Over the summer, a neighborhood vanished. In the hilly rectangle bounded by S. Division, Hill, Fifth Ave., and E. Madison, backhoes methodically crushed scores of wood-frame houses, a handful of small apartment buildings, and the old Fingerle Lumber sales room.
Clearing the blocks south of Madison kicked off Phase 2 of the U-M’s Central Campus Residential Development. It was a signature project of ill-starred former president Santa Ono.
Read MoreKing’s Keyboard House, the city’s last remaining piano store, has closed after sixty-four years. Second-generation owner Jim King had hoped the business would continue in new hands, but he has retired and sold the building at 2363 E. Stadium, its home since 2008.
At first, Wendy Turner, executive director and general manager of Michigan Public (broadcasting on WUOM and four other stations in Lower Michigan), was reasonably optimistic. So was Molly Motherwell, general manager of WEMU and president of the Michigan Association of Public Broadcasters. After all, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was still intact.
Read MoreThe displacement of stores by restaurants downtown is not a one-way street: on S. Main, a gift boutique has replaced a coffee shop.
Stores offering various mushroom-based products continue to sprout up around town, finding fertile soil in the city’s relative tolerance of entheogenic plants and fungi.
The September ceremony featured speeches both lofty and bitterly political; a serenade from a transgender singer; the dramatic lifting of a white sheet from the marker; and a steady parade of attendees snapping selfies with DeGrieck and Kozachenko. (Wechsler, who lives in Boston, could not attend.)
Read More
“I was really fascinated by the fact that all these kids were really great storytellers but weren’t really good readers,” recalls Bailes, now a U-M medical student. Once back in the United States, she began working with a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to better understand how to keep kids who are falling behind on track to learn to read. She thought, “Why can’t dance and literacy come together to get kids excited about reading and learning?”
We received 161 entries correctly identifying last month’s Fake Ad, which featured an old joke about accountants being dull.
Read More
It was an experiment: give 100 citizens on the margins monthly cash payments of $528 for two years. No strings
attached—they would decide for themselves how best to spend the additional income.
Ken was a serious admirer of life, from the cell to the cosmos. He was endlessly curious, scientifically rigorous, and joyfully irreverent.
Read More
Agnes Gibson Pearson Reading died peacefully in her home on September 2, 2025.
Read More
The “Mighty Fitz,” the biggest ship on the Great Lakes when it was launched in 1958, went down with all hands in a storm on Lake Superior in November 1975. Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot immortalized it in “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and now it’s the subject of Bacon’s latest book: The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Read More
My first Ann Arbor Observer article appeared in the October 1980 issue. This October will be my last as editor. Our deputy editor, Brooke Black, is already planning her first issue as editor-in-chief in November. Publisher Patricia Garcia is also retiring and will be succeeded by our media director, Danielle Jones.
Read More
The collaborative enterprise of the local Tsogyelgar Buddhist community is expanding into a new multifaceted storefront on Zeeb Rd., White Lotus Farms Café.
Read More
Doris Heisig Terwilliger, age 100, died Sunday August 17 in Ann Arbor, MI.
Read More
The new record holder is at the far northeastern corner of the district in Superior Twp., and cost more than three times as much: $12.495 million. That’s what the family of the late Louis P. Ferris Jr. got for his eighty-five-acre spread at 4000 Vorhies Rd.
Read MoreUniversity Commons’ first $1 million sale: Praxis Properties CEO Bill Kinley sold his 3,500-square-foot, three-bed, three-bath unit for $1,040,000, a record for the complex of ninety-two condos built in 2000.
Read MoreRaising Cane’s Chicken Fingers couldn’t have plucked a more prominent campus perch for its third Michigan store, number 935 overall for the privately held Baton Rouge–based chain.
Read More