Marketplace

“Marijuana is the undercurrent of our business,” acknowledges Shane Callanan, owner of Garden Connections, a new hydroponics store in Jackson Road’s Independence Plaza. Because of its fussiness and high value,...

The Big Boy on Plymouth Road has a decidedly non-chainlike approach to landscaping. In June, nearly two dozen hanging baskets of petunias lined the sidewalks from the parking lot, while little green sunflower shoots promised a...

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...

Ed Koster closed David’s Books in June after a twenty-seven-year run. The bookstore, founded in the late 1970s by David Kozubei, had occupied a series of spaces on Liberty and State streets.Koster is philosophical about...

They won’t be able to hand deliver their neighbors’ orders any more, but that’s the only drawback Aubrey Lopatin can see to moving Arbor Teas, her and her husband Jeremy’s seven-year-old online tea...

Kassem Chammout (who goes by Kasey) knows how to run a full-service restaurant. His La Pita Dearborn is a large complex, including restaurant, nightclub, catering business, and banquet rooms. So to him, opening the stripped-down...

After five years at Copper Leaf Crossing on Ann Arbor-Saline Road, Beth and John Lebert have moved their Pet Emporium to Lamp Post Plaza, a couple of doors down from Trader Joe’s. “I’ve always wanted to be...

At 4:10 p.m. on Monday, July 18, Borders Inc. made it official: the business is dead, the liquidators are coming. Yet two hours later, things seemed almost like normal at the downtown Borders, “Store Number One.” A...

The stage for this reckoning was set in the November 2010 Observer. Before she left to write about restaurants in Seattle, reviewer Hanna Raskin asked whether Ann Arbor would have “the local meat to compete” when...

A new shop on Main Street is redolent of an older Ann Arbor many people hold dear, whether it is the Ann Arbor of 1970s head shops or of the 1990s Jewel Heart: incense, singing bowls, silver jewelry, scarves, and other...

Michael Yang hasn’t been in Michigan long enough to know that we use a hand to map our geography, but he smiles in recognition when he sees it. He says that China is shaped like a chicken, and quickly sketches one with a...

Dan’s Downtown Tavern adds a Pour House.Ever since the state’s restaurant smoking ban went into effect in May of 2010, business has picked up at Dan’s Downtown Tavern in the heart of downtown Saline. More...

Bob Sutherland’s up north empire started with T-shirts.Ann Arbor’s new Cherry Republic sells cherry jams, cherry butters, cherry jellies, cherry cookies, cherry BBQ sauce, cherry bath salts, cherry soda, cherry soap,...

If you walk into Lucky Haskins’ Antiques & Oddities on Main Street looking for Lucky, you won’t find him—there’s no such person. Owner Adnan Hourani came up with the name while driving south on I–75...

In April, The Mission Marketplace, a nonprofit fair-trade store that sells handcrafted items from developing nations, lost its lease after nearly five years on Main Street. Glee Cake Patisserie will move into its spot this...

Here’s a “hometown boy makes good” story. Adam Baru, son of a local orthodontist, who has worked with some restaurant industry giants–Masaharu Morimoto and Danny Meyer–has returned home to open his...

Several years ago my husband and I spent five weeks in India. We landed in the south, where it’s particularly hot and humid, and where the food, primarily vegetarian, centers around rice and dal, sambhars and chutneys. My...