For over a century, a bevy of stores served the farmer and the fixer-upper

Downtown Ann Arbor was once a mecca for hardware shoppers. From the town's early days, there were always at least four hardware stores, which drew customers from the entire city and from all the small towns and farms in the area. During the week, the stores served the area's tradespeople--plumbers, painters, carpenters, plasterers, contractors, and builders. On weekends, farmers came into town to buy supplies--pitch-forks or baling twine for the harvest, axes or mauls for chopping wood, and all the myriad bits of hardware they needed to repair their farm machinery and to fix their barns and fences.

As the farmers' ranks dwindled in this century, they were replaced by growing numbers of home owners and do-it-yourselfers. If the part needed wasn't made, the hardware store could make one. And if it needed installation, they had work crews they would send out.

By 1835, just eleven years after promoters John Allen and Elisha Rumsey began selling lots in the village of "Annarbour," William Dennis and Hierome Goodspeed were advertising a hardware store on the corner of Main and Huron. Along with farm supplies like cowbells and horseshoes, their inventory included knives, scissors, coffee mills, waffle irons, razors, and latches. By the 1870's and 1880's, the early competitors had sorted themselves out into four major stores, all of which survived well into this century: Schumacher's, 1870-1940; Schuh's (later Schuh and Muehlig, Muehlig and Schmid, Muehlig and Lanphear), 1872-1962; Eberbach's (later Fischer's) 1880-1981; and downtown's sole surviving hardware store, Schlenker's, founded in 1886.

Hardware was big business back then. Schumacher's, located where Kline's is now, grew to fill three storefronts. Schuh's occupied all three floors of a building on the southeast corner of Main and Washington. Hardware stores were valuable assets that were passed on from generation to generation: after founder John Schumacher's death, his business was taken over by his sons, Bert, Philip, and Robert. Jacob Schuh took a younger clerk, Andrew Muehlig, as a partner and eventual successor. When Schuh's original store was torn down to make room for the First National Building in 1929, Muehlig's nephew, Edward Muehlig, and partner Don Lanphear moved to a new building at 311 South Main (now the Full Moon).

Eberbach's, on the northeast corner of Main and Washington, was started by Christian Eberbach as a business for his two younger sons, Ernest and Edward, since his oldest son, Ottmar, was getting the pharmacy. Later, the State Savings Bank, which had an interest in the store, moved into the very corner, nestled in much like the Del Rio fits into the corner of the Old German. Bob Eberbach remembers that as a boy he could enter his great uncles' store from either Washington or Main. By 1892 the store was taken over by John Fischer, who had been a clerk there, although the Eberbachs continued to work there and kept an interest in it. In 1937 the store moved two blocks east, to 219-223 East Washington.

Schlenker's was first located on West Liberty in the building that is now Rider's Hobby Shop, then across the street in the store now owned by Ehnis & Son. In 1906 they built the present store a block west with room upstairs for the family to live.

The hardware stores sold all the small, practical items that other stores didn't want to bother with--tools, nails, fittings, and utensils. The owners were all tinsmiths, and before the days of mass production and easy transportation, they made much of what they stocked--gutters, furnace parts, funnels, coffeepots, pitchers, and pans. The tinning complemented the other stock in the store, and it also helped keep the employees busy during the slower winter months.

Each store also developed its own specialty. Schuh and Muehlig's was sewing machines: they sold and repaired all the major brands. They also sold such house finishing items as tiles, grates, mantels, and pressed tin ceilings. (Edward Muehlig put a tin ceiling in the house he built in 1909 at 801 West Liberty.) Later, Muehlig and Lanphear put in furnaces and made a specialty of installing locks. Schumacher had plumbing crews and later spun off Schumacher and Backus Plumbing and Heating. Fischer's and Schlenker's both had roofing crews. (Schlenker's put the slate roofs on the First Methodist Church and on many U-M sorority and fraternity houses.)

Until central heating became widespread in the 1920's, wood and coal stoves were a big part of the hardware business--Risdon's, one of the pre-Civil War stores, put stoves above hardware on their sign. Eberbach's sold Round Oak heating stoves and Adams and Westlank Monarch cooking stoves. Marty Schlenker remembers that in the 1920's his father's store had a row of stoves all along one wall from front to back.

