Month: October 2019

A new coffee shop at Main and Stadium

The little building across from Michigan Stadium and Pioneer High is changing purposes again. I assume it was a gas station decades ago — the placement on the lot and the garage-door-sized windows on the east wall are strong signs. I remember it first as Schneider’s convenience store, where I would get Mountain Dew in a glass bottle while waiting for my transfer bus home from school. Since then it has been a paint-n-pour type creative party space, a mobile phone store, and an indoor tanning salon, and is now about to become a coffee shop.

Legend* tells that the MDen owns this land and building. As the closest retail anything to Michigan Stadium, it’s usually host to an MDen pop-up store on game days, though the MDen has enough physical locations for the other 357 days of the year to not need this year round. Hopefully this is the use that sticks? Not that I have any affinity for coffee, it’d just be nice not to write about another business closing.

The next nearest coffee is a 7-Eleven and the Espresso Royale in the Woodland Plaza center near Busch’s, so there’s probably a need to be filled here. There are many U-M employees just on the other side of the stadium that have no fancy coffee within like a 15-20 minute walk uphill.

* “legend” generally means “some comment on a Ann Arbor Townies Group post” around here

Mighty Good at Arbor Hills is… still open

Recently we visited Arbor Hills Crossing. That’s a sentence you don’t hear much around here, I honestly have never felt like I belong in there. All the shops seem to be for people of a higher income and social class than I identify with. But I’ve been hearing about Shake Shack for years and I wanted to see what the hype was about.

I parked by Mighty Good Coffee, which was the only open parking of course, and I was surprised and confused to see the shop was open:

The closure of Mighty Good was a big story in the springtime. The local chain’s baristas organized and attempted to group-bargain with the owners, who then announced they would close their retail outlets. Some of the locations closed months ago. Arbor Hills was supposed to close on August 31. But as you can see, it’s still open, and for exactly the reason you think it is:

On preview, that didn’t embed like I hoped it would, but click through if you want more. The gist is that Mighty Good has hired new workers for this location who are not part of the union. The former Mighty Good locations on Jefferson across from Bach Elementary, and at South U and Washtenaw, are now operated by new management with different concepts. But a baristas’ union member predicts that Mighty Good’s Main Street location will probably reopen with new workers soon too.

The A2RS short review of Shake Shack that you’ve been waiting for: shake was pretty good. Fries were crinkle-cut, which to me is usually visual shorthand for “frozen starchy disappointment,” but they were nice and crispy even after driving them home. I like that the menu has hamburgers and cheeseburgers as discrete menu items, and the hamburger is cheaper — so if you don’t want cheese, you’re not subsidizing everyone else’s cheese. Unfortunately, the hamburger they served me clearly had had cheese on it , which was picked off before it was served to me, rather than just making a clean new hamburger. There was melted cheese residue on the surface and edge of the burger patty.

They could have made me really sick. What if I was allergic to cheese, instead of just a picky, annoying person who doesn’t like cheese? (YES, I KNOW WHERE I LIVE. YES, I EAT CHEESE ON PIZZA. I CONTAIN MULTIDUDES™.)

So I’m reluctant to return. When I want a premium burger with pretenses of healthiness, I will most likely stick with Elevation Burger.

Motel 6 on State Street is closed

The Motel 6 off of Airport Boulevard and State Street, recently, suddenly, quietly closed. Once a Knights Inn and, for decades, the only lodging in the area south of I-94, it now faced competition from a quite new Staybridge Suites, and a Holiday Inn Express soon to open, across the street on the outskirts of Research Park. Both of these new builds have indoor hallways and the amenities craved by the business travelers that Research Park attracts.

The signs at the old motel are completely blacked out, but the grounds are still maintained and the property is well-lit for reasons that seem obvious to me (either the broken-windows effect, or keeping the complex ready for a new hotel brand and management to step in quickly, especially during football season). A length of steel chain blocks the one driveway at the front of the complex.

Pristinely empty, it beckoned me to take a few low-light night photos with the best camera…

Above, the guesthouse is still lit from within, though nobody’s working the desk. Beyond the guesthouse, the rows of empty rooms wait to be occupied again.

To the left in the photo above, behind the small fence, is the outdoor swimming pool. I was beginning to feel emboldened and started to edge closer, when a Ford Edge turned off of Airport Boulevard, zipped down the access road, and started to turn into the driveway. I tried to wave them away so they wouldn’t hit the chain, but it stopped them cold. My nerve evaporated, and I walked back to my car.

The Edge followed me. Its window rolled down. “Excuse me, sir,” the driver said. “Is it open?” (I was wearing jeans and a hoodie, but no matter what I’m wearing, I apparently radiate something that makes strangers think I know what in the world is going on. I guess it’s middle-aged, approachable white maleness.) I shook my head and said “nope, sorry.” The Edge zipped away.

I went back for one more shot, a real easy one where I probably wouldn’t get the cops called on me if someone else showed up.

