How a Saline parsonage wound up at Greenfield Village

Seventy years ago, Henry Ford moved Saline’s former Baptist parsonage to Greenfield Village. These days it’s being used to demonstrate what a typical Victorian residence of the 1870s looked like. But that wasn’t the reason Ford wanted the house in his outdoor museum in Dearborn: for him, the important thing was that it was the boyhood home of the inspirational newspaper columnist George Matthew Adams.

The original Baptist church in Saline was built in 1837 on land donated by town founder Orange Risdon, at Henry and Adrian (now South Ann Arbor) streets. The parsonage was built directly south of it two years later. Adams was born there on August 23, 1878, the son of Lydia Havens Adams and minister George Matthew Adams Sr. One of five children, Adams bragged in later years how his parents raised a family of five on an annual salary of $600.

After his father changed ministerial positions several times, Adams ended up going to high school in Iowa. After graduating from Ottawa University in Kansas, he went to Chicago to work at an advertising agency. He started out operating the elevator and worked his way up to writing copy.

In 1907 Adams borrowed money to rent and equip an office and started a syndicate to provide copy for newspapers. His stable of writers would eventually include poet Edgar Guest, children’s author Thornton Burgess, and Robert Ripley of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”

But Adams’s biggest claim to fame was his own column, “Today’s Talk,” syndicated in hundreds of newspapers all over the United States and in Canada. According to the Greenfield Village website, “It was influenced by his religious upbringing, and its inspirational tone appealed to the average American.” Adams’s writing was full of aphorisms, such as “We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves” and “It is no disgrace to start all over. It is usually an opportunity.”

“Henry Ford himself loved to give advice,” notes Greenfield Village curator Jeanine Head Miller. “He was very opinionated. You could see how he would love Adams.” Also, Adams, like Ford, had a strong religious background and his own rags-to-riches story.

Most of the buildings Ford moved to Greenfield Village meant something to him personally. Buildings from his own past included his boyhood home, two one-room schoolhouses he had attended, the home of one of his teachers, a jewelry store where he worked, and the barn on Bagley Street in Detroit where he developed his first car. Other buildings, like the Saline parsonage, were associated with people he admired. Ford moved Thomas Edison’s pioneering research laboratory from Menlo Park, New Jersey, to Dearborn--where it joined the courthouse where Lincoln practiced law; the Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop where the Wright brothers built the first airplane; the Ann Arbor house that Robert Frost lived in when he was poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan; and homes or workshops belonging to Harvey Firestone, Luther Burbank, and Noah Webster.

Adams was still famous in 1937 when Ford decided to include his boyhood home in Greenfield Village. It had been a private residence since 1918, when the Baptist congregation where the elder Adams had ministered merged with the local Presbyterian church. (Separate Baptist congregations were reestablished in later years.)

In its first decades at Greenfield Village, the George Matthew Adams House was repainted all white, the most common color for homes in the 1830s, when premixed paint was not available. Today, it’s called the Adams Family Home,
and the outside is painted as it was in 
the 1870s, off white with forest green
trim. The house is furnished like a typical
middle-class residence of the era, even though the Adams family, who were not prosperous, likely furnished their home with hand-me-downs.

“We’re trying to create a typical Victorian residence of the eighteen seventies,” explains Miller. “Mass-produced furniture would have been available to middle-class people. There were a variety of consumer goods, lots of new choices.”

Two paintings by Lydia Havens Adams, Seascape and Little Ducks, hang in the house. There are also a silver cake basket and numerous books written by either George Adams or his twin sister, Edith, who was interested in early childhood education, plus other books from their libraries.

Though Henry Ford removed one of Saline’s historic homes, he did preserve other parts of the area’s history. In 1935 he bought the old Schuyler Mill, moved it farther back from Michigan Avenue, and added a factory behind it; both are now part of Wellers’ banquet facility. In 1943 Ford moved a one-room school from south of town to a site across the street from the mill; it’s now used for offices.

Commuters cursing delays at the narrow railroad underpass on the west end of Dexter should direct their anger at Charles Warner’s cow.

The bridge over Dexter-Pinckney Road was designed in 1890 by Frederick Blackburn Pelham, the first African American to graduate from the University of Michigan in engineering. But it might never have been built if Warner’s cow hadn’t calved on Sunday morning, March 20, 1887.