Often newly developed products were first sold in hardware stores before being spun off to a store dedicated to them. Schumacher's sold washing machines as early as 1916 ("My neighbors can't understand how my washing can be on the line by 8 o'clock," said one ad). They also had a niche in sports equipment. Doris Schumacher Dixon, daughter of Robert Schumacher, remembers that as a girl she always had the newest in sports equipment from her family's inventory--bicycles, footballs, baseballs, tennis rackets, ice skates, roller skates, hockey equipment, and golf clubs.

Fischer's was the first area hardware store to specialize in housewares. It also was known as the store with the most university trade, maybe because it was closest to campus. Schlenker's sold the first refrigerators in town and was also a pioneer radio dealer, selling Atwater Kents. When Marty Schlenker's uncle Paul was involved in the store, he sold all kinds of fishing equipment--outboard motors, tackles, rods. And, as today, Schlenker's was known as the store where you could get anything: if you couldn't find what you were looking for anywhere else, you would go to Schlenker's.

A store's proprietors set the tone of their store, not only with what they sold, but with their personalities. John Schumacher was a leader of the temperance movement, and during his lifetime his store was known as a center for like-minded idealists, just as Eberbach's pharmacy had been a center for early Republicans. Muehlig and Lanphear contributed to the community by furnishing supplies for Albert Warhnoff, Ann Arbor's Santa Claus, who made toys for needy and sick children in the 1930's and 1940's.

When there were numerous hardware stores within a few blocks, the owners cooperated as much as possible, honoring their specialties and sending customers to each other. Mary Cruse, a stockholder of Fischer's and co-owner of East Ann Arbor Hardware, says they even traded inventory when something moved in one store and not another. Marty Schlenker remembers running joint ads with Fischer's, Ann Arbor Implement, and Herder's, figuring they were appealing to a similar crowd while offering different merchandise. They also sometimes ordered together, going in on train lots to reduce costs.

After World War II, a new generation of hardware stores opened on the commercial strips on Washtenaw, Stadium, and Packard. With easy access and ample parking, they gradually took over most of the business that had previously come downtown. Schlenker's singular survival was thanks in part to a 1950's decision to tear down the old tin and roofing shops to build its own parking lot.

With appliances and other mechanical products getting cheaper, fewer people repair broken appliances and the like, so there is less demand for traditional hardware services. Many stores now sell other merchandise, such as Christmas decorations, office supplies, table linens, and toys, to fill the gap.

Some of today's nonfixers give their broken or worn-out appliances to the Kiwanis sale instead of the landfill. On Kiwanis sale days, Marty Schlenker is reminded of the old days, when people flocked in to buy small parts to make their bargains work again.

[Photo caption from original print edition: Employees watch a parade on Main Street from Schumacher's upstairs windows. In its heyday, the store filled three storefronts in the spot where Kline's is today.]

The heavy snow that ushered in 1999 brought traffic almost to a standstill. For a few days, Ann Arbor’s older neighborhoods, blanketed in white, looked not much different from the way they would have appeared after a winter storm at the close of the nineteenth century.

Compare that pristine scene with old photos of Ann Arbor in the winter, though, and you’ll notice something missing from today’s picture: black smoke. Today, most home chimneys give off the almost invisible by-products of natural gas furnaces. A century ago, they belched columns of sooty coal smoke. Coal-fired boilers in offices and stores, factories and laundries, added to the pall that hung over the city.

From the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, coal was Ann Arbor’s chief source of energy. Coal heat helped make winter tolerable (Ralph Waldo Emerson praised its capacity “to make Canada as warm as Calcutta”), and coal-fueled steam engines powered almost every local mill and factory--as well as the locomotives that brought virtually all people and goods to the town.

But the age of “King Coal” was also incredibly dirty. When traveling, Carl Malcolm remembers, “if you left the train windows open, or if you were standing on the platform, you’d be covered with tiny cinders.” At home, says Sam Schlecht, “every week you’d get a quarter of an inch of [coal] dust from the furnace.” So prevalent was the soot, Malcolm recalls, that “in the winter you’d notice the dirt on the snow.”

Ann Arbor was far from the harshest and most dangerous part of the coal economy, the underground mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Even so, scores of residents spent their lives working intimately with coal, unloading it from rail cars at local coal yards, storing it, and delivering it to homes as needed. It was difficult, dirty work.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Raleigh Alexander was co-owner of Blue Ribbon Coal, a yard by the Ann Arbor Railroad tracks on South State, near today’s Produce Station. Alexander’s son John remembers, “Dad would use twine to tie his pants and cuffs so not so much coal would get on his skin. He looked like a clown with his pants blowing out, neckerchief around his neck.” Nonetheless, Alexander says, “The dust would crawl up his pant legs—he’d soak his feet up to his knees every night.”

