Marketplace

ReStore Resale

Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore resale shop has closed its strip-mall outpost on Jackson and consolidated into the mother ship. All sales are now made at the less visible, but much bigger, location on Aprill Drive.ReStore,...

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An Area in Flux

Packard near Platt is, as always, slightly in flux, but the shopkeepers in this multicultural hive of activity don’t devote a lot of time to massaging the media. So the media must massage them. A walk-around and some door...

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Nickels Arcade

At Nickels Arcade, the upshot is: Beagle Brain moved and downsized, Johnny closed, and Wendy stayed put, but here’s the more complicated backstory.Wendy clothing store had briefly split into two stores in Nickels Arcade,...

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Changes on Liberty

Around the corner and up the block, the retail options at 311 E. Liberty have shrunk slightly in the last year.First, Avtomobile moved out of the basement. The young owners of the eclectic little gallery and craft shop, Maris...

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Tom Kundrak Sells Wenk’s

Wenk’s Pharmacy actually ceased to belong to Fred Wenk about seven years ago, when it was bought by the Prescription Shop’s Tom Kundrat. Kundrat needed a new home after the Prescription Shop’s building on...

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Today Menswear Opens

Hipster is the word crying out to be used here. Today, the new men’s clothing store in the former Project Gallery on Fourth Avenue, is so fearsomely cool that it could itself be an exhibit at that gallery known for its...

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The Post-Borders Bookstore

Peter Blackshear pulls China: The World’s Oldest Civilization Revealed off the bargain shelf. “It’s put together by an Australian guy, Gordon Cheers,” he murmurs, leafing through it. “He’s...

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Oldest and biggest

Wheels in Motion recently took over the building next door on Washtenaw (formerly Naked Furniture, which moved down the road) more than doubling its size–in fact, owners DeWight and Vickie Plotner also have a third...

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Postmodern Mall

If you’re wondering what’s up with that rusty-looking metal grillwork over the store entrances at the not-quite-finished Arbor Hills Crossing shopping center, this is what the investors’ brochure says about...

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Vintage Tech

Typewriters were once the norm for doing business around Ann Arbor and nationwide. But now that the tech age is a quarter century old, it’s hard for Ann Arborites who still use them to find places to repair them. So when...

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Noodles & Company on Stadium

Ann Arbor’s third Noodles & Company opened on West Stadium in a much-remodeled former KFC. All three (the others are on State St. and in Arborland) and about a dozen more in Michigan are owned by Pasta Per Trio. Mike...

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Fun 4 All

Fun 4 All, a twenty-four-year-old business owned by Richard Nelson, has moved from Ypsi to Pittsfield Township, in the block of stores anchored by the Carpenter Road Target. Nelson was on the phone when a reporter walked in and...

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RJ’s Coney Island

R.J. Rzeppa has never owned a coney island or any other kind of restaurant before, but he’s seen the inside of plenty of them, working for “transportation companies in the Detroit area, delivering dry goods to...

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Opening Bookbound

In early August, Megan Blackshear said she and her husband, Peter, “are receiving books. We’ll open the store when we receive the 10,000 books we’ve ordered.” She was guessing Bookbound would cross that...

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The New Old German

The Old German, an annex to the Grizzly Peak, opened in July in the long, skinny stone grotto of a basement on the corner of Ashley and Liberty. Most of the space is underneath what used to be the Del Rio (a space the...

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Elevation Burger Arrives

Mike Tayter wanted to come back to Michigan and start his own business. He and wife, Sarah, were both raised in Michigan–she in Kalamazoo, with a Presbyterian minister mother and Jewish pediatrician father (to thoroughly...

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Opening the Vault

“We get the keys September 6, and we’ve got twelve days to set everything up to open in time for the opening of ArtPrize on the eighteenth,” says Steve Fodale, co-owner of the Vault of Midnight comic book...

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Herb David’s Is Dancing Dog

“I feel like we went on a blind date and a few months later, we’re having a baby,” says Sue Finley, who is a photographer and mixed media artist, but she’s not bad with a simile either. She’s...

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