1965, minister Terry Smith came to Ann Arbor. A former basketball player at Ohio State, he attracted parishioners involved in U-M athletics, including Fritz Seyferth, Gus Stager, Bill Frieder, Newt Loken, Johnny Orr, Bob Ufer, and Lloyd Carr. Smith, who retired last year and still gives the invocation at U-M athletic department events, was the longest-serving minister in the church’s history.

Most of the changes in the church’s more than 150-year history reflect larger changes in town. Few members still live near enough to walk to church, and the congregation has become more diverse in race and ethnicity. Says present minister Bob Livingston, “It’s impressive, coming as I do from Grand Rapids where it is more homogeneous.”

But many things have been constant over the years. An emphasis on good music is one. From 1890 to 1895, the church employed Reuben Kempf, one of the best musicians in town, as choirmaster. Today, Marilyn Mason, world-famous organist, provides music, and Willis Patterson, associate dean of the U-M music school, is choir director.

Probably the most consistent element in the history of the First Congregational Church is its tolerance of a wide variety of views. Longtime church member Louise Allen says, “You can have your own thoughts. Religion isn’t thrust at you.” According to Smith, “It’s a thoughtful congregation. When I was preaching, I knew they were thinking. They were responsive, they’d talk to you afterwards.”

Smith’s description of the congregation parallels comments written by Calvin Olin Davis in his 1947 history: “members were often bluntly outspoken in their judgments and often wearisomely stubborn in their convictions . . . but [they believed] that all men are of equal worth in the sight of God and that each one is entitled to the full and free expression of his thoughts and feelings.”

Former president Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, spent their wedding night at Ann Arbor’s Allenel Hotel in 1948. “I thought I was giving her a great treat,” Ford recalled in a 1975 visit to Ann Arbor. “I paid for that a thousand times.”

In her autobiography, The Times of My Life, Betty Ford writes, “You never stayed above the second floor at the Allenel Hotel because it was such a fire trap you wanted to be sure you could jump.” The newlyweds were in Ann Arbor because Jerry wanted to see Michigan play Northwestern the next day. (Betty left after the first half.) And they stayed at the Allenel because the nearly eighty-year-old firetrap was still the best hotel in town.

The Allenel was the direct descendant of Cook’s Temperance House, which opened in 1836. Owner Solon Cook and his wife, Anna, were teetotalers. (Anna managed the Ladies Total Abstinence Benevolent Society, and Solon was a trustee of the Presbyterian Church.) A harness maker, Solon Cook exchanged saddles and harnesses for produce, lumber, and feed for his horses, who pulled the “omnibus” that took hotel guests to and from the train station. The Cooks ran the hotel until after the Civil War, enlarging it twice.

In 1871, the wooden Cook’s Hotel was demolished and replaced by a four-story brick building. The Cooks had retired by then, but the new hotel retained their name and a reputation as “the” destination for visitors to town. In 1896, presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan stayed at Cook’s and gave a speech standing on the marquee above the entrance. According to contemporary accounts, Huron Street was jammed as far as the eye could see.

On Christmas morning in 1910, the hotel was badly damaged by a fire that started in the basement. No one was hurt, but some of the guests barely escaped. After two months of remodeling the hotel reopened, boasting the latest in luxuries: telephones in every room and an electric elevator. It was renamed the Allenel—a blend of the words Allen (presumably after Ann Arbor founder John Allen) and hotel.

The hotel was remodeled again in 1928, after Angelo Poulos and Ted Dames took it over. Distant relatives, the two men had known each other as boys growing up in Kapsi, Greece (now Artisimon). Both came to the United States as young men, Dames to Chicago and Poulos to Ann Arbor. Poulos owned the Ann Arbor Restaurant at 215 South Main and in 1923, he invited Dames to Ann Arbor when he needed help to build the Michigan Theater.

Poulos’s nephew James Maharis remembers that his uncle and Dames worked very well together. Dames’s widow, Inez Dames, agrees, recalling that Poulos was the more reserved of the two, while her husband was the more outgoing. Active in the Greek community, Poulos was one of the founders of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.

Dames became the Allenel’s manager, settling into a two-room suite on the second floor. According to Maharis, Poulos “lived on West Washington Street and walked to the hotel every morning before six. He would do most of the buying during the morning hours. Mr. Dames would come down around eleven and start his day. . . . Everyone worked the same--seven days a week.”

About a dozen employees lived in small rooms on the fourth floor—cooks, waitresses, bellboys, and a retired chef who cooked for the staff dining room. The public dining room, off Fourth Avenue, became one of the town’s most elegant eating places. The Tap Room, accessible from either Fourth or Huron, served breakfast, casual meals, and drinks. The kitchen also prepared food for the private Town Club, which had its quarters in the hotel--Jerry and Betty Ford ate their first dinner as a married couple in the Town Club.

Rare steaks were a favorite in the dining room. Poulos’s brother-in-law, James Colovos, carved the turkeys and hams, and Maharis’s parents, Stella Poulos Maharis and Nick Maharis, took care of the salads and ice-cream pie a la mode was always popular. While guests dined, three musicians played soft chamber music. On football Saturdays there were lines for the dining room all day long. After the game, the U-M band often marched through the hotel’s public rooms, playing as they went.