When Warner didn’t show up for church, his parents, Dennis and Martha Warner, became concerned. That afternoon they walked from their house in the village toward Charles’s farm, which he had taken over from them years before. As they began to cross the tracks, the Michigan Central’s Limited Express roared around the curve at forty-five miles per hour. Dennis Warner made it across, but his wife did not. “Mrs. Warner evidently became slightly confused, hesitated an instant, and just as she stepped from the track was struck by the pilot [cowcatcher] of the locomotive, throwing her head against the cylinder, crushing her skull and killing her instantly,” reported the Dexter Leader.

To be going so fast, the train must not have stopped at the train station at Third and Broad, rebuilt just a year earlier. But an inquest determined the railroad was not at fault. The Michigan Central, which ran from Detroit to Chicago, had been rolling through Dexter since 1841.

The Warners were early Dexter settlers. In 1837, when the crops failed on his farm, Dennis Warner came into town and found work shoveling gravel on the embankment being built for the railroad. He also started making shoes, and parlayed that into a general mercantile business. At the time of his wife’s death, he owned a whole block of stores on the south side of Main Street.

The accident cast a “pall of gloom over the entire community,” reported the Leader. After the funeral, held at the Congregational church on Fifth Street, townsfolk began petitioning the railroad to build a bridge at the crossing. At the time the Michigan Central was making improvements all along the line, and the railroad assigned Pelham, a young civil engineer whose specialty was bridge building, to design new bridges over the road and over Mill Creek. Both elegant stone structures are still there, the latter behind the fire station at the end of Warrior Park.

Pelham began working for the Michigan Central as an assistant engineer the year Martha Warner died, shortly after his graduation from the U-M. Born in 1865, he had grown up in Detroit, the youngest of seven children of Robert and Frances Pelham, who had moved from Virginia. Robert Pelham was a stonemason, and his son often worked with him on projects around Detroit.

Frederick Pelham excelled in math. According to The Michigan Manual of Freedmen’s Progress, published in 1915, he graduated at the top of his U-M class. The Dexter underpass was the most unusual of the twenty bridges that Pelham designed in Michigan because of its skew arch, a design used when bridges are not perpendicular to crossings. Before putting in the stone arch, the workers dug under the rail bed and put in a temporary wooden frame. They used the soil they removed to raise the banks of Mill Creek and straighten it out, filling in an old millrace so that the creek wouldn’t harm the new bridge.

Stone bridges were the best available at the time for durability, strength, and easy maintenance, but only wealthier railroads could afford them. “The enormous amounts of labor needed--especially the skilled labor of stonemasons--made this type of bridge costly,” explains Charles Hyde, author of Historic Highway Bridges of Michigan.

For the Dexter bridges the masons collected stones from Mill Creek and sized them by hand. One of the stonemasons was Peter McGinn. “He worked on viaducts in Ireland; he knew how to cut stone,” said his granddaughter, Alice Vencil, in an interview in October, a month before she died. According to Vencil, her grandfather came to Michigan to work with the railroad on bridges all around the state.

Neither McGinn nor Pelham has his name among those engraved under the bridge; the persons so honored are higher officials--H. B. Ledyard, the Michigan Central president, and L. D. Hawks, the railroad’s head engineer.

After graduating from the U-M, Pelham returned to Detroit to live with his parents. He did some work on the interurban system there, taught Sunday school at Detroit’s Bethel AME Church, and was a member of the Michigan Engineering Society and the YMCA. Pelham died at age thirty in 1895.

Longtime Dexter residents recall that it used to be common for engineering students from the U-M to make field trips to study Pelham’s bridge and its skew arch. For decades, the underpass was fine for pedestrians and horse-drawn buggies, and later for automobiles. But as the area’s population has grown and traffic has increased, it has become more of a bottleneck, especially during rush hours.

Officials are considering two possible solutions: building a bypass from Parker Road to Dexter-Pinckney Road west of Gordon Hall, or building a new underpass just to the south and retaining the current one for pedestrians and bicycles. But altering Pelham’s masterpiece isn’t on the table.

At the Michigan Union Brewing Company and the Ann Arbor Brewing Company, Ann Arborites could pick up beer by the pail.

The Ann Arbor Brewing Company at 416 Fourth Street was the only brewery in the city to survive Prohibition. Yet its product was not greatly valued in its hometown. "It was considered good only for putting out fires," claimed the late Carl Horning in a 1995 interview.

