2015 June

The catering Catch-22

Jun 14, 2015 | |

Jeanne Loveland closed Cafe Marie just after Mother’s Day. The gracious letter to customers she sent out earlier in the month urged: “Please continue to seek out small, independent businesses, not only when...

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Seto’s Leaving

Jun 13, 2015 | |

With twenty-five years in the Ann Arbor Police Department and three years as chief, public safety administrator John Seto was eligible to retire in April with a nice pension. So it wouldn’t have been surprising when he...

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No Trust

Jun 12, 2015 | |

“Paranoia runs high, and morale runs low,” WCC faculty union president Maryam Barrie told the college’s trustees at their April meeting.As Barrie went on to charge that the school suffers from a “closed...

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The Building Official Vanishes

Jun 11, 2015 | |

“I’m very concerned about the city going back to the way it was,” says Geoff Perkins, a board member of the Builders and Remodelers Association of Greater Ann Arbor. He and other members complain that before...

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Underground Printing Splits a Store

Jun 10, 2015 | |

From the road, at the crux of Ann Arbor-Saline and Main, all the orange bicycles and prominent corner marquee of the new Orange Theory Fitness obscures the fact that Underground Printing is still there, just smaller. Rishi...

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Superstore Mystery

Jun 10, 2015 | |

“When is Menards going to open?” asks a reader. “No word. Thank you,” emails “Ray” from the company in response to our email inquiry.The Wisconsin-based chain has been distributing ad fliers...

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Arbor Opera Theater

Jun 9, 2015 | , |

Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is perhaps the most-performed opera ever. The tragic story of Violetta, the courtesan with the heart of gold, who sacrifices her last chance at true love to protect the honor of the man she...

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Return of the Camera Store

Jun 8, 2015 | |

Walking into the newly opened CameraMall on E. Washington is like entering a time warp. A whole store filled with cameras! Even its generic name evokes the mail-order camera stores that congregated in lower Manhattan in the...

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Heather Phillips

Jun 6, 2015 | , |

Spring is a very busy time for Heather Phillips. It’s not unusual for her to work twelve to eighteen hours a day at Heather’s Place, the little sewing shop in the lower level of her Water Hill home, making and...

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Frita Batidos

Jun 5, 2015 | , |

“You can’t hide this excellent Cuban restaurant,” writes Vivian Loh of last month’s subject, Frita Batidos on W. Washington. “FB catered our wedding,” writes Megan Hartline. “I spent a...

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Ms. Fix-It

Jun 5, 2015 | , |

Only sixty-nine people correctly identified the Fake Ad for Ms. Fix-It on page 114 of the May Observer. The name of the previous month’s winner, Diane Fenske, was hidden in the ad copy, “repair FENCE, KEY.”That...

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Loren D. Estleman

Jun 4, 2015 | , |

Many years ago, a friend passed along a copy of Whiskey River by Michigan writer Loren D. Estleman. The book is a crime novel about booze smuggling set in Detroit during Prohibition, and I burned through it in record time. I...

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Marcus Elliot

Jun 3, 2015 | , |

The greatest moments of the celebrated Detroit jazz tradition took place at times when jazz was a popular art and when music was widely taught in the schools. In recent years other kinds of music have achieved a broader appeal,...

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This Year in Jerusalem

Jun 2, 2015 | |

“People say, ‘It must have been really hard,’ and I say, ‘Running a restaurant is a lot harder than building one. If you can run a restaurant, you can build one,'” says Ali Ramlawi, about his...

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Cheap Shots

Jun 1, 2015 | , |

In the photo exhibit Cheap Shots III: Blurred, Not Shaken–a clever take on James Bond’s shaken, not stirred martini–the Ann Arbor Area Crappy Camera Club pays homage to an older, slower, more artistic...

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