Ron Patterson, whose father, Jim, delivered coal for Blue Ribbon, remembers helping unload coal and then coming home to bathe. “It’d all come out in the tub,” he recalls. The memory of that grimy water is so vivid, he says, that “I can’t take a bath today--I have to take a shower.”

Mary Visel, wife of Carl Visel, co-owner of Cornwell Coal, remembers that her husband, when he got home, even sneezed black. “It was a hard life,” she says, shaking her head. “I advised my girls to marry guys who worked in offices.”

“As early as 1300, the scarcity of firewood drove Londoners to heat their homes with coal, despite the ‘intolerable smell’ of the smoke,” Priscilla Long writes in Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. But coal took hold late in the United States, where the forests--and the supply of firewood—were long thought to be inexhaustible. As late as 1860, the city directory listed only one place to buy coal, Widenmann Hardware, and one place to buy furnaces, Schumacher Hardware. But by the 1880s, central heating was gaining in popularity, and the directory listed seven hardware stores selling furnaces and seven places selling coal.

At first businesses got into heating as a sideline--the Staeblers through their agricultural implement business, for instance, and the Rohdes as an extension of their building supply inventory. But by the turn of the century, consumption was high enough that companies devoted exclusively to selling coal began to emerge. For the next fifty years, there would be as many as fourteen coal yards operating in Ann Arbor at one time, all based along the railroad tracks. Except for a single Depression-era co-op, all were owned privately by a family or one or two people.

Central heating greatly simplified the problem of keeping warm in the winter--there was only one furnace to feed instead of individual parlor stoves or fireplaces in each room--but tending a coal furnace was still a chore. For many years, coal had to be shoveled into the furnace by hand. The job became easier after the introduction of electrically powered stokers, but clinkers (unburned bits of rock) and ashes still had to be removed regularly. At night the fire had to be banked so that it would burn very slowly overnight but still could be restarted in the morning.

Robert Hayden paid tribute to his father’s tending of the family’s coal furnace in the poem “Those Winter Sundays”:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the 
blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday 
weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever
thanked him.

Ford Ferguson, retired freight yard manager of the Ann Arbor Railroad, was familiar with the local coal operation from the early 1940s until its final days in the late 1960s. “Almost all the coal came in on the Ann Arbor Railroad, although some came in on the New York Central,” he recalls. “All [the yards] got lots of coal, sometimes five or six carloads at a time.” According to Ferguson, the yards were all about the same size and charged similar prices. “The only difference was who bought coal from them.”

All the yards had similar layouts: a small office to take orders and schedule deliveries; a rail spur used to park the coal cars; an area along the track, rented from the railroad, that was used to pile up the different types of coal (a few people splurged on “hard coal,” clean-burning anthracite, but most chose less-expensive “soft” or bituminous coal); and a truck scale to weigh outgoing loads. Small bins were placed alongside the scale, so that coal could be added or subtracted to reach the exact weight ordered. “Poorer people used to bring bushel baskets and get coal out of the coal bins,” remembers Bob Beuhler, whose father, Herman, owned Ann Arbor Fuel on Madison. “They’d record it in a ledger and, when they got money, come back and pay.”

Many small companies came and went, but there were ten major ones that people still alive remember. Two were side by side on Depot Street along the Michigan Central tracks:

Staebler’s, 115 Depot. Staebler’s decaying coal trestle can still be seen alongside the building that is today the headquarters of First Martin Corporation. The cinder-block office was built by Ken Heininger in 1941, when Neil Staebler went to Washington to work for the federal Office of Price Administration and Heininger was hired to take over day-to-day management of the various Staebler enterprises.

McCudden, 229 Depot. Owner Frank McCudden also had a good reputation for fixing furnaces. Much renovated, the building is now Fry & Partners Architects.
All the other yards were along the Ann Arbor Railroad. In order, running south from the river, they were:

Blaess, 124 West Summit. Oscar Blaess took over the Hiscock coal operation and then passed the merged company on to his sons, Earl and Harold. According to Earl’s widow, Eloise, “Harold did the bookkeeping. Earl figured the weights. They did it all themselves. They loved that kind of work.” Huron Valley Roofing now occupies a new building on the site.