Unless people had university connections and could book the League or the Union, the Allenel’s upstairs banquet room was just about the only place for large events. Alice and Lawrence Ziegler held their wedding rehearsal dinner there, and Pat and Ed Murphy’s wedding brunch was there. The Washtenaw County Medical Society, the Young Republicans, and various service clubs held their meetings there and the May Festival was always celebrated with a big banquet for the visiting orchestra.

Poulos died in 1943, at age fifty-three, of a heart attack. Dames tried to retire in 1952 but, unhappy with the way things were being done in his absence, moved back in 1958. By then, however, the Allenel’s days were numbered. The Town Club had moved to West Washington in 1957; the dining room had closed, leaving only the Tap Room, and the building was showing its great age. In 1964, Dames and Poulos’s heirs sold the hotel. It was torn down and replaced with a Sheraton Inn, which opened in 1967.

Though far bigger--202 rooms instead of 60--the new hotel never achieved its predecessor’s pivotal role. Highway traffic no longer came through the downtown, and most travelers began staying closer to the expressways. Meanwhile, two closer hotels, the new Campus Inn and the renovated Bell Tower Hotel, won most of the U-M trade. After going through several name and ownership changes, the Ann Arbor Inn closed permanently in 1990. Construction is now under way to convert the building into 116 apartments for seniors.

October 1996 issue of the Ann Arbor Observer

• U-M Search [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9

Keywords:

• University of Michigan - President
• University of Michigan - Board of Regents

People:

• Andrea Fischer Newman
• Jeff Lehman
• Homer Neal
• Bernard Machen




• ReUse Center [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9

Keywords:

• Recycling Services




• Water Fight [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9

Keywords:

• Sewers & Sewage

Places:

• Evergreen Subdivision
• Scioto Hills Subdivision




• Services Merger [Inside Ann Arbor], page 9 - 10

Keywords:

• Huron Services for Youth
• Child and Family Services

People:

• Bob Miller
• Bill Vollano
• Dana Nelson




• Watch This Space [Inside Ann Arbor], page 10 - 11

Keywords:

• Downtown Development Authority

People:

• Estelle Schneider
• Wendy Rampson
• Steve Kaplan
• Larry Friedman




• Road Work [Inside Ann Arbor], page 11

Keywords:

• Tri-Mount Construction Co.
• Guenther Building Co.

People:

• Cresson Slotten




• "Home" Games [Inside Ann Arbor], page 11

Keywords:

• University of Michigan - Athletics
• Hockey Team
• Basketball Team

People:

• Red Berenson
• Steve Fisher

Places:

• Joe Louis Arena
• Yost Ice Arena
• Crisler Arena




• Right to Die [Inside Ann Arbor], page 12

Keywords:

• Death & Dying
• Merian's Friends

People:

• Ed Pierce
• Yale Kamisar
• Merian Frederick
• Jack Kevorkian




• More Movies [Inside Ann Arbor], page 12

Keywords:

• Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs
• Michigan Theater Foundation

Places:

• Michigan Theater




• Gable Moves On [Inside Ann Arbor], page 12 - 14

People:

• Joe Gable
• Tim Anderson

Places:

• Borders




• New Tenant [Inside Ann Arbor], page 14

Keywords:

• Motorcycle Garage
• Afterwords'
• India Motorcycle Sales

People:

• Bud Haynie
• Ali J. Mohammed
• Steve Kelly




• Storybeads [Inside Ann Arbor], page 14 - 15

People:

• Carolyn Arcure




• Dance Craze [Inside Ann Arbor], page 15

Keywords:

• Macarena
• Tower Records

People:

• Denise Frost

Places:

• German Park




• Crime Update, page 17

Keywords:

• Ann Arbor Police Department
• Crime & Criminals




• Anatomy of a Shoplifter [Crime Update], page 17

Keywords:

• Ann Arbor Police Department
• Special Investigations Unit
• Cleptomanics and Shoplifters Anonymous

People:

• Terry Shulman
• Tom Fisher

Places:

• Briarwood Mall




• Mike Monahan [Ann Arborites], by Sonia Kovacs, page 19

Keywords:

• Fish Mongers

People:

• Paul Saginaw
• Ari Weinzweig

Places:

• Monahan's Seafood Market
• Zingerman's




• Duel, by Chris Cernich, page 21 - 24

Keywords:

• Elections

People:

• Joe Fitzsimmons
• Lynn Rivers




• Eighth District Race, by Chris Cernich, page 25

Keywords:

• Elections

People:

• Dick Chrysler
• Debbie Stabenow
• Joe Fitzsimmons
• Doug McGinn




• Meeshegan Man, by John U. Bacon, page 27 - 33

Keywords:

• University of Michigan - Athletics
• Legacy of Champions
• Football

People:

• Fielding Yost
• Charles Baird
• Marion Burton
• Don Canham




• Benching of Willis Ward, by David S. Pollock, page 31

Keywords:

• University of Michigan - Athletics
• Football
• Racism

Places:

• Fielding Yost
• Jerry Ford
• Harry Kipke




• Dodworth Saxhorn Band, by Jon Hall, page 35 - 39

Keywords:

• Music
• 19th-century Brass Band
• "Baseball"
• PBS

People:

• Ken Burns
• Dave Friedo
• Alex Pollock
• Michael Deren




• West End Grill [Restaurants], by David C. Bloom, page 41 - 42

Keywords:

• Restaurants - Reviews

People:

• Ronald Pohlman
• Kaiser Yang




• Service Bites II [Restaurants], by David C. Bloom, page 42 - 43




• Chic and Casual New Dress Shops [Marketplace Changes], page 45 - 46

Keywords:

• Retail Trade
• Clothing - Retail

People:

• Lisa Catrett-Belrose
• Renee Grammatico
• Alexandra Payne
• Andrea Chaconas

Places:

• Voila
• Mrs. Rooney's
• Alexandra's




• Chianti Opens [Marketplace Changes], page 46 - 47

Keywords:

• Retail Trade
• Restaurants
• Meta Corporation

People:

• Stuart Lichtenstein
• Jimmy Schmidt
• Dennis Larsson

Places:

• Chianti




• Arborland Gains Some Interesting Small Tenants [Marketplace Changes], page 47 - 48

Keywords:

• Retail Trade
• Malls

Places:

• Arborland Shopping Center
• Office Max
• Originations Gallery
• Precious Gifts
• Wilds Cards
• Perk and Brew




• Scavenger Hunt [Briefly Noted], page 49

Keywords:

• Retail Trade
• Clothing - Retail
• Resale (Second-Hand Merchandise) - Retail
• Vintage Clothing

People:

• Chuck Vander Hoek

Places:

• Scavenger Hunt




• Top Drawer [Briefly Noted], page 50

Keywords:

• Retail Trade
• Resale (Second-Hand Merchandise) - Retail

People:

• Barbara Siders
• Virginia Hill
• Diane Norman
• Katherine Buhr

Places:

• Top Drawer




• Staples, Inc. [Briefly Noted], page 50

Keywords:

• Retail Trade

Places:

• Office Depot
• Staples, the Office Depot
• Busch's Valu Land




• Oreck Floor Care Center [Briefly Noted], page 50 - 51

Keywords:

• Retail Trade

People:

• Bob Livingston

Places:

• Arbor Vacuum




• Smokers Hub [Briefly Noted], page 51

Keywords:

• Retail Trade
• Cigars
• Cigarettes

Places:

• Smokers Hub




• Closings [Marketplace Changes], page 51

Keywords:

• Retail Trade
• Business - Closings

Places:

• Yribar Gallery
• Lotus Gallery
• Topinka's
• Kenny Rogers Roasters
• Tuesday Morning
• Fiber Gallery




• Susan Holitzer [Fiction], by Jennifer Dix, page 55

Keywords:

• Authors
• Bleeding Maize and Blue

People:

• Susan Holitzer




• Jeff Willets and Suzanne Willets-Brooks [Classical Music], by Pirooz Aghssa, page 58

Keywords:

• Music

People:

• Scott Read
• Becky Straub




• Meredith Monk [Contemporary Music], by Kate Conner-Ruben, page 63

Keywords:

• Dance
• "Politics of Quiet"




• Cleveland Symphony Orchestra [Classical Music], by Jim Leonard, page 71

Keywords:

• Music

People:

• Christoph von Dohnanyi




• Marcus Cafagna [Poetry], by Keith Taylor, page 75

Keywords:

• Poetry
• Authors

People:

• Marcus Cafagna




• Gene Bertoncini [Jazz], by Piotr Michalowski, page 81

Keywords:

• Music
• Jazz Guitar

People:

• Tom Knific




• Komar, Melamid and Renee [Gallery Review], by Jennifer Dix, page 85

Keywords:

• Art & Artists
• Elephants

People:

• Vitaly Komar
• Alex Melamid

Places:

• Toledo Zoo




• "Down the Plughole" [Plays], by John Hinckey, page 93

Keywords:

• Authors
• Performance Network

People:

• Malcolm Tulip




• State Symphony Orchestra of Russia [Classical Music], by Jim Leonard, page 101

People:

• Yevgeny Svetlanov




• "Badlands" [Films], by Dan Moray, page 105

People:

• Terrence Malick
• Charles Starkweather




• Lisa Hunter [Nightspots], by Wendy Case, page 109

Keywords:

• Music
• "Solid Ground'




• August, 1996 [Home Sales], by Kevin Duke, page 125

Keywords:

• Houses - Cost of

The whole town gasped with pleasure a year ago January, when the stark white panels covering the former Kline’s storefront were removed, revealing ornate terra-cotta decorations around the windows and across the top of the building. The striking detail work, damaged when the panels were applied to the facade in Kline’s 1961 remodeling, dates to the construction of the building in 1896. Called the Pratt Block, it was built to house the factory and headquarters of the Crescent Corset and Clasp Company.

The Crescent Corset and Clasp Company was incorporated in 1891. The September 24, 1891, Ann Arbor Register reported that the firm had raised $10,000 in capital and that “seven or eight men will be employed at the outset.” The company’s first president was publisher Junius Beal, and its first location was a rented space on the third floor of Beal’s Courier building on the corner of Main and Miller (now Dobson-McOmber insurance).

A corset was a “foundation garment,” designed to mold a woman’s body into the hourglass shape that was the style of the day. To achieve this effect, waists were cinched as tightly as possible in order to make the hips and bust look more voluptuous. The corset achieved the desired profile with stays made of whalebone or metal, and body compression was achieved by tightening laces spread up the back of the corset like shoelaces. (Anyone who has seen “Gone with the Wind” will remember the scene where Scarlett is laced into her corset in preparation for the ball.)

Although today corsets sound like instruments of torture, Crescent’s products were advertised as being more comfortable than other models; one modified corset, called a “waist,” was recommended “for bicycle riding or to wear around the house.” By 1894, the county census recorded twenty employees at the company, four men and sixteen women. They earned $1.33 for a twelve-hour day. Two years later, the growing company moved into the newly built Pratt Block, spreading out over the two top floors.