Horning was exaggerating: for eighty-eight years, the local brew found customers throughout Ann Arbor and beyond. And townsfolk weren't averse to stopping by for a glass or two of beer, on the house, any time of night or day. According to Will Frey, who worked at the brewery off and on from 1937 to 1943, leaky barrels that couldn't be sold were put in a back­room. Those who knew the barrels were there—namely, just about everyone in town—could come in through an always-unlocked door off the loading dock and get a drink. They used glasses hanging nearby, which they rinsed out when they were finished.

"It was a good stop for the postman. It took him longer to deliver mail there than the rest of the block," recalls Frey. The staff got free beer, too. Robert Kauffman remembers the job he got there at age sev­enteen cleaning out an old metal tank on top of the brewery: "At lunch break we went down to the main floor of the brew­ery and helped ourselves to a few pints of Ann Arbor Cream Top directly out of the barrel." People who played baseball in that era recall coming by after games to cool down with a glass of beer.

The brewery was founded in 1861 by Peter Brehm, who had recently moved to Ann Arbor from Germany. Brehm named his business the West­ern Brewery, after its location on the west side of town in the heart of the German neighborhood. In 1864, after his first building burned down, Brehm built a larg­er, two-story brewery, with a basement.

When Brehm opened his brewery, there were three others in town. Two—Hooper's (1858-1866), at State and Fuller, and the Bavarian (1860-1872), on Fuller between Elizabeth and State—were probably home operations. The City Brewery (1860-1886), at 210 South First Street, was clos­er to Brehm's operation in both size and location. It's now the Cav­ern Club—named after the basement vaults where the beer was aged.

Two other brew­eries started short­ly after Brehm's, both also named for their locations: the Central (1865-1875), at 724 North Fifth Avenue, now the Brewery Apart­ments; and the Northern (1872-1909), at 1037 Jones Drive, now an office building. Competition from the two ambitious newcomers surely didn't help Brehm's business, and the Panic of 1873 drove him over the edge: he lost control of the brew­ery and killed himself in despair.

Yet his successors managed to keep the business going for another seventy-five years. In 1880 Christian Martin and Mat­thias Fischer bought the Western Brewery. Martin, the brewmaster, walked over from his house across the street at 431 Fourth at 4 or 5 a.m. to start the fire in the boilers. Fischer, who ran the bottling operation, also lived in the neighborhood, on West Jefferson.

The new owners made a success of the operation from the start. A year later, the 1881 Chapman History of Washtenaw County, Michigan, reported, "The beer produced by this brewery finds a ready sale in all parts of the county." According to Chapman, "some 1,500 barrels of malt, 1,700 Ibs. of hops, 225 cords of wood and 800 tons of ice are used in the manu­facture and stor­age of the 3,000 barrels of beer turned out annu­ally." The West­ern Brewery's nearest competi­tor, the Northern Brewery, turned out just 2,400 barrels.

By 1903 the brewery was do­ing so well that the partners hired their German neighbors the Koch brothers to build a larger brick build­ing south of their original one. In those days they used gravity to move the beer from place to place as it brewed, so the north end of the new building had five levels—three above ground and two below. A lower section, on the south, was used for packaging— in kegs, and later in bottles.

When the new building opened, the business was renamed the Michigan Union Brewing Company in honor of the local union of bartenders and brewery workers, which represented the employees. Shortly after that, in 1906, the North­ern Brewery went out of business, leaving Michigan Union Brewing as the only brewery in town.

It delivered beer by horse and wagon to saloons and businesses all over Ann Arbor and as far away as Dexter and Saline, which also had large German populations. In 1915 the company acquired an Ann Arbor-made Star Truck and extended its delivery routes to Milan and Whitmore Lake.

The brewery also did home deliver­ies—or people could pick up beer at the brewery in their own containers. The late Harry Koch used to tell how as a young boy he was sent to the brewery by his dad, who was one of the Koch brothers, to fill a pail with beer for the construction crew's lunch.

Michigan adopted Prohibi­tion in 1918, a year ahead of the country as a whole. The brewery was renamed the Michigan Union Beverage Company and for a short time made near beer, but that didn't satisfy anyone. "The Germans wouldn't have anything to do with glorified hop water," says Will Frey. Many Germans made their own wine (you can still see their grape ar­bors around the Old West Side) or ob­tained bootleg products from Canada.

