Crash
A bit after 3 on a January afternoon, Pauline Lee was driving south on Seventh past Pioneer High School. She had just picked up her grandson, Jackson, at his piano lesson. There was already an inch of snow on the ground and...
Read MoreFeb 27, 2009 | Community |
Seventy-six years ago this month, the country was at the low point of the Great Depression. In Ann Arbor, American Broach, King-Seeley, and Hoover Ball and Bearing all had cut production and laid off workers. Local retail sales...
Read MoreFeb 26, 2009 | News |
Last November, several U-M students met to study methods for preventing riverbanks from collapsing. They cut red osier dogwood from one bank of the Huron River into short sections called “live stakes” and pounded...
Read MoreFeb 26, 2009 | Uncategorized |
Now that the Oscars are over, the Michigan Theater is finally going to show one of the most-talked-about Oscar-nominated films,
Read MoreFeb 26, 2009 | Marketplace |
Quickie Burger & Dogs, which opened last year at State and Hill with a sexually suggestive logo that delighted the frat boys and infuriated the campus feminist contingent, now has a Class C liquor license. It’s the...
Read MoreFeb 25, 2009 | News |
The Ann Arbor Observer Company laid off five staff members on Tuesday. “They’re all good people who have contributed tremendously to the Observer’s publications,” says publisher and co-owner Patricia...
Read MoreFeb 25, 2009 | Community |
An Ann Arbor woman visiting family in Minneapolis in January accompanied her college-age nephew to a movie. Returning to their car, they were dismayed to find a city cop about to ticket it for being illegally parked, something...
Read MoreFeb 24, 2009 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Vinx is a hypnotic one-man band. A bookish-looking but genial figure with black clothes, thick-framed glasses, and an orange head scarf, he takes the stage with an African drum hanging from a cord slung over his shoulder. There...
Read MoreFeb 23, 2009 | Marketplace |
If you’re a disc golf fan and you’ve dreamed of opening your own disc golf store, Matt Cyrulnik can get you off to a good start. He figures that when he closes Fly—his combination disc golf and urban clothing store...
Read MoreFeb 22, 2009 | Community |
Q. What is the oldest cemetery in Ann Arbor?A. The oldest headstone, in Terhune Pioneer Cemetery near Packard, commemorates young Emily Whitmore, who was buried in 1825. However, there are no bodies in this public park—the...
Read MoreFeb 20, 2009 | Marketplace |
With shelves picked clean, Bello Vino Marketplace closed its doors on January 8, a week ahead of the schedule it had announced shortly before Christmas.”It actually wasn’t Pfizer,” says Jennifer Ferris,...
Read MoreFeb 19, 2009 | Community |
“It takes your mind off your worries,” says a player during a break in a soccer game at World Wide Sports Center. Raul, a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old, plays regularly with the SSPORT team. It’s made up of...
Read MoreFeb 18, 2009 | Marketplace |
For local cooks looking to relearn old tricks, a group called Preserving Traditions is reviving an earlier concept of community: starting this month, it will be using the kitchen at the Pittsfield Grange to teach food...
Read MoreFeb 17, 2009 | News |
Are teen pregnancies on the rise in Washtenaw County? Christina Rivest, director of Father Patrick Jackson House at Main and Pauline, thinks so. Over the last four years she’s seen Father Pat’s, the area’s only...
Read MoreFeb 16, 2009 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
No one there will ever forget it—the moment the massed forces of the University Symphony Orchestra and Choirs launched into Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony with a tutti the size of a tsunami: “Behold: the...
Read MoreFeb 15, 2009 | Marketplace |
There aren’t five guys named Moe in this story. But there are two guys named Mo, one restaurant named Moe, two properties named Pittsfield, and a lot of juggling of names and concepts.Mo (short for Mohammed) Kasham opened...
Read MoreFeb 14, 2009 | Community |
When Karen Park and John Beranek got engaged, friends scrawled the story of how they met on the sidewalk between their homes.”John met Karen at Top of the Park,” they announced in colored chalk. “She lives that...
Read MoreFeb 13, 2009 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
A typical performance from Lady Sunshine and the X Band begins with just the band, laying down a groove that hypes up the crowd. And, man, do they know how to do it. Trading wild sax and trumpet solos over a resonant walking...
Read MoreFeb 12, 2009 | News |
Tom Partridge describes himself as “a disabled senior citizen.” He’s also a self-appointed community conscience who often scolds public officials for not doing enough to support progressive causes. “Tom...
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