Crystal Metzger is shutting the lid on Lexi’s Toy Box. She originally planned to close at the end of July, but “it might be late June. Look at the room behind you–it’s almost empty,” she says, pointing to one of the small alcoves of her ground-floor shop in a house on Ashley.
Metzger opened her store–named after her grown daughter Lexi–in 2007, selling “toys that inspire open-ended play. No electronics, no batteries.” Instead the shop was filled with puppets, wooden blocks, cloth dolls, craft kits, and other simple, durable toys that a child might have played with a century ago.
Metzger is closing because her husband, Robert Hernandez, retired a few years ago from U.S. Steel, and “I got used to having him home. I want to be home with him, and we want to travel.”
Her fairy doors, she says, are already for sale at Peaceable Kingdom. And “I’ve made arrangements for Nikki [Wilson] at iT Boutique to carry some of my other toy lines.” Ann Arborite Tess Fil’s little hand-sewn felt envelopes and “letters” for playing “mail” are available in a few other shops in the area.
Though Metzger is only two doors down from Reza Rahmani’s recently purchased group of properties, which are expected to impact local rents, her decision to close was entirely independent. The house has been in the Metzger family since 1946 when her grandparents, Fritz and Bertha Metzger, bought it as income property. Various Metzgers and relatives have lived there, and later her father, Bud, who owned the Old German, used it as an office. She’ll keep it in the family.
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