The Pratt Block was named for its owner, Stephen Pratt, a Detroit industrialist who made his money manufacturing steam boilers. It was designed by Malcomson and Higgenbothan, Detroit architects who designed many area school buildings, including the old Ann Arbor High School and Carnegie Library (now the U-M Frieze Building). Made of molded and fired clay, terra-cotta was widely used for architectural detailing from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1930’s. (Other examples on Main Street include the 1925 Marchese Building at 319 South Main, the 1929 First National Building at the corner of Washington, and the 1908 Mayer-Schairer building between Washington and Huron.)

Advertisements for Crescent corsets called them “superior fitting and extra durable.” The 1896 Headlight, a promotional magazine put out by the Michigan Central Railroad, concurred, stating that “the excellence of their goods has given them an enviable reputation in this line. They deal direct with the consumer and every article is made to the individual measure of the customer, and their trade extends all over this and neighboring states.”

The corset factory closed in 1912. Although corsets continued to be worn for a few more years, they were declining in popularity. Social historians give a number of reasons: women’s more active lifestyles, changing fashions that emphasized a more boyish figure, and, several believe, the fact that the popular tango was hard to perform while wearing a corset.

Before the factory closed, one of the street-level storefronts was taken over by Schmacher Hardware, which had started in 1870 in the adjacent building to the south. Afterward, the hardware store took over most of the rest of the building. In 1930, Kline’s department store moved in, staying until December 1994.

In 1961, Kline’s hid the terra-cotta detailing behind a featureless “modern” facade. It was a time when appreciation of old buildings was at its nadir. The 1877 courthouse at Main and Huron had been replaced five years earlier, and Bertha Muehlig’s house across the street from Kline’s would soon be demolished. Proponents of urban renewal advocated tearing down entire neighborhoods. Those older buildings and homes that were saved were often remodeled, like Kline’s, expressly to make them look new.

Developer Ed Shaffran bought the Pratt Block after Kline’s closed. He has already converted the two upper floors-—site of the corset factory-—into nine apartments. On the top floor, he found three rows of holes in the hardwood floor, which he surmises were made when the sewing machines were bolted down. He also found a bunch of straight pins, but no old corsets. On the second floor, he discovered Schmacher Hardware advertisements--for Royal furnaces, Jewitt stoves, and tinware--on the south wall.

Before the 1961 panels were removed, Shaffran had some idea of the detailing beneath them, and he also knew that it had been damaged, because he had climbed out onto a second-floor windowsill and looked under the panels with a flashlight. However, he was surprised by the extent of the damage to the terra-cotta along the top of the building. He theorizes that when Kline’s sent the measurements for the new panels to their New York office, they reported the width and height of the building but didn’t take into account how far away from the building the panels would have to be hung in order to avoid damaging the terra-cotta detailing. Whoever installed the panels simply knocked off the parts of the terra-cotta that protruded too far. If they had extended the bracketing beams just a little farther—less than a foot—they could have preserved it all.

A careful washing of the building has revealed the original color of the bricks and terra-cotta. Shaffran is now repairing the facade, replacing broken bricks with new ones of the same color and shape as the originals. The architectural terra-cotta is being replaced in some places with new terra-cotta, in others with a combination of wood and molded millwork, which is then sprayed with a product called Sto to give it an appearance close to the original fired clay.

Shaffran is currently finishing the first-floor storefronts, which will be rented to five retailers. Tenants so far include two home furnishing stores, Jules and Atys, both of which expect to open in April or May, and a Main Street branch of Le Dog. When he’s done, Shaffran promises, the Pratt Block will once again be “the diamond of Main Street.”

With the repeal of Prohibition, Gust Sekaros turned his cafe into a bar

When Prohibition ended in Ann Arbor, at 6 p.m. on May 11, 1933, the Court Tavern at 108 East Huron was ready. One of twenty local establishments that had received permission to serve beer, the former Court Cafe was filled with patrons until it sold out, around 11 p.m. Sam Sekaros, son of then-owner Gust Sekaros, recalls that historic night: “Men, women--everyone was out celebrating that beer came back, that Prohibition was over.” The celebration continued around town until well after midnight, according to the Ann Arbor Daily News, “in a spirit of joy and festivity which outrivaled the celebration which annually ushers in the arrival of a new year.”

When Prohibition was repealed nationally, Michigan set up a state liquor commission that permitted breweries to begin production and make warehouse deliveries. By May 11, twenty-two breweries around the state had received this temporary approval. (The Ann Arbor Brewing Company, on Fourth Street, which had survived Prohibition by making ice cream, was not in that first batch, but it was soon up and running, making its “Old Tyme Bru.”)

Gust Sekaros had applied for a license the first morning they were available. Then he had gone to the State Savings Bank to borrow $500 to buy the beer. It was during the Depression, and the bank had lent him the money but required that it be repaid quickly. Business was so good the first night that Sekaros was able to repay the loan the next morning.

As 6 p.m. approached, the town geared up for action. Cars lined up near the grocery stores that had permits to sell beer. Downtown filled with people eager to make a night of it. Besides the Court Tavern, permits had been given to one hotel, the Allenel at Fourth and Huron; one club, the Elks; and one beer garden, Preketes on Main Street. Many students were among the celebrants, although the city council had purposely not issued any licenses east of Division Street. While early stories had promised that beer would sell for 5¢ a glass, the paper reported the price as 15¢ on that first day.

