“Lovely door, lovely venue,” writes Suzanne Tainter. October’s “I Spy is the Kerrytown Concert House on 415 N. Fourth Ave.,” writes Rudi Hauleitner. “Great place for small-scale concerts with marvelous acoustics!” he continues. “Looks good on the outside, sounds great on the inside!” agrees A.J. Kydd.
Read More“I will happily trade Florida’s hurricanes for Michigan’s blizzards,” muttered our son Benjamin as he spent his birthday bolting metal hurricane shutters over the windows of his St. Petersburg townhouse, anticipating a second major hurricane in two weeks.
Read MoreIt’s barely news when houses are bought low and sold fast for a bundle, but even by local standards the speedy turn for 3163 Norwood St. is head-spinning.
Read MoreIt isn’t unusual to see foam on the Huron in the Ann Arbor area. Does that mean that we have a PFAS problem?
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In January 2023, when Lydia Goff was working on her Master of Social Work at the U-M, she met two classmates: Wolverine quarterback Jack Tuttle and center Drake Nugent (now on the San Francisco 49ers). Goff was a longtime volunteer with Best Buddies, an organization dedicated to ending the isolation of those with IDD by pairing college students and community members with people with disabilities for one-on-one interactions and by hosting monthly events for everyone involved.
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Yuan Xiao has earned a reputation for turning out top competitors. “He has unbelievable respect in the gymnastics world,” says Justin Spring, an NBC gymnastics commentator and Olympic bronze medalist who now coaches at the University of Alabama.
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The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery opened fire on the federal Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Three days later, University of Michigan president Henry Tappan and other dignitaries in Ann Arbor addressed a public meeting at on the courthouse square at Main and Huron. “The meeting overflowed across the square into the street,” reports a city historic marker on the courthouse wall.
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At dusk, on fall Fridays across the county, the world of high school football comes back to life, like a prep sports version of Brigadoon. The marching bands. Singsongy cheerleader chants. An announcer’s booming voice. Armored athletes crashing into each other. And the bleacher crowd’s claps and jeers at the action unfolding before them, on 100 yards of astroturf.
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Steve Lesko and his younger sister Ciara attended Chelsea Public Schools, where Lesko played the violin starting in fifth grade. By freshman year of high school, he’d “burned out” on classical music and joined the Chelsea House Orchestra. That was where “I fell in love with Celtic music,” says Lesko.
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Case Kittel and his brother, Ross, were in the middle of the Au Sable River when Ross turned thirty-two. It was midnight and they were competing in the 2023 AuSable Canoe Marathon, a grueling, 120-mile canoe race that starts in Grayling and ends the next day in Oscoda. At midnight, Case says, he started singing “Happy Birthday.” There was another canoe near them; the folks in that boat “were like, ‘What?!,’” but they joined in the singing, too.
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Early one morning two years ago, Gail Kuhnlein left her beloved home in Pittsfield Township’s Hidden Creek subdivision for heart surgery and almost didn’t return. Kuhnlein, now sixty, suffered complications during the scheduled repair of a congenital defect in her mitral valve, and was in a medically induced coma for weeks before she recovered. When she returned two months later to the home she shares with her husband, Tim, it was with a new perspective on life. “This,” she says, “is all bonus time.”
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The November 5 election is about the schools’ past, present, and future—the current board’s firing of superintendent Jeanice Swift last summer, the discovery of a $25 million hole the budget in March, the hiring of Jazz Parks as the new superintendent in June, and the need to grow enrollment to keep the schools financially sound in the future.
Read MoreFive houses sold for under $200K: You read that right—and one distressed 867-square-footer at 2110 Champagne Dr. in Bryant-Pattengill went for just $100,000.
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Rachel Ufer has looked forward to Halloween on Granger Ave. ever since she moved there in 2017. “You can’t really believe it until you see it,” Ufer says of the spooky decorations that drew roughly 1,400 trick-or-treaters to her block in Burns Park last year. But a few days before Halloween, a large inflatable skeleton was stolen from her house—and the next night, an inflatable spider.
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We received 132 entries correctly identifying the Fake Ad for Bespoke Monorail Cars on page 86 of the September issue.
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Whether he plays at Blue LLama, the Kerrytown Concert House, or does a solo gig at the Earle, Rick Roe usually includes a few of Monk’s tunes and some of his own. These show Monk’s influence, but Roe has studied many other great musicians—“Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, and not only piano players”—as well. His music integrates their influence and is entirely his own.
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“This month’s I Spy is the Thelonious Monk mural by Brian Whitfield on Ashley Street,” writes Silvia Ruiz. David Karl identifies it as “the old Del Rio Bar building,” which Dyke McEwan adds is now home to “the Cellar by Grizzly Peak.” The mural, writes Kathy Scott, honors both Monk at the bar where he sometimes performed. Dan Romanchik credits his wife Sylvia for spotting it, even though “I walk by there all the time—so if I win I’ll have to give the prize to her.”
Read MoreQ. Where did the poet Joseph Brodsky live in Ann Arbor?
A. Brodsky was born and raised in the Soviet Union, but his poetry was deemed critical by the government, and in 1972 he was convicted of “malicious parasitism.” Declared a “pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers,” he was pressured to leave the country.
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Several years ago, a CAT scan revealed a cancerous 2.5-centimeter mass on the retired Ann Arbor elementary school teacher’s right lung. He says a biopsy revealed “a rare form of lung cancer called NUT carcinoma.” Surgeons removed a lobe in his right lung and thirteen lymph nodes.
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Alcindor runs the Faculty of Nursing Science of the Episcopal University of Haiti (FSIL in French). With help from the Ann Arbor–based Haiti Nursing Foundation, she’s led it through hurricanes, earthquakes, Covid, and the country’s descent into political chaos since its president was assassinated three years ago. In that power vacuum, heavily armed gangs have kidnapped thousands of people and held them for ransom.
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