Cornwell, 410 Miller. This yard was started by Frank Cornwell, who sold it to two employees, Carl Visel and Leona Schlafer, in the 1940s. Schlafer ran the office while Visel took care of the yard. After 1961, when the shrinking business could no longer support them both, Schlafer left and Carl’s wife, Mary, took over in the office. The building is currently vacant.

Artificial Ice, 416 West Huron. Owner Gene Heinzman sold coal in the winter, when demand for ice fell off. Today the building houses Fireside Foods.

Ann Arbor Fuel, 214 East Madison. The Staeblers helped their relative, Herman Beuhler, set up this business, although it competed with theirs. In 1938 Beuhler sold to Lewis & Frisinger. The yard is now part of Fingerle Lumber.

City Fuel, 108 East Madison. Owned by Edwin L. Feldkamp, this yard also became part of Fingerle’s.

Ann Arbor Co-op, 635 South Main. The co-op started in the Depression as a coal buying club, taking orders over the phone, picking the coal up at the Staebler coal yard, and distributing it to members. It eventually grew to include its own grocery store, in the building at Main and Mosley where the Neutral Zone teen club is now, and a gas station on Catherine Street (now Argiero’s restaurant). The co-op’s office was in the Main Street building, while its coal yard was to the north, where Don’s Auto Wash is today.

Crane, 207 Hill. Run by John Crane, this was one of the smallest but also earliest coal businesses. It later merged with Blue Ribbon. Its site, too, was eventually absorbed into the Fingerle complex.

Blue Ribbon, 1709 South State. Raleigh Alexander and Clarence Sevey bought the business from their boss, Ralph Osgood. Originally located at 513 South Ashley, the yard moved to State Street in 1944.

The U-M was too big to bother ordering coal through a local yard. It had its own spur off the Michigan Central on Fuller, and its own switch engine to shuttle cars up the hill, via a track east of Glen, to the power plant on Huron. The coal was piled on what is now the surface parking lot behind the Power Center.

Another big consumer was the artificial gasworks on Broadway between the Michigan Central tracks and the Huron River. The plant heated bituminous coal in a vacuum, drawing off flammable gas that was piped to customers to fuel gaslights and cooking stoves. A by-product, coke, was a nearly pure form of carbon that could also be used as a fuel. Because it was harder to light than coal and burned faster, coke was used mostly in industry. Today the gas plant’s site is a Michigan Consolidated Gas service center.

Some other local businesses used enough coal to buy wholesale but didn’t maintain their own inventory, instead making arrangements for local yards to accept delivery and bring it to them. Cornwell had such agreements with Nielsen’s greenhouse, the Argus and King-Seeley factories west of downtown, and the Kyer laundry on South Main.

Ferguson recalls that the Ann Arbor Railroad carried “mostly soft coal. Few used hard coal; it was much more expensive.” The coal cars were dropped off at the turntable near Ferry Field; Ferguson’s crew, usually three men, would deliver it to the coal yards with a switch engine. Bob Beuhler’s family got to know the crews so well that he was sometimes invited to ride with them as they made their deliveries—a real treat for a boy.

Operators invented various methods of unloading the coal. Beuhler dropped it from the car into a pit and had a pulley arrangement to hoist it up. Several places, like Staebler’s, had elevated trestles so that the coal could be dropped directly into trucks. But delivery was the real key to a successful business. “We had more customers than coal, more delivery requests than personnel,” recalls Heininger. The yard owners all had their own trucks and delivered as much as they could themselves, but they also hired other drivers, especially in the busy winter season: Blue Ribbon recruited farmers who had spare time in the winter.

Delivering coal was best done by two people, one to stay on the truck and keep the coal moving into the chute and a second to level it off in the basement. “I liked riding around with Dad, jumping up and down from the truck,” Ron Patterson recalls. “The better houses had special coal bins, but others just had a fenced-off area of the basement to store the coal. If there was stuff already there, a puff of soot would come out. We’d wait and then go down.”

“I’d go in [to the coal bin] and level the coal off, breathing dust,” recalls Carl Thayer, who as a teen helped deliver coal for the Ann Arbor Co-op. “The coal would be up as close to the ceiling as you could get. If we could get it high enough, it would last all winter.”

Most coal operators offered lower rates in the summer, but human nature or lack of cash--many of these memories are from the Depression--kept most people from ordering until the cold was upon them. Coal yard operators found other work to supplement their incomes in the summer, using the same equipment, if they could. Visel did hauling and grading and eventually moved into building swimming pools, Alexander and Sevey did yard work, Patterson hauled trash, Frisinger built roads, and Beuhler sold ice harvested from Whitmore Lake until Heinzman’s manufactured ice put him out of business.

