Susan Pollay’s Whimsies

“I joke that other people go to the lake to relax by the water,” says Susan Pollay. “I just enjoy being in a city.”

Over coffee at Sweetwaters, she directs my attention to the corner of Washington and Ashley. “Do you remember those wonderful Mickey Mouse ears on the sidewalk?” she asks. “I’m looking at the corner where I first saw them.”

Forty years ago, when Pollay moved here from San Francisco, Ann Arbor still had mechanical parking meters. Artist Chris Dunn realized that at night their paired shadows looked like Mickey’s ears—and surreptitiously stenciled the rest of his face below the shadows.

“With technology, the parking meters have changed,” Pollay says, so “nobody will have the joy that we had when we found it.” But “stumbling on something [like that], if it’s done right, makes your day.”

Like David Zinn’s chalk drawings? I ask. “He is my hero,” she replies. “Every so often, you walk in front of the post office, and there’s a David Zinn. The surprise is part of what makes his poignant little cartoons so wonderful.” 

The possibility that you’ll “turn a corner and see something new,” she says, “is one of the gifts the city gives us.”

As executive director of the Downtown Development Authority from 1996 to 2020, Pollay oversaw the rebuilding of Ann Arbor’s parking structures and downtown sidewalks. And among the hardscapes, she enabled Zinn and others to add whimsical touches—from his trompe l’oeil recreation of a scene from Singin’ in the Rain to a row of gold-painted fire hydrants.

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Former DDA board member Ed Shaffran admits that he voted against hiring Pollay. The authority “was doing what turned out to be at the time a $53 million repair-and-replace of the parking structures,” the developer recalls, and he figured they needed somebody with construction experience. But Pollay, who had previously run the Ann Arbor Summer Festival and the State Street Area Association, “connected quickly,” Shaffran says. While he could “pound the table harder,” he says she’s “one of the best schmoozers in the world,” adding, “I’m saying that as a compliment.” 

“The big projects were large capital improvement projects,” Pollay recalls. “The garages were all falling down … Giant chunks of concrete were falling on cars at First and Washington. It was bad.” 

When it was launched in 1983, the DDA was funded by property taxes on new construction downtown. Since that wasn’t enough to repair years of neglect, Shaffran twisted politicians’ arms to give it the parking revenue as well. Later, Pollay persuaded city council to renew the DDA’s “tax increment financing” as well—it will collect the additional property taxes generated by new construction at least through 2033. 

That would be a fine legacy in itself. But among the big projects, in the spirit of the Mickey Mouse faces, Pollay also found ways to add touches of whimsy—just by “saying yes and getting out of the way.” 

She says it was the “hardworking maintenance staff at Republic Parking” which then managed the structures, who tucked a “charming little fairy garden” in a corner of the massive Fourth and William structure. 

Then–city engineer Mike Bergren “oversaw DDA’s project to replace the broken sidewalk in front of Fire Station One, and he gets the credit for including several creative elements,” Pollay adds. Along with the row of gold-painted vintage fire hydrants, a podium topped by a firefighter’s helmet “remembers the names of valiant firefighters who lost their lives working to save others.”

During excavation for the underground Library Lane parking structure, “Christman Construction confronted large boulders that had to be removed,” she says. “We heard that a member of the library board was a U-M geology faculty member, so we had them set aside boulders for her to inspect.” Carola Stearns chose one brought here by “a long-ago enormous glacier carving our landscape,” and it’s now on display near the library. 

The Singin’ in the Rain mural across Fifth Ave. started with a chance encounter. “I was taking a walk downtown on a Sunday and bumped into David while he was creating a chalk piece,” Pollay remembers. “He expressed frustration that his request to paint a mural had been rejected by a property owner, and I offered to help if I could.”

She found a more welcoming setting: the wall protecting the entrance to the Library Lane parking structure. Placed so that a painted Gene Kelly appears to be swinging around a real lamppost, it faces the bus station, and, as a bus rider, Pollay “was charmed by the idea of seeing this mural every day while at the Blake Transit Center. My memory isn’t as good as it used to be, but I believe we reimbursed David for his costs, plus gave him a small stipend.” 

Another mural cost even less. The DDA was already planning to paint a peeling wall on the Maynard St. garage when a U-M art student “approached us and said, ‘I’d like to do a mural on there. Would you let me?’

“I try always to start with yes. I said ‘Yes. And what’s more, here’s the budget we were going to spend on painting. You can have our budget. Paint the wall.’” Giant ants have marched up the alley ever since.

Such spontaneity didn’t always work out so well. “We had several [murals] we had to paint over,” Pollay says. “You don’t see them anymore.”

But she would “still say yes—because you might just end up with an Ant Alley.”

Happily retired at sixty-six, Pollay says her goal is to become more childlike as she gets older. She’s taken a tap-dancing class at the Y (she jokes that she was grateful there were no mirrors in the classroom) and is about to start another at the Ann Arbor Art Center in jewelry making. She’s also on the boards of the Lower Town Riverfront Conservancy and the AAATA.

“I need a purpose,” she says. “I describe myself as a sheepdog. If I don’t have sheep to herd, I’m going to tear up the furniture.

“I believe in change. It’s how nature is. It never stops. That is the way a healthy, vibrant community is—change—and we embrace it. It may sometimes feel disconcerting. You may not know the next step. [But] you figure it out. 

“You figure out how to ride a bicycle. You figure out the strategies. And I hope, for myself, anyway, that with that embrace of change, new opportunities arise.”

Not everyone feels that way, and the DDA, and Pollay herself, were sometimes political targets. But during “the lowest of the low times, out of nowhere Rick Strutz from Zingerman’s got ahold of me” to share the news that the deli had created a sandwich in her honor. 

“This is the Hollywood Star in Ann Arbor!” she exclaims. The “Schmoozin’ Susan” is made “on their farm bread with grilled cheese and grilled asparagus,” she recalls, and “is the perfect dunking sandwich for any red soup.” 

“It was a thank-you for all Susan’s connecting of dots for the buildout,” says Grace Singleton, a Zingerman’s Deli managing partner with Strutz and Rodger Bowser. Though it’s no longer on the menu, they’ll still make it by request. 

Pollay’s legacy also includes a time capsule in the Library Lane structure. “People brought hats, cell phones. A child gave her reading list for the summer … somebody wrote a letter saying ‘Someday it’ll be OK to marry my love, but we’re gay … right now it’s not possible.’ People gave of themselves in a really personal and intimate way for the future …

“There are a bunch of things from us from 2012 that somebody will open in 2112. That’s whimsy to me.”