In 1920 Connor Ice Cream rented the building, since much of the equipment could be used for making ice cream (De­troit brewer Stroh's did the same thing). Florence Seitz Clark, who grew up across the street at 427 Fourth, reminisced in 1986, "The secretary at Connors ate her suppers with us. On weekends Connors al­ways had specials. If there was some left over, which there often was, she would bring us a quart for our supper. This was a real treat since otherwise we never had any. When she would come with a brown bag we knew what it was and got all excited."

When Prohibition ended in 1933, three local contractors, Chris Mack, Stanley Thomas, and Ed Bliska, decided to revive the brewery. They persuaded Jake Ludwig, a trained brewmaster who had moved to Pennsylvania to farm during Prohibition, to return to beer making. Ludwig was later replaced by Al Bek, who had gone to Germany to learn the trade.

The new business was not a union brewery, so it was named the Ann Arbor Brewing Company. Frey recalls that some­one tried to start a union but that no one was interested. "No one grumbled about the pay. It was good money in the Depres­sion," he explains.

The work was seasonal—heavier in summer, when the demand for beer was highest—so a lot of the crew was tempo­rary. It attracted young people like Frey who didn't mind sporadic hours, as well as farmers who needed a little extra work to help pay their taxes. Peter Marion recalls how his father, Alvin, came in three days a week from his farm near Saline to work the bottling line.

Frey began work­ing at the brewery in 1937, whence was just out of high school; he was hired because his half brother, Ted Ziefle, was the assistant bookkeeper. On his first day on the job he was put to work loading bottles into big crates in a small building, since torn down, in the back of the brewery. When brewmaster Al Bek saw him, he yelled, "What are you doing here?" It turned out Bek had two boys near Prey's age whom he had wanted to have the job. The next day Alvin and Dick Bek were both working there too; they and Frey became good friends.

Frey recalls that the brewery got hops from out west and grain from a Chicago grain dealer. He still remembers that every Christmas the Chicago dealer gave his family a big box filled with treats like cheese and sausage. They looked forward to the dealer's package so much that they opened it last.

Frey worked mainly in the bottling op­eration. Making the beer was very special­ized work and left to the brewmaster. Frey does remember that the mash was made in a big copper kettle, which could be seen out the back window of the main office. It was pumped up to the top floor and then sent down to the basement by gravity.

The bottling operation was semi-mechanized. The machines had to be constantly monitored, and at several points the bottles had to be transferred by hand. With all the moving, Frey admits, "there was a fair amount of broken glass in the brewery, but we also got pretty good at it. You learned fast, or you'd get all bloody."

Returned bottles were loaded onto a conveyor belt, where "they marched like little soldiers," in Prey's words, through the washing machine. It was Alvin Mari­on's job to watch the bottles as they came out to make sure that they weren't chipped and that the washer hadn't missed any for­eign objects, such as cigar butts, chewing gum, or pebbles.

The bottles were filled and capped by machine, but again they had to be watched carefully—if the pressure were wrong, the bottles wouldn't fill completely. "A bunch of us would stand around and drink half bottles," Frey says, "since it was very dif­ficult to put it through again."

Ann Arbor Brewing sold sev­eral brands: Cream Top, Old-Tyme, and Town Club. But according to Frey, they were actually all the same beer. He remembers they would attach la­bels in batches: "We'd start with, say, six hundred of Old Tyme, then three hundred of Town Club." Hazen Schumacher, who worked at the Pretzel Bell restaurant in the late 1940s, recalls that the brewery would also dye beer in novelty colors for holidays—red on Valentine's Day and green on St. Pat­rick's Day. But the only beer that was actually brewed differently was the bock produced each spring.

Brewery work­ers used a machine to attach the labels and to put a paper tax stamp on each bottle. Sometimes the machine got gummed up, which was not a big problem with labels but upsetting when it happened with the tax stamps: they were prepaid, so it was like throwing money away.

The final step was transferring the beer by hand into cases. These were made at the brewery, riveted together by the thou­sands. Frey recalls that they were so sturdy that they were used over and over, and were good for use on camping trips or as luggage for kids.

By this time, the beer was delivered farther afield. Frey says that besides near­by towns with German populations like Manchester, Stockbridge, and Milan, an Amish population in Ohio got shipments, and so did a pocket of German farmers in Texas.

In 1939 the brewery was purchased by a group of investors from Chicago. They sent Charles Ackerman, who Frey believes was the nephew of one of the investors, to oversee the operation. Ackerman, who is listed in the city directory as president, treasurer, and general manager, saw the brewery through its final decade; it closed in 1949, and the equipment was sold.