During World War II good coal was hard to get, since the best was saved for the war effort and trains were filled with military freight. The Visels remember getting an inferior coal from Illinois, delivered in “monster trucks.”

On the plus side, no one was able to switch to oil or gas during the war. By then, though, the coal yard operators were all working against the clock. Says Heininger, “We all knew that after the war, coal would disappear.”

“As soon as they built the [natural] gas pipeline in the 1940s, school was out,” explains Beuhler. Clean, simple, and cheap, natural gas quickly supplanted coal and oil as the preferred fuel for home heating. After the war Staebler’s bought the customer lists of Artificial Ice and Ann Arbor Fuel, but even so, their volume fell 40 percent. They closed in 1947 and switched to building houses.

By the mid-1960s there were only three coal yards left--Blaess, Blue Ribbon, and Cornwell. “They went down together like a house of cards,” recalls Alexander. The very last to give up the business was Cornwell. “Coal was the most expensive and dirtiest way to heat,” says Jerry Visel, who with his twin brother, David, had been working with his dad since the early 1960s to develop a swimming pool business. (Their first pool was at their parents’ house at Second and Mosley.) When the Visel sons took over the bookkeeping, they discovered that the pool business was paying taxes for the coal operation and convinced their parents to get out of it. They sold the building to Calvert’s landscaping and hauling company and moved out Pontiac Trail, where they’re still in business today as Cornwell Pool & Patio.

Of the original yard buildings, only Cornwell’s and Staebler’s are as they were. A few artifacts can be found around town, such as the Staebler sign in Casey’s Tavern. John Alexander, a farmer, still uses his father’s old truck scale to weigh corn. Coal chute doors are still visible on many houses. For the most part, though, only memories remain.

On a recent visit to Sault Sainte Marie, Ron Patterson toured a dry dock where a coal-burning ship was being repaired. When he reached the boiler room, he reports, “It threw me back. The smell triggered my memory--the soot smell.

“It was good, but it choked."

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 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.

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.

A former factory in floodway limbo

The fate of the former furniture factory at 109 East Madison, a key building in the debate over the use of local floodways, has been delayed. The present owner, the University of Michigan, tried to sell it but took it off the market after failing to receive any offers that were close to its appraised value.

Built in 1883, it is a classic three-story brick building, with subtle detailing and large windows. But visions of turning it into condos for downtown’s hot housing market ran into a seemingly insurmountable problem: the building is in the Allen’s Creek floodway. Although normally hidden in an underground pipe, the creek reappears during a “hundred-year flood” (the kind of flood that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year; see “Storm Warning” in the November Observer). In such a flood, 109 East Madison not only would get wet, but would receive the full force of the flowing water.

There was no regulation of floodway construction in the late nineteenth century, when cabinetmakers George Gruner and George Kuebler decided to go into business for themselves. Gruner and Kuebler built their factory on the corner of South Fourth Avenue and East Madison, nestled into a bend of Allen’s Creek--the creek passed along the building’s Fourth Avenue side and then curled around the back. Gruner and Kuebler’s equipment was steam driven, so they didn’t need the creek’s waterpower; more likely, they chose the site to be near their labor market, the skilled craftsmen who lived on what is now known as the Old West Side.

In 1899, after Kuebler died and Gruner moved to Cincinnati, Charles Sauer bought the property. Sauer was born in Canada to German parents and learned carpentry from his father before moving to Ann Arbor at age twenty. He worked as a draftsman and as a contractor before forming Sauer Lumber with his two brothers, Adam and John.

The new business offered architectural services and contracting, as well as lumber for all kinds of building. In the early years, the Sauers also still sold furniture, possibly using the same tools and craftsmen who worked for Gruner and Kuebler. They extended the business west, building a small mill in the yard for custom work, and an office at 543 South Main. “They have a well equipped planing mill in connection with the lumber plant and are doing an extensive business,” Samuel Beakes wrote in the 1906 edition of Past and Present of Washtenaw Country, Michigan, “their patronage having continually grown in a gratifying manner since the organization of the firm in 1899.”

The Sauer brothers built Ann Arbor’s 1906–1907 city hall, kitty-corner from the present one, on the corner now occupied by the Dahlmann City Center Building. Eight years later, Charles Sauer himself moved into the mayor’s office. Sadly, he died just six months into his term, at age forty-nine. On the day of his burial, all business and governmental offices closed from 2 to 3:30 p.m. during the funeral.