Since none of the establishments had sold beer (at least not legally) for fifteen years, they were not completely prepared. Sam Sekaros remembers that his family used three or four washtubs filled with cracked ice to keep the beer cold. At many taverns, especially the German ones, customers brought their own beer mugs. Fred Dupper, who had a beer distributorship at what is now the Bach School playground, used a fifty-five-year-old copper mug made in Germany by his father, Jacob, who claimed that the metal brought out the beer’s flavor.

Born in Greece, Gust Sekaros had run a restaurant in Sioux City, Iowa, before moving to Ann Arbor--his wife Angeline’s hometown--in 1925 to run the Court Cafe. In a prime spot across from the courthouse, sandwiched between a bank and a hotel, the restaurant had a reputation for serving excellent meals, such as pork loin with applesauce or roast beef and mashed potatoes--all-American fare that Sekaros prepared fresh every day. Meals cost 25¢ or 35¢, including coffee.

After May 11, Sekaros finished changing the restaurant into a bar. He took out the booths, replacing them with a bar along the right side and tables along the left. He replaced the full kitchen with a grill behind the bar. The tavern still served lunch, mainly sandwiches and hamburgers. “We had the best hamburgers and cheeseburgers in Ann Arbor,” says Sam Sekaros, who is seconded by former customers. The secret, he says, was the meat, delivered fresh every morning from Steeb’s. (The Sekaroses firmly refused to use frozen meat, which Sam claims is good only for spaghetti.)

Sam Sekaros started washing dishes in the cafe as a junior in high school. When he went into the service during World War II, his wife, Inge, helped her father-in-law run the tavern. It was open shorter hours then, because labor was scarce during the war and the tavern was allotted only a limited amount of beer per week. When Sam returned from the war, his father retired, giving the business to him and his younger brother, Dan.

More of a hangout than a serious drinking place, the tavern attracted customers from the area: courthouse employees--including judges--Ann Arbor Bank workers, lawyers from the Ann Arbor Trust Company, and employees of the nearby King Seeley, American Broach, and Argus factories. Walter Mast of the Main Street shoe store was a fan of the cheeseburgers. Ann Arbor News employees came in to unwind after putting the paper to bed. Friday was the busiest day, since people came into town for weekly errands to the barbershop or the bank. On Saturdays the tavern was busy early, but business tapered off in the evening.

With a window on the street and fluorescent lights within, the Court Tavern was not the place for a secret rendezvous. “If you don’t want to be seen, better not come in,” Sekaros told his customers. Women were always welcome, and people felt comfortable bringing their children. Sekaros was happy to serve them soda pop, white or chocolate milk, and he never allowed rowdiness or bad language.

The Court Tavern became an early sports bar, with its television set on for important sporting events. It was one of the first taverns to get Channel 50, which carried Michigan basketball. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Sekaros remembers, the tavern was filled all day long with people watching history unfold.

In 1960, the tavern celebrated another first: being allowed to sell hard liquor by the glass. Before then, liquor could be served only at private clubs, a local anomaly that had made the Town Club on Washington and the Elks Club on Main Street favorite downtown hangouts. Sekaros and other bar and restaurant owners had spent a year going door-to-door gathering the signatures necessary to put the proposed change on the ballot. When voters approved the change, Sekaros was once again ready, having done all the necessary work to qualify for a liquor license, such as changing the floor drains and upgrading the bathrooms.

But even with its enhanced liquor license, the tavern lasted only a few more years. In 1965, when the Ann Arbor Bank on Main at Huron needed their space to expand, the Sekaros brothers sold their liquor license to the Bolgos family, which had a restaurant on Plymouth Road. Sekaros recalls the last day of business as “like a jam session, with people coming from all over.” The tavern stayed open until it ran out of food at about 11 p.m.--the same hour it had run out of beer thirty-two years earlier.

The congregation of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church celebrated for two days in 1896, after finishing the church at 632 North Fourth Avenue that they had been working on for five years. Built of brick with a stately tower, beautiful stained glass windows, and intricate woodwork, the church was worth the wait.

On Sunday, April 5, 1896, Bethel held three services--morning, afternoon, and evening. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who had laid the building’s cornerstone, served as guest preacher. Turner, then residing in Atlanta, Georgia, had been the first black chaplain in the U.S. Army, thanks to an appointment from Abraham Lincoln. Other guest preachers included Rev. Mrs. G. T. Thurman of Jackson; Rev. James Barksdale, pastor of Ypsilanti’s AME congregation; and, representing the white Methodists, Rev. Camden Cobern of Ann Arbor’s First Methodist Church. The celebration continued the next day with a dedicatory concert and recitations by four elocutionists. “Altogether it was an occasion which will long be remembered by the members of the A. M. E. church,” reported the Ann Arbor Argus.

Building the substantial church was a stretch for a congregation that numbered about forty at the time of the dedication. Bethel AME was an offshoot of Ann Arbor’s first black church, the “Union Church,” founded in 1855. Members built a small Greek Revival place of worship at what is now 504 High Street (with a porch added, it is today a very small private residence), but just two years later, some split off to form Bethel AME. The other Union Church members went on to organize another historic black church, Second Baptist.

Bethel AME Church was located in this building at 632 North Fourth Avenue from 1895 to 1971.