By then local breweries were either expanding or dying out as the beer industry consolidated—a trend that's continued ever since, most recently with a joint venture uniting Miller, Molson, and Coors. The brewery was sold to Argus Camera, which already owned two neighboring buildings.

The U-M bought the Argus buildings when the camera company left town in the 1960s. Beginning in 1965, the former Ann Arbor Brewing building was shared by Mathematical Reviews, a bibliographic journal that had just moved to Ann Arbor from Providence, Rhode Island, and the U-M's audiovisual education center. By then all traces of its former use were oblit­erated. "I was unaware that it had been a brewery until one of the movers told us that he had drunk a beer where our film library was going," recalls retired center employee George Williams.

Mathematical Reviews moved out in 1971, only to return in 1985, when it bought the building from the U-M. To make room for more parking, the journal removed the old shed in back where Frey worked the first day he arrived. The staff do, however, fully appreciate that they are in an old brewery.

"When I first came here and found out the building used to be a brewery, I in­terpreted it as a sign from God," recalls as­sociate editor Norman Richert. A beer buff whose first academic job was in Milwau­kee, Richert was delighted to learn from local historian Wystan Stevens that memo­rabilia from Michigan Union Brewing and Ann Arbor Brewing regularly come up for sale on eBay. He's since amassed a collec­tion that includes labels, bottles, a box, and a wooden beer keg.

Richert admits it was "a little disap­pointing" to hear, through Frey, that Ann Arbor Brewing's different brands were all the same beer. But he also points out that our standards in food and drink have be­come much more refined in recent years. "People thought of it more like a commod­ity then," he says. "You go get beer, you go get milk. You don't necessarily think what it tastes like."

He guesses the different labels may have been a way to appeal to different buyers—an early form of the steady blur­ring of consumption and marketing that has led to phenomena like Old Milwau­kee's Swedish Bikini Team. In contrast, he says, one of his Michigan Union Brewing bottles had a much simpler sales pitch: embossed in the glass is the motto "Pure and without drugs or poison."

That and the other items in Richert's collection may eventually be available for public viewing: He hopes eventually to start a small museum commemorating the building's beer-loving past.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: "There was a fair amount of broken glass in the brewery, but we also got pretty good at [handling bottles]" Will Frey recalls. "You learned fast, or you'd get all bloody."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Mathematical Reviews associate editor Norman Richert bought most of his brewery memorabilia (above and below) on eBay—but the wooden keg was a gift from Harry Cross, whose father salvaged it from the building.

Carleton Angell's beloved sculptures return to the Natural History Museum

The two pumas that guarded the Ruthven Museums Building on North University for sixty-six years are missing. Generations of kids had clam­bered over the stylized black cats, and countless museum visitors had posed for pictures standing in front of them. But last July, a hole was noticed in the head of one of the pumas.

Officials first sus­pected vandalism. "They've been hit with paintballs. They were once trimmed with masking tape to look like zebras. And they've been painted green (probably in deference to a certain Big Ten ri­val)," writes museum employee Dan Madaj. But a more careful look made it clear that the real culprit was years of exposure to the ele­ments. The big cats were removed for restoration and replace­ment—the first time they'd left their perches since museum sculptor Carleton Watson Angell put them there in 1940.

A farm boy from Belding, in west Michi­gan, Angell overcame great obstacles to build a career as an artist. Born in 1887, he got his first art lessons as a child from a customer on his father's milk route. But then his father died, and his mother moved back to her hometown of Hion, New York, where Angell worked for seven years to save up for art school. He finally enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1909, at age twenty-two. Afterward he worked at the American Terra Cotta Company in nearby Crystal Lake, making decorative panels for building facades but lost that job dur­ing an economic downturn. He returned to Illinois, worked in his brother's grocery store, and married Gladys Thayer.

But Angell continued sculpting and drawing, and in 1922, when he was thirty-five, his persistence finally paid off: he got an offer from the U-M to be a half-time instructor at the College of Architecture and Design. By then he and Gladys had three children, so to supplement his income, they ran a boardinghouse at 1438 Washington Heights (about where the new School of Public Health building is today). Their daughter, Jennett Angell Hamilton, re­members watching her dad strip the sheets from the beds and bring them down for her mother to wash.

