Your Media Exchange announced its closure, effective May 25, due to flagging sales. It bought, sold, and traded movies, music, books, and video games for nearly three years at 319 S. Main. Toledoan Broc Curry retains another YMX...
Read MoreUpbeat music was pumping inside Briarwood Mall’s JD Sports store as employees busily stocked shoes and clothes in preparation for a late May opening. Romulus-based district manager Greg Gambrell agreed to step out for a quick chat in a quieter space, the mall’s main corridor across from the Apple store.
Read MoreNTVES, featuring handcrafted indigenous clothing, accessories, and gifts, is back at Briarwood, along with gallery space for the artwork of founder Inty Muenala and others.
Read MoreJust a decade ago, the land surrounding the Meijer store at Jackson and Zeeb was mostly parking and potential. Those out-lots now host everything from an urgent-care center to a tobacco shop, along with quick-service food and drink options galore.
Read MoreSkechers has found its first foothold in Washtenaw County: the shoe chain opened May 10 in the Arborland storefront that has seen only temporary Halloween City tenancy since Arhaus moved up Washtenaw Ave. to Arbor Hills Crossing in 2013.
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The wage war began in 2018, when One Fair Wage, a national coalition of activists, workers and organizations fighting for a higher minimum wage for tipped employees, gathered 370,690 signatures to put the decision up to voters. If the measure had passed, the wage paid to tipped workers, then set at $3.84, would gradually be increased to match the statewide hourly minimum wage—which the same proposal would increase to $12 by 2022 and thereafter index to inflation.
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Supporters argue that the city needs that “densification” to allow more people who work in the city to live here, to bolster the property tax base eroded by the U-M’s expansion, and repair economic and racial inequities caused by past “exclusionary zoning.” Opponents question whether growth on that scale is necessary or even likely. But if it does come to pass, they predict, it will be at the expense of the city’s neighborhoods, as apartments and condos crowd out single-family homes.
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One sunny day in June of 1957, Kenny Scodeller pounded on my front door. When I answered, he commanded, “Get your baseball glove, you’re going to work!”
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It took over a year longer than expected, but the transformation of the venerable Original Cottage Inn into another family-owned Italian restaurant is nearing its big reveal on E. William. Coratti’s Pizzeria Bar and Bocce will open in early June in a vintage building in which most everything has been updated.
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The connection she’s seeing is between incarcerated people and their children. As a volunteer and board member at large with a nonprofit called Staying in Closer Touch, she records women in the Huron Valley Correctional Facility reading children’s books aloud. Those waiting their turn use markers and crayons to create cards for their child or grandchild. Pilutti says it’s “very powerful to witness.”
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“I prefer to be struggling in Ann Arbor as an artist than wasting every waking hour on my planet putting money into someone else’s pocket,” says Kymm Clark, whose circuitous journey has brought her back to Tree Town to her new collaborative fabrication studio, LullCo.
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Fayroian headed Greenhills School twice—from 2005–2012 and again since 2018. Since then, the independent school for grades 6–12 has grown from 520 students to 720. They’ve had to cap enrollment, he says, and have “long waiting lists.” Now he’s overseeing a plan that aims to add 180 younger students on a second campus: the building on Platt Rd. that’s now Summers-Knoll School, a progressive preK–5 independent.
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Visitors can now pop in their earbuds and tour the ornate landmark while listening to an original musical composition: Sara Tea’s “Fifth Wall: A Soundtrack for the Michigan Theater.”
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Work started. Then it stopped, and nothing on the boarded-up exterior explains why.
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Local Catholics responded with surprise and pleasure to the news of Chicago native Robert Prevost’s election as Pope Leo XIV.
Read MoreWhile we navigated through several streets with reduced lanes on the way to a concert at Hill, we wondered: do companies have to pay the city when they close streets to make room for construction?
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Jennifer Jean Hein, 66, passed away unexpectedly on April 28, 2025 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The eldest child of Peggy and Charlie Hein, she was born on July 7, 1958 in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was proud to follow in the footsteps of her parents with a strong commitment to education and public service.
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Without waiting for Congress to act, his appointees cancelled NEA grants that had already been approved—including $30,000 for the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The 2025 festival was in March, and “I had already submitted our final report and payment request,” says executive director Leslie Raymond.
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A Vietnam veteran and Ford Motor Company retiree, Kinzinger has been helping other veterans for around thirty-five years, including raising money for the Washtenaw County Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center. Now his focus is on Warriors and Caregivers United (WACU), a nonprofit that prioritizes supporting returning veterans, their caregivers, and their families.
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“The most obvious giveaway is the date of June 31—it ain’t happening. Much more interesting, though, are the (at least in some way self-contradictory) instances of wordplay. ‘Competition in Mediocrity’—chef kiss left! ‘Pedestrian automobiles’—chef kiss right! … The nod to the previous month’s winner (Merry Muilenberg) is the 1926 Muilenberg Model X.”
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