The AME Church, the first independent black church in the United States, was founded in 1816 by Richard Allen. Born a slave, Allen saved his earnings to buy his freedom. He became an ordained minister and was hired by a Methodist church in Philadelphia to preach the early morning and early evening services. But when his preaching began attracting blacks to the congregation, some of the white members were displeased. Their objections led Allen and his black congregants to leave and found a church of their own.

The church they left was called “Methodist” for its form of worship and “Episcopal” because it was organized under bishops. Allen carried both terms over at his new congregation, and added “African” after the heritage of its founders.

Ann Arbor’s AME congregation was founded by John Wesley Brooks, who was, like Allen, a former slave. Born in Maryland in 1798, Brooks was sold to a New York resident when he was still a child. Slaves in New York at the time were supposed to be freed when they reached age twenty-eight, but Brooks’s owner ignored the rule. When Brooks was thirty, a lawyer named John Spencer successfully argued Brooks’s case and won his freedom.

Brooks stayed in New York another year as Spencer’s employee and moved to Ann Arbor in 1829, just five years after the town was founded. He paid $100 for eighty acres in Pittsfield Township, where he farmed for twenty-five years. He moved back into town, to a house on North Main, at about the same time the Union Church was being organized.

Bearing the same names as John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, Brooks must have been born into a Methodist family. The biographical sketch of him in the 1881 Charles C. Chapman county history says, “Mr. Brooks experienced religion at the age of thirteen, and has been a member of the M.E. [Methodist Episcopal] church for 70 years. He was ordained to preach by Rev. Swift, and for five years after his arrival in Michigan was engaged in the missionary work.” Just when Brooks joined the AME Church is not known, but since he was eighteen and living in the East when Allen founded his church, it is likely that Brooks was involved in it before coming to Michigan.

Bethel AME’s church history says that for some time before 1865, the congregation shared worship space with the Quakers at State and Lawrence. It was a natural pairing, because local Quakers had helped escaped slaves on their way to Canada during the days of the Underground Railroad. In its early years, Bethel also worshipped in a small cottage that Brooks owned on the west side of Fourth Avenue.

In 1869 Bethel moved to its first permanent home, buying a lot across the street from Brooks’s cottage and building a wood-frame church. The post–Civil War building boom was providing new job opportunities, and Ann Arbor’s black population had grown to 230. Members of the church held such jobs as laborers (John Britton, Martin and Robert Carson, Stephen Adams), carpenter (Henry Williams), plow setter (John Brown), barber (Lucian Brown), porter (George Brown), and drayman (Henry Smith).

In 1890 Rev. Abraham Cottman, the minister at the time, suggested that the members build a bigger church. The next year they moved the frame building to the back of the lot and laid the cornerstone for the new building. A group of young people formed the Furnishing Club; as soon as the basement was done, they fitted it out for services, and the congregation moved in.

The parishioners, many of whom were skilled craftsmen, continued to work on the sanctuary. Members contributed money for windows, pews, and other furnishings. Two of the stained glass windows are named in memory of early church members John Brown and B. Fassett. Fassett’s husband, a minister, had led Bethel in 1865, and the Fassetts’ daughter, Mrs. John Freeman, paid for the window. According to one local history, O. W. Stephenson’s Ann Arbor: The First Hundred Years, some of the money also came from white businessmen in town (one stained glass window has “Eberbach Hardware” on it).

Bethel nearly lost its hard-won church only a few years after moving in. In the economic depression that followed the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, church members were thrown out of work, the congregation fell behind on its payments, and the mortgage was about to be foreclosed. On the day the foreclosure sale was scheduled, church members sat in court silently praying for a reprieve. Just as the gavel was about to go down, trustee Stephen Adams came running in.

“They were in trouble. They were behind in their mortgage,” says Judy Overstreet, Adams’s great-granddaughter, relaying the story as her grandmother told it to her. “He [Adams] came tearing in with the money. He had put another mortgage on his house [to cover the church’s debt].”

Just half a block away from Bethel, on the corner of Beakes and Fifth Avenue, Second Baptist built its first church. Longtime Bethel member Rosemarion Blake recalls that on summer Sundays when both congregations had their windows open, they could hear each other singing. Blake remembers some funny coincidences--like the time one congregation sang “Will there be any stars in my crown?” and the other, singing a different hymn, responded, “No, not one.”

In Ann Arbor’s early days, blacks lived spread around town, but by the end of the nineteenth century most were concentrated around the two black churches and across the Huron River in Lower Town. The Bethel history explains that the church stood “in one of the few neighborhoods in Ann Arbor where blacks were permitted to purchase property. Consequently, Bethel was ideally situated to provide its congregation and the larger community with services that went beyond being a primary place of worship. Anyone who walked or drove past Bethel--at practically any time of the day or evening--saw a brightly lit church inviting them to come in and participate in whatever activities were taking place.”

“There were always so many activities,” remembers Irma Wright, who grew up in the church in the 1940s. She sang in the junior choir, worked on Christmas pageants with the other kids, and enjoyed the big outdoor dinners in the back in the summer. The basement was used for Sunday school and for meetings and clubs. During the week the church was open for Bible study.

Blondeen Munson has wonderful memories of the ACE youth group (short for “Allen Christian Endeavor,” after the denomination’s founder) that met at the church in the 1950s under the leadership of Harry Mial and Shirley Baker. “It was a really, really important place to be,” Munson recalls. “It attracted not just the Bethel teenagers but kids from Second Baptist and a few black Catholics in the neighborhood. It was really rap sessions. There was lots of talking about life, school. We’d get help with homework, went on hayrides, had parties.”