Although it passed out of family hands, the Sauer Lumber business kept going until the mid-1940s. Colin Fingerle, whose family owned a competing lumberyard nearby, recalls that Sauer’s specialized in doors and windows, making them from scratch.

Bob Beuhler, whose dad owned a coal company across the street, remembers the Sauer employees as skilled craftsmen. When he was a boy, he was in the middle of building something--a model boat, he thinks--but couldn’t finish the project with the tools he had, so at his dad’s suggestion he went across the street to Sauer’s to ask for help. “They ran it through their machine. They obviously knew what they were doing. They were old guys, very kind, and did it for nothing,” says Beuhler.

Nelson Plumbing, a company that sold plumbing supplies to builders and contractors, was the next occupant of the building. Fingerle remembers going to the third floor, then unused, and seeing the shaft, belts, and pulleys that had distributed power from the steam engine throughout the building. After Sauer went out of business, the Fingerles bought the property west of the building. They are still using the old custom mill and occupied the Main Street office for a while, but have since torn it down for a lumber shed.

The university bought the former factory building in 1970. It has housed various offices, including the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, Alumni Records, and Marketing Communications. Workers there enjoy the charm of the exposed brick walls and large windows, although they say that the building shakes when trains go by. They also report that in a big storm the first-floor carpeting gets wet and gives off a musty odor. While the building was on the market, all the occupants made plans to move, which the last of them are now carrying out.

People were interested in buying the building, but none at the price the university wanted. “We were frankly disappointed with the offers we received,” says Norm Herbert, U-M associate vice-president and treasurer. “From a use standpoint, keeping the building is of more value to us.”

One of those who expressed interest was local developer Peter Allen, who would have liked to convert it to living units. “It’s a magnificent building inside,” says Allen. “It would be good for young faculty.”

But “state law prohibits residential use on the floodway,” says Jerry Hancock of the city’s Building Department. “Peter Allen would have to change state law.” Office use is all right, according to Hancock, because “typically people are awake and alert and can get out of harm’s way.” But people sleep in residential property and might not be able to get out in time if surging water damaged basement utilities or if the building weakened enough to collapse. People also could be trapped on an upper floor during a flood, Hancock adds, unable to get out for a medical emergency.

Asked about the floodway problem, Allen answers, “That’s patently foolish. It’s up out of the ground. It would be great in-fill [housing]. It fits with all public policy. The idea that it’s dangerous doesn’t hold up. It’s been there for a hundred years.” Allen sees this building as a “kingpin--if you could do residential, it would give the lever to do some more, to open a bigger loophole.”

But that showdown will be delayed for at least three or four years. After rethinking the matter, the university has decided to use the building for “surge space.” It will provide temporary quarters for offices displaced by planned renovation work on several Central Campus buildings, including LS&A, Mason and Haven halls, the old Perry School, West Hall, and the Dana Building.

One thing is almost certain: the building will not be demolished. Since under current rules no one could get permission to build a new structure on the site, it would not be in anyone’s interest to tear it down. Just what it can be used for, though, is still to be determined.

Four generations of selling watches and jewelry

In four generations of selling watches, jewelry, and silver, the Schlanderer family has seen jewelry sales go up, silver sales go down, and watch sales remain steady. The need to know the time evidently remains a constant in most people's lives, regardless of economics or fashion.

Schlanderer and Sons, 208 South Main, was founded in 1933 by C. Henry Schlanderer and his two sons, Paul and Arthur. But the family story really starts much earlier. By the time he opened that store, Hank Schlanderer had already been in the watch and jewelry business for forty-seven years.

Schlanderer was born in 1870, the son of German parents. His father, also C. Henry, was born in a small town near Tuebingen and immigrated to Ann Arbor with his family in the 1850's. He found work as a baker, a trade he had learned in Germany, married Fredericka Rauscher, and bought a house at 504 South Main. A volunteer firefighter, he was mortally injured on his way to a fire in 1871. Fredericka was left with four young children and another on the way. To make ends meet, she moved the young family to the basement of their house and rented out the upstairs.

As soon as he finished sixth grade, Hank Schlanderer went to work; collectively the children managed to earn enough to allow the family to reclaim the upstairs of the house. When he was fourteen, Hank joined his brother working at the Keck furniture factory on Fourth Street. Two years later, he left to apprentice as a watchmaker with George Haller.