In 1926 Angell was offered additional work at the U-M Museum of Natural His­tory, which was preparing to move from State Street to North U. Celebrated indus­trial architect Albert Kahn designed the V-­shaped building, but Angell contributed many decorative details, including the bronze front doors and the limestone bas-reliefs of animals and naturalists on the facade. And even after the building opened in 1928, he continued to produce busts of important people connected with the museum, both living and dead. They were placed in alcoves around the rotunda as he finished them during the 1930s.

The pumas were his last major contri­bution to the decoration. In an article in the August 17, 1940, Michigan Alumnus, Angell explained that although lions are often chosen to guard public buildings, he preferred Michigan's native cats. After building scale models to check the propor­tions, he constructed full-size figures of wood, wire, plaster of Paris, and clay. From these he created plaster molds, which were used to cast the final versions in terrazzo, a stone aggregate. Sixty-six years later, the terrazzo finally began to show its age.

Angell's main job was to make mod­els for dioramas, miniature re­creations of natural and historic scenes. He worked with scientists to mod­el extinct animals from fossil skeletons, and with anthropologists to show how people in different cultures lived. He often depicted American Indians, whom he typi­cally showed at work—making pottery, drilling, carrying things.

None of Angell's Indian dioramas are still on display, but it's interesting to wonder how he would have reacted to the recent protest by art students who charged that the museum's current repre­sentations of Native Americans are racist. Angell worked hard to create accurate de­pictions. Jennett Hamilton recalls how the family traveled to a reservation in Missaukee County, where her father spent nine hours sculpting an Ottawa chief named Henri. When the chief died soon afterward, the Angell family went back north for the funeral.

His work at the museum led to com­missions from other university depart­ments, community groups, and individu­als. Angell eventually completed hundreds of local projects, including a bronze bas-relief of philanthropist Horace Rackham in the Rackham Building and a plaque at An­gell School depicting the school's name­sake, U-M president James B. Angell (the two Angells were believed to be distant relatives).

By 1936 Carleton Angell was earning, enough that he and his family were able to leave the boardinghouse. They lived at 933 South State Street and 1217 Lutz before building a home at 3125 Hilltop in the early 1950s. Angell created Arborcrest Memorial Park's Four Chaplains monu­ment in the family room at the Hilltop home. It depicts four clergymen—two Protestants, a Roman Catholic, and a Jew—who died after giving up their life jackets to others when their ship was tor­pedoed during World War II. He complet­ed another commission—relief panels for the Washtenaw County Courthouse depict­ing local life—in the home's garage. Daughter Jennett remembers how when he was done her father enlisted her husband and brothers, along with every other able-bodied relative and friend he could find, to help him deliver the massive artwork.

Angell died in 1962 from a massive heart attack. Though he was seventy-four, granddaughter Barbara Gilson says that his death came as a shock, since he seemed in good health and was by then taking care of Gladys, who had suffered a stroke. Dariel Keeney recalls, "The last thing my grandfather said to me on my last visit to him in the hospital, hours be­fore he died, was 'Take care of your grandmother. She is so precious to me.'"

Since their installation, Angell's pumas have served as symbols of the museum, standing out in all weather. Over the years various small repairs were made, but last July's discovery made it clear that the time had come for a com­plete overhaul.

This time the museum is taking a twor pronged approach. The Fine Arts Sculp­ture Centre in Clarkston made molds from the original figures and then cast replicas in bronze. The Venus Bronze Works in Detroit has added a black finish to the bronzes, and also has restored the original terrazzo figures.

The pumas are expected back around the middle of May. The bronze cats will take over the plinths outside the doors, while the terrazzo originals will be placed in a yet-to-be-determined location inside the museum. On June 2, the museum will celebrate their return with a Puma Party, including a display of Carleton Angell's work in the rotunda.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Farm-boy-turned-artist Carleton Angell created much of the ornamental detail on the Ruthven Museums Building, including the ornate bronze doors and the bas-relief sculptures on the facade. The two pumas guarding the entrance were the final touch—Angell chose Michigan's native cats instead of the customary lions.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Bronze replicas of the pumas were cast at the Fine Arts Sculpture Center in Clarkston. The Venus Bronze Works in Detroit has since added a black finish to match the terrazzo originals.

Photo: Carrie, Jeffrey, and Laura Pew at University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, August 1972

Once the height of local luxury, the vintage apartment building has a new lease on life.