Mial, who at the same time was running the youth canteen at Willow Run, often organized joint activities to lessen the rivalries between the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti communities, such as taking both groups roller-skating at a rink in Inkster. When he discovered that these weekly excursions were keeping the segregated rink in business, he used the leverage to persuade the owner to integrate it.

In the 1960s Mial was also a leader of the Ann Arbor Fair Housing Association. The desegregation group held many of its meetings at Bethel. “We’d have weekly, biweekly, triweekly meetings there, and no one ever objected,” he recalls. “We were welcome because they supported what we were doing.”

After a year of picketing Pittsfield Village because it wouldn’t rent to blacks, the group convinced the Ann Arbor City Council to pass a resolution banning discrimination in housing and employment. “It was the reference from then on, the enabler,” says Mial.

Bethel’s minister at the time was Rev. Lyman Parks, who himself was very involved in community affairs and was often asked to serve on city boards and commissions. When Parks was later transferred to Grand Rapids, he became even more involved in politics, ending up as mayor of the city. “Ann Arbor whetted his appetite,” says Mial.

Parks’s successor was John A. Woods. “Parks was more aggressive about getting on committees,” Mial says, comparing the two. “Woods was more a seer, a wise man. He would listen and counsel.” Woods’s son, John A. Woods Jr., agrees, calling his father “rabbinical, meaning teacher.” Although different from Parks in style, the elder Woods was equally involved in the community. His son remembers him as “accessible. He lived on West Summit, in the heart of the community. He was seen sitting on the front porch. People knew their pastor was there.

“There was no such a thing as making an appointment. People just showed up. I remember late-night counseling sessions, people distraught because their son or daughter was arrested. He’d do what he could to ameliorate the situation.”

Woods extended his concerns to the larger black community. “Although he had no mantle other than local pastor, he was one of the de facto leaders of the community,” his son says. His wife, Juanita Woods, was a teacher, and he became concerned over tracking in the public schools. The police would call him in to help defuse explosive situations. He also served the community by making Bethel Church available for funerals. “Some churches only bury you if you’re a member,” John A. Woods Jr. explains, “sometimes only if you’re a member in good standing. But his only requirement to be buried at Bethel was that you had to be dead.”

Woods’s biggest legacy may have been his work in shepherding the new church on Plum Street (now John A. Woods Drive) to completion. The church had owned the land across the river near Northside School since 1953 but didn’t decide to build on it until after Woods came and the congregation became too numerous to stay on Fourth Avenue.

“It was a great thing to have the church there. Lots of members lived in the neighborhood. We were sorry [to move], but we had to go on,” says longtime member Pauline Dennard. The building was too small for all the congregation’s religious and outreach activities, and parking was inadequate.

When Munson was growing up, as she remembers, “we didn’t have a large parking lot. We didn’t need it--everyone walked.” But as desegregation opened up new neighborhoods to black residents and people moved farther away, more began driving to church. Some suggested that they stay on Fourth Avenue, tear down the old church, and rebuild, but parking would still have been a problem.

The congregation moved to the new church in 1971, using the education wing for services until the sanctuary was completed in 1974. “It was remarkable,” says Irma Wright, remembering the first time she saw the new building. “There was so much parking. The church looked so big.” Second Baptist also left the old neighborhood in the 1970s, moving to a big new church on Red Oak off Miller.

In August 1989, after a successful fund-raising campaign led by Rosemarion and Richard Blake, Bethel AME burned the mortgage on its new church. John A. Woods Sr. died four months later. “He hung on to see the fruition of his dreams,” says his son.

The three ministers who followed Woods--Clifford Gordon, Archie Criglar, and current pastor Alfred Johnson--have all been active in the community. According to Mial, “Each pastor had to come and get active because it’s an active church. They inherited what their predecessors had done.”

They definitely need the parking space: today members live all around town, and most drive to church. Dennard, whose husband served on city council in the 1950s, running on a platform of fair housing, recalls that back then, housing for blacks “was limited to where you lived in that time. Now, lots of people are living all over Ann Arbor. It’s beautiful.” A scan of the church directory shows members living in every zip code in Ann Arbor, plus a handful from surrounding communities.

New Grace Apostolic Church bought Bethel’s Fourth Avenue building in 1971 and remained there until last September. “They had choir practice in the evening,” recalls Heather Phillips, who lived nearby. “Their music filled the neighborhood. It was great.”

But history has repeated itself: New Grace, too, has outgrown the Fourth Avenue church. Member Bobbie Baugh says the congregation has tripled in size since buying the building and is now close to 100 members.

“We moved because the building was functionally obsolete,” says Baugh. “It was inadequate for our needs. We want to serve the community, reach out to youth, offer weekend activities to people outside the church.” While awaiting completion of its new church on Packard across from Buhr Park, New Grace is renting space for weekday programs at First Church of the Nazarene and holds Sunday services at the Red Cross.

Mike Bielby, himself a neighborhood resident who appreciated the old church’s charm, bought the building and is turning it into four apartments (see Inside Ann Arbor, January). “I’ll have it match the earliest appearance as close as possible,” he promises. Bielby plans to create two handicapped-accessible apartments on the lower floor, where community activities were held; a luxurious three-bedroom apartment in what was the sanctuary; and a fourth apartment in a newly created third floor in the upper area of the sanctuary. He’s already restored the stained glass windows and has pledged to fix up the tower.

