A decade ago, at the height of the county’s housing frenzy, Bloomfield Hills-based Colt Farms applied to rezone 286 acres in Ann Arbor Township from agricultural use to a mobile home park. The panoramic vistas of the Braun...
Read MoreIn 1978, David E. Davis Jr. single-handedly made Ann Arbor a center of automotive publishing when he moved Car and Driver from Manhattan to an office in Pittsfield Township. By the time he quit eight years later, he’d...
Read MoreGovernor Rick Snyder promotes his proposed budget as sharing the suffering required to fix the state’s structural deficit. Few local Democrats see it that way.”I don’t think anyone disagrees that there has to...
Read More“People tell me I couldn’t have picked a worse decade to be mayor,” says John Hieftje with a rueful smile. Since he was first elected in 2000, state aid has slowed to a trickle, real estate values have...
Read MoreIn a “Big Year,” a birder chooses a geographical location, then tries to see as many species as possible during a calendar year. A variation on the concept is a Big Green Big Year, or BIGBY–seeing as many...
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While there are plenty of other places in Ann Arbor to get pizza and burgers, James Schayes, who opened U Pizza & Burgers last August, didn’t run with the pack. Though you could get a regulation pepperoni and mushroom...
Read MoreUniversity of Michigan students Natalie Eliot (left), Evan Keimer, Jackie Brand, and Caitlin Kozak splashed barefoot in the flash flood pond that formed outside their house on South Fourth Avenue. Later they helped push...
Read MoreBig Boy, both statue and restaurant chain, are American icons. So’s the image of America as a great melting pot. And icon meets icon at Ann Arbor’s Zeeb Road Big Boy, one of only two in the company’s national...
Read MoreThe Elsifor family has been a part of Ann Arbor for more than one hundred years. My mother died five years ago in February; this June, she would have been seventy-four years old. She died suddenly, but we knew she wanted to be...
Read MoreA book titled 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Ann Arbor, Michigan (But Are About to Find Out) arrived in town so casually it was almost as if author Horace Martin Woodhouse didn’t care whether anyone read it or not....
Read MoreIn the depths of a decade-long Michigan recession, a Sturgis company called Great Lakes Chocolate & Coffee managed not only to find the key to a successful coffee shop but to parlay it into four locations scattered across...
Read MoreA number of Ann Arborites tap maple trees each spring. Bella Sherman, however, may be the only one to harvest “birch juice”—a delicacy in Russia, Ukraine, and a few other northern countries. Sherman, a native of...
Read MoreThe Ann Arbor Transportation Authority has a vision for the future–but the present already looks pretty good compared to most places.After a yearlong process that included hiring a national consulting firm, conducting an...
Read MoreThe Purple Rose is twenty years old this year. If it were a person, it would be old enough to vote and almost old enough to drink. And maybe that’s why it seems to be acting out a little bit this year. Earlier this year...
Read MoreWireless Toyz’s loss was Debbie Peterson’s gain. Wireless Toyz sold Verizon products and services on the corner of Washington and Fourth Avenue for fourteen years, until Verizon changed its corporate policy–if...
Read MoreThe bell atop the Stone School Cooperative Nursery, 2600 Packard, still rings as it did when it was a one-room school. The heavy bell is rung by the nursery school students, with the aid of a teacher, to mark the end of the...
Read MoreOn a recent Saturday morning at the Drop-Off Station on Ellsworth, a dozen people doing court-ordered community service milled around a car delivering two old computers for recycling. Business is down at the station–so...
Read MoreSome years ago a boy named Sean Dobbins joined the jazz band at Washtenaw Community College that was directed by Morris Lawrence. Lawrence took in kids of every level of ability and had developed a repertoire of original tunes...
Read MoreQ. Are any Civil War Medal of Honor recipients buried in Ann Arbor?A. Two are buried at Forest Hill Cemetery: Joseph B. Kemp was honored for capturing a Confederate flag in the Battle of the Wilderness, while Conrad Noll rescued...
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