Suwanee Springs closed at the end of May, and its owner, Wally Meyers, a downtown retailer whose stores have been pretty much a reprise of the Ann Arbor zeitgeist over forty years, is moving to Thailand. The first Suwanee Springs opened on State Street in 1968. Meyers made his own inventory: leather sandals, bags, and jackets. In the 1970s, as the counterculture went mainstream, Meyers moved to Liberty, bought a building on Main, and opened a second store where Peaceable Kingdom is now. Handmade rustic leather went out, imported leather came in, and his stores changed with the times. He also briefly had stores in Birmingham and on South U.

He closed the Main Street store in the 1990s and bought Kioti on Liberty, which sold loose, flowing batik fashions from Southeast Asia. In 2005, he closed both Liberty stores. “People didn’t want one-size-fits-all anymore. That kind of arty batik went out of fashion.” (What? It did? cry ten thousand Ann Arbor women of a certain age.) He opened Suwanee Springs on Main Street, shifting to more structured, edgy women’s fashions, and promoting American brands.

Meyers briefly recounted this history from Detroit Metro while waiting to board a flight to Bangkok. During the Kioti years, he says, “I spent a lot of time manufacturing clothes in the Far East, traveling back and forth. So it’s not a sad thing,” he emphasizes. “It’s just time to move on. It was the economics of the Internet. It’s hard to cover the cost of rent and compete with all the online vendors.”

Landlord Ed Shaffran concurs about the Internet, but laments Suwanee Springs’ passing. “The owner-in-the-store–it’s a classic,” he muses. “It’s synonymous with what downtown is all about: the owner who is working to earn your trust, who’s there behind the counter every day. You don’t get that feeling when you go into Best Buy.”

Shaffran says he has “a number of suitors for the space. It won’t be a restaurant,” he promises, but admits that it’s getting harder to find people willing to enter the retail fray: “I hope banking isn’t Ann Arbor’s retail future.”