As Bielby starts working on the building, he is amazed at what good shape it is in after more than 100 years of use. “The craftsmanship was excellent,” he says.

In 1930, Ella Prochnow quietly made history as the nation’s first female car dealer

Ella Prochnow, probably the first woman in the United States to own an automobile dealership, never anticipated her career. She didn’t even know how to drive when her husband died in 1930, leaving her his seven-year-old Buick dealership. But as she said in a 1964 interview, “I did know that income must be greater than outgo and based my business on this simple but essential point.” According to Prochnow’s sister, Edna Lage, “It was an unheard-of thing for a woman to take over, but she said, ‘This is my business, and I’m going to run it.’ ” The first thing she did was learn to drive.

Ella Bareis and Walter Prochnow grew up across the street from one another on First Street. Ella, born in 1896, was just a year older than Walter. Both attended Ann Arbor High. Ella was valedictorian of her class and went on to attend the University of Michigan. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Northfield Township while Walter began work as a teller at State Savings Bank (now NBD). They were married in 1922.

A year later, Walter bought the Ann Arbor Buick dealership, then located on Huron Street where the bus depot stands now. Two years later, he moved the business a block west to the corner of Huron and Ashley (the present site of a First of America drive-in branch). The dealership took over a three-story Italianate building that had opened in 1862 as the Monitor House hotel. After an 1869 fire, the building had been fitted up as a livery barn, and it was the Rohde feed and grain store when Prochnow bought it.

Walter Prochnow was so successful in the mere seven years that he owned Ann Arbor Buick that his death at the age of thirty-three was reported on the front page of the Ann Arbor Daily News. Ella Prochnow was left a thirty-four-year-old widow with two small children, Walter and Bette. At first, a manager ran the dealership, but then Ella decided she’d rather do it herself. She knew very little about cars, according to her sister, but “they were her lifetime interest from then on.”

A major factor in Prochnow’s success was her ability to enlist the support of her staff, according to her sister. Many people stayed with her for years: mechanic Bailey Rogers, who was working at Rohde’s when Walter Prochnow bought the building, stayed on to work at Ann Arbor Buick for sixty-one years, retiring only five years before his death at age ninety-four. Lage herself soon went to work for her sister, joining the dealership when the bookkeeper left. Lage worked until she was almost ninety.

Prochnow also had to persuade the Buick Motor Company to allow a woman to run a franchise; all of their other dealers were men. Buick might have had doubts at first, but Prochnow always met her sales targets and even won prizes for outstanding sales performance. According to her sister, she eventually developed a very warm relationship with Buick’s management, all the way up to the president. She also gained the respect of other car dealers in the area, serving for more than thirty years as treasurer of the Ann Arbor Auto Dealers Association.

According to her sister, Prochnow “was not a pusher or forward person, but she had a great deal of respect from a lot of people.” Although she worked long hours, she made sure it was not at her children’s expense. She had a housekeeper but made a point of going home every evening to have supper with her children and put them to bed. Only then did she return to her business to work into the night.

Space was tight in the old onetime hotel, but Ann Arbor Buick stayed because all the car dealerships were downtown. The first floor was the showroom and the parts department. Cars were serviced and repaired on the second floor, carried up in a giant elevator. The floor was made of wood, and Walter Prochnow, who owns the dealership today, remembers that customers sometimes got nervous when the floor creaked under the weight.

Car manufacturing was halted during World War II, and after the war it took time for factories to convert from defense back to civilian production. By 1948 Ann Arbor Buick had a three-year waiting list of customers eager to buy new cars. That year Prochnow bought the building next door at 206 West Huron to use for sales and repair of used cars.

Back then, many car buyers picked a brand and stayed with it, periodically trading in their cars for new models. After the initial purchase, that was a relatively inexpensive process. During the 1930’s, Grover Hauer, father-in-law of current salesman Dick Kempf, had a standing order for each year’s new model-—always in black. Trading in his year-old car, he could get a new one for prices ranging from $169 to $428. The yearly introduction of new models was done with a lot of fanfare, and there was excited speculation on what they would look like. Walter Prochnow remembers that the showroom windows would be covered with paper so that no one got a glimpse of the new models until the big day.

Problems with the downtown building became acute in 1958 when the new Buick Roadmaster Limited proved to be too big to fit into the elevator. Walter Prochnow had taken over as general manager by then, but his mother was still active. She devoted her considerable energies to the unavoidable move.

In 1957 she had bought five acres of what was once farmland out on Washtenaw. (Although closer to town than Arborland, it was then outside the city limits. Ads of the 1960’s describe the location as “between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.”) She traveled around to other dealerships, researching the needs of a modern garage, and worked closely with the builder, supervising the countless details.

The new building, at 3165 Washtenaw, was as up-to-date as the downtown garage had been old-fashioned. With its glass-walled showroom and delicate vertical “Buick” sign, it’s still a fine example of the postwar modern style. The 1964 grand opening celebration was attended by politicians (Mayor Cecil Creal and state legislators Gil Bursley and Stanley Thayer), bank presidents, and many business owners. It was still a man’s world: pictures of the ceremony show Ella Prochnow as the lone woman among the dignitaries. She lived twenty-one years longer, dying in 1985 at age eighty-eight, and she stayed active in the dealership almost to the end.