Schlanderer could not have chosen a better teacher. George Haller, trained in Germany, came from a long line of skilled clock and watchmakers. His father, Jacob Haller, even had several horological inventions to his name. Schlanderer was paid a dollar a week as an apprentice, and he graduated when he could make a watch from scratch. He stayed on with Haller for twenty-five years, rising to manage Haller's store at 216 South Main.

When Haller died in 1911, Schlanderer formed a partnership with another watchmaker and jeweler, Fred Seyfried. They called their store Schlanderer and Seyfried, or sometimes S & S. They bought the Henne jewelry store at 113 E. Liberty, then moved in 1922 to 304 South Main. In 1933, when both men wanted to bring their sons into the business, they dissolved the partnership. Fred Seyfried stayed at 304, while Hank moved a block north to 208. Both stores have been there ever since. (Seyfried's today is owned by brothers Bill and Jim Hart.)

Schlanderer's two sons, who joined him at the new location, brought their own skills to the business. Paul had been working as a silverware buyer for J.L. Hudson, while Arthur had a master's in business and could take over the accounting. Both were graduates of the U-M, where Arthur was captain of the hockey team.

The building that Schlanderer and his two sons moved into was almost eighty years old. Paul Christman built it in 1854 for his tin and stove shop, which remained there until his death in 1913. After Christman's death, the building became a confectionery, then a drugstore. For a time, the Staffan Funeral Home occupied the former Christman family apartment upstairs.

Schlanderer and Sons opened in the middle of the Depression. Arthur Schlanderer remembers that during their first year they didn't earn even $25 a week. Things turned around during World War II. In the 1930's they had stock to sell but not enough customers. In the 1940's they had customers but not enough stock, since many factories had switched to war production. Most of their watches came from Switzerland, which was neutral during the war, but shipments took so long that the watches were often sold before they even arrived. Some of the store's best customers were workers at the Willow Run bomber plant, who had extra money for the first time in their lives and came in to buy fancy items like diamond-encrusted wristwatches.

Hank Schlanderer died in 1941 at the age of seventy. His son Paul died in 1949, leaving Art the sole owner until 1957, when his nephew Chuck joined him after graduating from Hillsdale College with a business degree and spending two years in the service. Chuck's son, Chuck Jr., joined the business in 1989, after finishing at his dad's alma mater, Hillsdale. In addition to his regular liberal arts studies, Chuck Jr. studied jewelry making, both in high school (Huron has an excellent program) and in college. Arthur retired two years ago at age eighty-two.

The store's inventory continues to evolve as demand changes. It started as primarily a watch store with jewelry as a sideline, but sales of both are now about the same. Chuck Schlanderer says people used to have just a few good pieces but now like to have jewelry for every occasion. Because customers also prefer better quality pieces these days, Schlanderer's no longer carries costume jewelry. Another item that has disappeared is the compact, a small mirrored case for loose face powder. Back when most women had at least two, one for special occasions and one for every day, it was not unusual for Schlanderer's to sell twenty a day.

Sales of silver hollowware and flatware, once a major part of the business, have also declined, partly because per ounce silver prices have gone way up, but mainly because of changed lifestyles. People used to feel they needed silver serving pieces for entertaining, and they were common wedding gifts. Young women began collecting silver in their "hope chests" long before they ever met their future husbands. Now few women have time even to polish silver.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Hank Schlanderer stands next to his boss George Haller (far right) in this 1891 photo. Schlanderer opened his own store after Haller's death in 1911. Three subsequent generations of Schlanderers have sold jewelry downtown: (from right) Art Schlanderer, Chuck Schlanderer, and Chuck Jr.