When Cathy Nowosielski was a U-M medical student in the 1970s, she passed Observato­ry Lodge, at Observa­tory Street and Washington Heights, every day as she walked between her sorority and the old University Hospital. A panoply of almost every Tudor detail ever used, the 1930 apartment building has turrets, oriel windows, half-timbering, a slate roof, cooper eaves, and stained-glass windows.

Nowosielski admired the building, and when she learned that it was owned by the U-M and rented to employees and grad students, she decided to investigate living there. Directed to the second floor of the LS&A Building, she was told that she could have the one available unit if she took it right away. She gasped but agreed. "It reminded me of walking into an ele­gant mansion," she recalls. It was not only (in her words) "phenomenal" but also a much better deal than her sorority.

On a recent visit to Ann Arbor, No­wosielski asked a friend to drive her by some old haunts. When they got near Ob­servatory Lodge, her friend, Alicia Marting, couldn't believe it—the building Nowosielski wanted to see was the same one Mcirting's division, kinesiology, was moving into. They were even more amazed when they figured out that part of Nowosielski's top-floor apartment had been preserved just as it was—vaulted ceiling, textured plaster, phone alcove, and all—as the dean's office.

Observatory Lodge was the last in a string of eight ele­gant, multistory apartment houses that various devel­opers built near campus in the decade before the Great Depression. Six are still standing, but two were recent­ly torn down—the Planada on Ann Street was replaced by a parking structure, and high-rise apartments are currently going up on the site of the former Anberay on East University.

An elegant entrance foyer and lobby set the tone of Observatory Lodge, with a fire­place, art-pottery floor tiles, ornate wall panels, and antique furniture. The thirty-four apartments included efficiencies and one- and two-bedroom units. A hair salon and barbershop, entered from an outside door on the northeast side of the building, was convenient for residents but was also open to the general public. Both a manager and a caretaker lived on the premises.

Observatory Lodge's location made it perfect for hospital employees. City direc­tories from the 1930s list a hospital phar­macist, social worker, stenographer, and cataloguer, as well as doctors, interns, and nurses.

The main U-M campus was also well represented, with every level of academia from full professors to stu­dents. From the town side came Otto Haisley, superintendent of the Ann Arbor Public Schools, and Julius Schaffer, the manager of Kline's depart­ment store. Several women residents re­ported their occupa­tion as "widow." Former Washtenaw County sheriff Doug Harvey knew the building well: after World War II, his fa­ther, also named Douglas, was hired as caretaker by the Ann Arbor Trust Company, which owned the building. The family moved into a rent-free one-bedroom garden-level apartment on the east side. The fu­ture sheriff and his brother slept in the liv­ing room on roll-away cots.

"A grand old place" is how Harvey re­members the building. Most of the residents were "people of high stature, who lived there for years. It was hard to get in—you didn't just ask. It was rented far in advance; you had to wait until someone died." Harvey describes his father as a "jack of all trades—whatever he was asked, he knew how to do." He could paint, put up wallpaper, and repair plumbing, along with more mundane chores like stoking the furnace and keeping the hallways clean. He was so capable that his employ­ers soon combined the jobs of caretaker and manager.

Since people lived there for years, the caretaker knew them all well. "He used to coddle them. They loved him to death," Harvey recalls. For instance, his father used to walk the Irish setter belonging to Edgar Kahn, the famous neurosurgeon, and feed the dog an egg when they re­turned.

No one was allowed into the building without being buzzed in—certainly a plus for the widows. If no one answered a buzz, the elder Harvey would go to the door and interrogate the visitor. Not even the paperboy was allowed in; he just dropped the newspapers in the foyer and rang the buzzer. The manager then deliv­ered them to the apartments.

The younger Harvey was in high school when his dad took the job. He en­joyed going up on the roof and looking at the view out over the Huron River valley. When his buddies came over after school, they used to see whether they could get the elevator to stop short of the second floor and then climb on top of it to ride the rest of the way up. "Dad would get mad, but we thought it was the best thing since canned beer," he laughs.

Celebrated Observatory Lodge residents included U-M neurosurgeon Edgar Kahn, Kline's department store manager Julius Schaffer, and Ann Arbor Public Schools superintendent Otto Haisley. As a teenager, future sheriff Doug Harvey "surfed" atop its elevator—angeringhis father, who managed the building.

The university bought the building in 1966. By the time Cathy Nowosielski lived there, students made up about half of the resi­dents. They tended to be assigned to the top floors, she recalls, probably because they could deal better with the stairs when the elevator broke down.