Hopefully this reopens soon, but going by its TripAdvisor, if it didn’t reopen it would not be much missed.

EDITED TO ADD:

I almost forgot! Remember the vintage shop that opened this summer, where Chelsea Flowers used to be on Liberty? It’s closed, per A2RS Deputy Director Eli:

It was called “Former Vintage,” and that means I have to get to call it “the former Former Vintage space” from now on.

VERY MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD:
The end of today’s post contains a significant background detail for one of the plots on the HBO series “The Righteous Gemstones” , so if you’ve been planning to watch it and want to go in knowing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, maybe come back after you’ve binged at least the first three episodes or so.

Okay, on to the “news.”

The Quarter Bistro ended its fifteen year run at Westgate recently.

The Quarter Bistro was a New Orleans themed restaurant. It followed the now-defunct chains Mountain Jack’s and Rio Bravo in that Westgate outlot space. An /r/AnnArbor post broke the news that it will be succeeded by Stadium Boulevard stalwart Lewis Jewelers.

Lewis Jewelers has experience with repurposing a restaurant. Its current location, at 2000 West Stadium Boulevard, is a heavily-fortified onetime McDonald’s. If you didn’t know it already, can you kind of see it below? I don’t have any photos handy of the McDonald’s back then, but picture the mansard roof from an old McDonald’s and a drive-thru window along the long wall. McDonald’s moved to its current location, a couple blocks west on Stadium, in the late 80s or early 90s.

Quick flashback to Fingerle Lumber. Over about two weeks from the end of July to the beginning of August, most of the buildings on the site were demolished. I work nearby, so I managed to get some photos of the site immediately before and during the work. A lot of them are Live Photos so there’s a bit of motion.

(Some of the shots toward the end are pretty cool, but it might take some work to get there, sorry. I was snapping as quickly as I could trying to document and didn’t feel like using video camera mode. I wish Flickr Pro was still $25 a year, sharing was great and there are a lot of retail nerds there. I’d join up again for $25 like it used to be, but $50 is a bit much. Google Photos is free and fast but embedding is a little janky.)

U-M has not yet announced further plans for the block, but as soon as the debris was carried off, the lots were marked Yellow Parking (a relatively-affordable option for staff and some students). It is anticipated that this will someday be either additional student housing or maybe more Athletics buildings.

All Hollowed

Have you heard about the petitions to move Halloween from All Hallows’ Eve to a Halloween is coming up fast, so Spirit Halloween is once again popping up around town. The national chain has a outlet in a past-years location at the old Arhaus Furniture inside Arborland, as well as in the old Babies
“Я” Us on Carpenter Road. It also once again joins its sister chain, Spencer’s Gifts, at Briarwood, but now in a new location there…

Previous years saw Spirit in the cavernous space that was once the movie theater, but that space has been subdivided and a day spa has the external entrance, so Spirit Halloween now finds its temporary fortune in Briarwood’s largest and most infamous vacancy… Sears! But first, let’s enjoy some of that world-building and tale-spinning you can only get on premium cable.

One of HBO’s latest series is “The Righteous Gemstones,” a dark, twisty comedy about a family of evangelists who attempt to expand their successful ministry across the world, as well as into the fictional Southern town of Locust Grove.

In what has to be the most unusual brand placement opportunity since “Baskets,” the Locust Grove location is, conspicuously, a recently closed Sears store. (“When capitalism collapses, that’s where we come in,” a Gemstone proudly crows.) The theater where the services are held appears to be accessible from inside the mall and the parking lot, but the Gemstones apparently worked quickly to open, as the backstage is still filled with detritus from the store’s previous purpose.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall the Briarwood Sears now, as a purveyor of Halloween accoutrements.

Spirit has located itself in the south side of the old Sears store, where the shoes and I think the misses’ section used to be. Optical and Portraits were near here too. Much like the Gemstones, this Sears is too much room for even a Halloween specialist in peak season, and although there are some elements you wouldn’t expect (many operational animatronics so you can try before you buy for your front yard; a walk-through “fish tank” using large-screen TV panels as the view ports), Spirit has erected temporary walls to contain the sales floor, with pegboard panels to hang their wares.

Purely in the interest of journal-ish-ness, I placed my phone camera up to one of the peg holes to capture what it looks like back there. As in the rest of real life, it is much less interesting than the HBO version.

You can tell by the blue on the walls and pillars that this is where the Lands’ End section used to be. Little else has occurred in the space since Sears vacated just after the dawn of the New Year.

No telling what comes next once Spirit folds for the season. Previously I speculated this might be a good location for the return of Alamo Drafthouse, but:

• Alamo tends to target less-saturated areas for new locations. I’m pretty sure Emagine Saline and the State Theater, two venues with bars, make Briarwood less attractive by their standards
• Midtown Detroit developers are targeting Spring 2021 for an Alamo on Woodward Avenue (a long-touted plan)

Patti and I will be back to talk about “Vanishing Ann Arbor” again at the Kempf House Museum on Wednesday, October 9, at noon. Hope to see you there!