When studio photography was king Today, when the slightest family occasion is recorded with simple pocket-size cameras, and major events bring out the camcorder, it's easy to forget that just yesterday major life events were commemorated in the photographer's studio. Births, confirmations, graduations, team membership, army enlistments, marriages--all, if the family could afford it, were recorded for posterity at the local studio. Studio photographers, masters of the bulky, tripod-mounted cameras and fragile glass negatives of the day, were the unoffiocial portraitists of the city. From 1890 to 1971, Fred Rentschler and his son and successor, Edwin Rentschler, took pictures of mayors, businessmen, service organization officers, and ministers. Their Rentschler Photographers, primarily at 319 East Huron, had almost a monopoly on U-M subjects: they memorialized every U-M president from James Angell on, photographed the leading professors, and took all the major team pictures. Fred Rentschler was born in Ann Arbor on June 3, 1868, a few years after his parents immigrated from Wurttemberg, Germany. The 1906 Past and Present of Washtenaw County described the family as "prominent in social circles of the city"--connections that no doubt helped Fred get customers. After a two-year apprenticeship in photography with the firm of Lewis and Gibson, Rentschler established his own studio in 1890 at the corner of Main and Huron, on the second floor of Brown's Drugstore. His darkroom was across the alley, reached through a covered catwalk. He would take a picture in his studio, run across the alley to develop the glass negative before it faded, then return to take the next shot. In 1904, when the drugstore was about to be demolished to make way for the Glazier Building, Rentschler bought an old house at 319 East Huron, on land now part of City Hall, to use as his studio. To capture as much natural light for sittings as possible, he built a room on the back of the house with a two-story glass wall. Next door Rentschler built a house for his family. He had married Jessie Doane, a schoolteacher from Dexter, in 1898, and the couple had three children. Fred Rentschler's grandson, Jeff Rentschler, a recent retiree from the Ann Arbor Fire Department, was a small boy when his grandfather died. He heard from those who knew Fred that he was friendly and outgoing, but also that he ran the studio with an iron hand. At his death the Ann Arbor News wrote, "He had a great deal of patience . . . and thus was able to wait for that fleeting twist of the mouth, or that expression of eyes that delighted his heart when he squeezed the bulb to flash the human countenance onto a film." Edwin Rentschler, born in 1900, was trained from an early age to be his dad's successor. He officially entered the photography business in 1926, after graduating from the U-M with a business degree. (Jeff wonders if his dad resented going right into the business and if that is why he, in turn, wasn't encouraged to take it over.) The same year Edwin Rentschler joined the business, he married Lois Gates, the daughter of Dr. Neil Gates. As his father's health declined, Edwin handled more and more of the business, taking over completely a few years before Fred died in 1940. Edwin retained the customers and used the same technology as his fa≠ther had. Jeff Rentschler remembers him standing behind the big camera or hurrying to bring out props--chairs, stools of various sizes, tables. Like his father, he was a perfectionist and a careful craftsman, good with details and very patient. Jeff remembers him as a sterner man than his grandfather; but he could also be very charming. Even with children, who can be a real challenge for a photographer, he would talk and wisecrack until they relaxed and he could get good pictures. Jeff describes his father as a workaholic who perfected the system of photography he had been taught and changed nothing unless absolutely necessary. Long after good-quality 35-mm film cameras appeared--including the Ann Arbor-made Argus--Edwin Rentschler stayed with glass negatives and a large view camera so heavy it could be moved around the room only on casters. Because the equipment was so heavy, all work was done in the studio, never on-site. Weeks before their weddings, brides would come to the studio to pose in their gowns. Whole crowds would arrive for group pictures. Even the athletic teams came. Jeff remembers it was a tradition for the U-M football team to come at the end of each season and pose for a group picture. Then they would elect the next year's captain and his picture would be taken, too. (Rentschler didn't charge teams for the pictures, but made money selling them to others.) Edwin Rentschler's studio was a one-man operation; he even made frames himself. The only help he had was a receptionist and a college student who got a room in exchange for chores such as light cleaning and snow shoveling. During World War II, though, he had to hire extra help to take care of all the servicemen who wanted their pictures taken before they left, possibly forever. As the studio era waned, Rentschler could have stayed busy by moving about, doing weddings or photographing industrial sites. But he preferred the studio. For the last ten years of his career, he shared space in the Talbot Studio on Main Street and continued taking formal portraits. The only time he ventured from the studio was for the football team pictures. He was willing to take those on-site because, when he moved out of his Huron Street studio, the athletic department had taken all his staging to Yost and would set it up for him every year. Rentschler retired in 1969 and died two years later. Rentschler took home movies of his own family, but never casual photographs. Asked when he retired if he would take pictures of his family, he replied, "My wife takes candids. I'm strictly a studio man."

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: For decades, mayors, U-M presidents, ministers, and even the entire U-M football team made pilgrimages to Rentschler Photographers (above left) to have their pictures taken for posterity. It was undoubtedly founder Fred Rentschler who photographed his son Edwin and bride Lois Gates in 1926. The Rentschler studio and home on Huron were demolished in the 1960's to make room for City Hall. [Photo caption from the original print edition]: Long after good-quality 35-mm film cameras appeared--including the Ann Arbor-made Argus--Edwin Rentschler stayed with glass negatives and a large view camera so heavy it could be moved around the room only on casters.