Nowosielski remembers the building as being "very quiet. There were no parties. It was a place to come back to and call your own." The units were unfurnished and there were no group activities, but the young med student loved it—she enjoyed eating in the breakfast nook in the turret and having the sun shine in on three sides through casement windows. But much as she enjoyed living in Observatory Lodge, she admits that even then, more than twen­ty years before it closed, the plumbing, the elevator, and other parts of the building were showing their age.
Noreen Clark, professor and former dean of the U-M School of Public Health, lived in Observatory Lodge in its last dec­ade as a residence. She was first drawn to the building by the location—it's literally in the shadow of her school. She had to get on a waiting list before she could move in, and once she was in the building, she got on other lists to move into bigger apartments. Eventually she had a two-bedroom unit with a terrace. But even the smallest unit was fine, since she has a commuter mar­riage (her husband works in New York).

Coming from the UK, where professors often live "in college," Clark enjoyed see­ing students wandering around on evenings and weekends. She also loved the old building details—"the old gesso still intact, the arched doorways, the accordion-door elevator."

Toward the end of her stay, though, Clark was the only faculty member in the building. In 2001 she was the last resident to move out.

When the university closed Observatory Lodge, it cited concerns about the building's safety—specifically, the poor condition of the electrical system and fire alarms. By then over seventy years old, it still had its original knob-and-tube wiring with horsehair insulation, as well as as­bestos. People who loved the place held their collective breaths, fearing the univer­sity might demolish it as it had the Planada. They were delighted when, in 2005, the U-M announced plans to convert it to of­fices for the division of kinesiology.

Kinesiology desperately needed more space. As the division's mission expanded, it was spilling out of its quarters in the Central Campus Recreation Building into an annex next door. Besides its traditional curriculum of teaching people to be gym teachers and physical education administrators, kinesiology now helps communi­ties use sports as a tourist attraction and does research in "movement science"— studying, for instance, why certain activi­ties can control diabetes, or how exercises can reduce developmental delays in babies with Down syndrome.

The university's exterior renovations enhanced the building's historic character. The slate roof and copper gutters and downspouts were repaired, and new win­dows were installed that mimicked the original small-paned casements. The origi­nal squirrel weathervane was preserved, and a duplicate was made of the original wooden sign. The only visible "change is the addition of a retaining wall in front, which should provide ft pleasant place for students to sit in warmer weather.

The changes inside were much more extensive. Because total rewiring was needed, and because the thirty-four bath­rooms and kitchens were not needed, the inside was pretty much gutted, except for load-bearing walls. But the new offices and labs have been largely furnished with older-style wooden furniture, in deference to the building's history.

Two places were kept much as they originally were—Cathy Nowosielski's top-floor apartment, now the dean's office, and the lobby and foyer. The hope is that "someone can walk in and get a sense of what the building was like," explains Jim Mclntyre, development director of kinesiology.

To redo the front entry the university hired Saline-based Ron Koenig, who has done restorations all over the country, in­cluding several state capitols and the Detroit Opera House. Koenig's goal was, in his words, "to have the lobby look old but well maintained. It's key to reading the building."

Luckily all the design elements were still there, although some were in bad shape or painted over. Koenig started by taking samples of the lowest layers to dis­cover original colors and finishes. He then brought everything—the raised decorations in the wall panels, the floor tiles (a mix of Pewabic, Moravian, and possibly Flint Faience), the wainscoting, and the stained glass—as close as possible to its original condition.

Kinesiology began moving in last Oc­tober and completed the transition during the semester break. A few labs and class­rooms remain in the CCRB, but everything else is finally under one roof. "Because of the location, we're also talking about more collaborative work with public health, medicine, and orthopaedic surgery," Mclntyre says.

After kinesiology moved in, Noreen Clark was given a tour by dean Beverly Ulrich, a friend of hers. "I'm really happy it's occupied by a group who has respect for the building and are happy to be there," Clark says. But she admits she misses her apartment. If she could, she says, "I would move back in a New York minute."

The U-M is holding a grand opening of Observatory Lodge on April 3. The public is invited to take tours and hear opening remarks by U-M president Mary Sue Coleman and kinesiology dean Beverly Ulrich.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Kinesiology dean Eeverly Ulrich (left) now has her office on the building's top floor—in the same turreted corner where Cathy Nowosielski (right) lived as a medical student in the 1970s.