Central Park West
West Park, once a thriving year-round hub of activity, is now often deserted, even on warm summer days. But thanks to the Obama administration’s economic stimulus money, it’s getting a million-dollar makeover....
Read More2010 April
Nuns on the March
Some might say miracles followed four Dominican nuns as they drove east from Chicago in July 1996.”We were on our way to New York,” recalls Mother Assumpta, the group’s leader. “We were coming this way,...
Read MoreBrit Satchwell at the Helm
Early on a chilly fall Saturday, a man stood just outside the Farmers’ Market on Detroit Street. His face almost hidden in a hooded sweatshirt, he looked like a blue-collar worker among the tidily dressed academics and...
Read MoreFewer Music Students
For local private music teachers, the recession came early: enrollment at the Ann Arbor School for the Performing Arts peaked in 2005, at 600 students. Then came the departure of Pfizer and its highly paid, highly cultured...
Read MoreBurns Park Divide
When poet Jeff Kass leaves his house in Lower Burns Park in the middle of the night to practice his poetry, he sometimes wanders east across Packard to Upper Burns Park. As he shouts his poems into the darkness among the big,...
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Close Call
The car racing the lightat Observatory and East Medical Center Drive didn’t even slow as the signal turned yellow, then red. The walk signal lit up, and a woman waiting to cross East Medical Center stepped into the street...
Read MoreKorea via Hungary
Lin Cui, owner of Tianchu, a new Korean restaurant on William that opened March 2, came to Ann Arbor via Hungary. “After seven or eight years, I tire of a country. I like to travel, I like to move,” explains the...
Read More“Hello Goodbye”
Alain Gaash is not Jewish enough. In Graham Guit’s 2009 romantic comedy Hello Goodbye, Gaash (Gerard Depardieu) is not Jewish enough for his colleagues, for his family (he married a gentile, and his mother won’t let...
Read MoreSilvio’s Expands
When Silvio’s Organic Pizza expanded next door into the former Beanie June boutique in February, Silvio Medoro more than doubled the seating at his five-year-old restaurant. He also has added table service, a whole new...
Read MoreLocation, Bathroom, Location
When the Zaragon Place high-rise on East University opened last fall, its rents set new records for campus housing: two-bedroom apartments listed for $2,500 a month, six-bedrooms for $6,000. Yet this coming fall tenants will pay...
Read MoreVersatile and Varied
I’ve always thought of Chicago as the Midwest Broadway outpost, so it comes as no surprise that Lou Conte, a Broadway tap and jazz dancer, started Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. I’ve seen the company several times and...
Read MoreAnn Arborite Lou Caincross
The Mustang squeals as I downshift into the lot at Lou’s Wolverine Transmission on Packard south of Stadium. It’s louder than Led Zeppelin, and I fear it means the junkyard for the nine-year-old ‘Stang with its...
Read MoreBottomless Tip Box
It sounds like a barista’s fondest dream, but it’s actually a security system. At the Starbucks at Main and Liberty, the staff remove the bottoms of their plastic tip boxes to keep them from being stolen.According to...
Read MoreSinger E.C. Scott
CONCERT CANCELED.Blues music has come a long way since 1902, when W.C. Handy heard a man in a Mississippi train station pick up a guitar and sing a song with a repeated line about “goin’ where the Southern cross the...
Read MoreSaving Cats at HSHV
“Now we have a building that’s working with us,” says Tanya Hilgendorf.Executive director of the Humane Society of Huron Valley since 2005, Hilgendorf led the sometimes-bruising battle to replace HSHV’s...
Read MoreThe Packard Pub Opens
Kyle Miller thought he’d have the Packard Pub open in January, but things didn’t turn out the way he planned–and he says it’s driving his would-be customers crazy. “They’re dying,”...
Read MoreDinner with the Coroner of Oz
About fifteen years ago I attended, in Chicago, a meeting of the International Wizard of Oz Club. Similar to Star Trek gatherings, these conferences attract devotees of both the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz and the series...
Read MoreThe Art Habit
A current exhibit at the U-M Museum of Art questions the importance of technical skill in art. Aptly titled An Economy of Means, it features seemingly naive art works acquired by modest collectors, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel....
Read MoreWest Side UFOs
This past winter, neighbors overlooking Slauson’s athletic field observed some strange doings: once a week, an illuminated disc appeared, flying over a makeshift airfield for sixty to ninety minutes at a time.The apparent...
Read MoreBonus Round
When Congress passed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) last spring, it earmarked $21.5 billion for scientific research, equipment, and construction projects. Because it didn’t require that the...
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