Big Tree Hunter
When Gail Cagle worked for Wayne County’s conservation district in the mid-1990s, she helped a district supervisor there set up a new organization called ReLeaf Michigan, part of a global movement to restore forest...
Read More2013 April
The Trees of Tree Town
As long as humans have walked Michigan’s landscape, they’ve messed with the trees around them.Take Ann Arbor, for example. After the glaciers receded and before European settlers arrived, what would one day be called...
Read MoreComing Home
At a formal dance at Barton Hills Country Club in January, Megan Carlisle, thirty-five, looks radiant in her sapphire pants suit. The DJ plays “Y.M.C.A.” followed by the theme from “Footloose,” and the...
Read MoreWisdom of Solomon
Best-selling writer Andrew Solomon has back-to-back Ann Arbor book signings this month: at a Michigan League fundraiser (for the U-M Depression Center) on April 12, and at Crazy Wisdom Bookstore & Tea Room on April 13 (see...
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AirRide Competition
“I would say the last six months or so has been slower than [any time in] the last fifteen years,” says Metro Eddie, “and especially January and February was scary slow.” Metro Eddie–his preferred...
Read MoreTurning Blue
New residents recolor Western Washtenaw’s political map”He looked unbeatable,” recalls Dexter Township supervisor Pat Kelly. Going into last fall’s campaign against Saline mayor Gretchen Driskell, Kelly...
Read MoreGraham Parsons
My first impression of Graham Parsons is that he’s a confident front man; he’s wearing red pants, and, well, you just don’t go on stage wearing red pants unless you know what you’re doing. Then, as I...
Read MoreWhat Crepe?
Paul (“PJ”) Jenkins got his idea for What Crepe? while driving home from his favorite restaurant, Toronto’s Cafe Crepe: “I would go to Toronto just to eat them.”Jenkins, whose father is in the...
Read MoreUnforgettable Dinnerware
Margaret Carney says she’s “building a dream museum in the twenty-first century, one place setting at a time.”Carney recently moved to Ann Arbor with plans to open the world’s first Dinnerware Museum....
Read MoreA Second Ulta
Ann Arbor’s second Ulta–with “one-stop shopping for prestige, mass and salon products, and service”–opened February 15 (the first is at Cranbrook Village). An enthusiastic press release promised...
Read MoreMoving to Traver Village
A couple of stores have hopped over to Traver Village from Plymouth Road Mall. Both insist that the move has nothing to do with the Plymouth Mall Plaza now going up in the parking lot in front of the Way 1 Supermarket, although...
Read MorePuzzled parkers
After 200 permit parkers moved from Liberty Square to the new Library Lane garage last year, the Downtown Development Authority reopened Liberty Square for hourly parking. But as the change rippled through its computer payment...
Read MoreGetting the mustard out
This month, local volunteers defend their title in the regional Garlic Mustard Challenge. Last spring, the Huron Arbor group beat ten others from Michigan and Indiana by pulling 102,507 pounds from public and private land. This...
Read MoreMichele Ramo and Bucky Pizzare
The last years of the 1930s were milestones in the development of the jazz guitar. In 1939 an unknown young man named Charlie Christian joined the Benny Goodman Sextet on the new electric version of the six-string instrument...
Read MoreFrom Detroit to Ann Arbor
The Detroit Tigers open their baseball season on April 1 at Minnesota, and on the 5th will play the Yankees at Comerica Park in downtown Detroit, their home field since 2000. Since its establishment more than a century ago, the...
Read MoreFeel-Good Bins
For the past ten years, black steel bins marked with a big red heart have collected used clothing and shoes to benefit the nonprofit Homeless Empowerment Relationship Organization (HERO). But early this year, HERO’s...
Read MoreNew ‘Cue in Town
Is it a restaurant? A sports bar? Another franchise come to town and geared to go, precariously perched at Ann Arbor’s most cursed crossroads?My expectations for the new R.U.B. BBQ Pub at Packard and State were not high....
Read MoreAnn Arborite Paula Dana
“OK, hands washed, glove up, and I’ll get you right to work,” Paula Dana briskly tells Skyline High senior Afshin Farokhrani. It’s the Tuesday lunch shift at Food Gatherers’ Community Kitchen, and...
Read MoreLost Little Toledoan
I’ve never been one to go searching for change. I give into it only when absolutely forced, and then only after a good deal of denial, whining, and arguing. But even my own pigheadedness, honed as it is, could not convince...
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