AADL Talks To: Mark Hodesh, Fleetwood Diner and Downtown Home & Garden Founder

Thu, 12/18/2025 - 11:47am

When: May 18, 2023

In May 2023, AADL talked to Mark Hodesh. Mark told us about growing up in Ann Arbor, his many jobs in town including Red’s Rite Spot, Fleetwood Diner, and Downtown Home & Garden. Mark reflected on his life in Ann Arbor, and shared stories from his many years owning the Hertler Brothers building, including a set of gold teeth, and the cats Ann Arborites have known and loved.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] DARLA WELSHONS: [MUSIC] Hi. This is Darla.
• [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: And this is Elizabeth. In May 2023, AADL talked to Mark Hodesh. Mark told us about growing up in Ann Arbor, his many jobs in town, including Red's Right Spot, Fleetwood Diner, and Downtown Home and Garden. Mark reflected on his life in Ann Arbor and shared stories from his many years owning the Hertler Brothers building, including a set of gold teeth and the cats Ann Arbor's have known and loved. Thank you for joining us today. We're here with Mark Hodesh.
• [00:00:40] MARK HODESH: My pleasure. Glad to be here with you.
• [00:00:42] ELIZABETH SMITH: We're just going to start off by asking, we did you grow up?
• [00:00:46] MARK HODESH: I grew up in Ann Arbor, not born here, but my father got a job at Ford Motor Company, and we moved here in 1947 when I was four. I grew up here.
• [00:00:59] ELIZABETH SMITH: Have you lived anywhere else other than Ann Arbor?
• [00:01:04] MARK HODESH: Yes, a short while in the early 1980s in New York City and then in Castine Maine in the later 80s.
• [00:01:15] ELIZABETH SMITH: What was your time like in Ann Arbor? Did you go to school here?
• [00:01:20] MARK HODESH: I did. I went to school starting--actually I went to a one room school, Foster School on Maple Road, north and west of town for kindergarten, but I remember it. Then we moved to Pittsfield Village in 1952, something like that. I started first grade at Pittsfield No. 9. Mr. Krueger was the principal.
• [00:01:50] DARLA WELSHONS: How many kids were you in your class? Do you remember? Was it tiny?
• [00:01:54] MARK HODESH: At Pittsfield Number 9?
• [00:01:56] DARLA WELSHONS: Yeah.
• [00:01:57] MARK HODESH: I don't have a feeling for that. It sure wasn't huge. But it was a small school. It was great, though. I learned a lot of important things there, including Mrs. Wingo's little segment on running a business. We would buy Number 2 pencils for $0.02 and sell them for three.
• [00:02:24] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:02:25] MARK HODESH: Little erasers that went on the end for $0.01 and sell them for two, and a big sale was a protractor, $0.10.
• [00:02:33] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:02:34] MARK HODESH: I love Mrs. Wingo. It was a great class.
• [00:02:38] ELIZABETH SMITH: Before we started talking, you mentioned you have had a lot of experiences at the library. What was your first experience at the Ann Arbor library?
• [00:02:45] MARK HODESH: Well, I wouldn't say a lot [LAUGHTER] because being a horrid student's part of my history. But the first one was going to the old library on Huron Street, and you entered on Huron. I believe you entered at a higher level. The stacks were a little bit down below you, and it smelled of steam, heat, and books in the winter, and it was just a great smell. That's what I remember from that. I never went by myself, but my father took me there. Then another experience then would be junior high school at Tappan when I had a reading assignment. I came to the library, and I brought my ruler so that I could find the narrowest possible book to read. [LAUGHTER] Then I had to check the size of print to make sure it was going to be okay, so no.
• [00:03:40] DARLA WELSHONS: Was that Tappan in the original?
• [00:03:42] MARK HODESH: No.
• [00:03:42] DARLA WELSHONS: In the old Burns Park building or in the new Tappan?
• [00:03:47] MARK HODESH: New Tappan.
• [00:03:47] DARLA WELSHONS: New Tappan. Then, where did you go to high school?
• [00:03:50] MARK HODESH: Ann Arbor High before it was split.
• [00:03:53] DARLA WELSHONS: Yeah.
• [00:03:53] MARK HODESH: Yeah.
• [00:03:53] ELIZABETH SMITH: What did you do after your school years?
• [00:03:58] MARK HODESH: Well, it was a time when there were a lot of jobs around in the '60s, and I would just get them and then leave them. You could have 4 or 5 jobs in a year. I did for a while, all kinds of little factories around. I worked at Argus Camera for a couple of weeks and a place Reynolds Chemical in Whitmore Lake for a little bit, and eventually at Ford in an experimental foundry, where on my first day, it was an afternoon shift, and on my first day, the other janitor took me around and said, Here's what we do. It wasn't about work. It was about not working. [LAUGHTER] You can change your spark plugs over here. You can rest over there, and we didn't do a thing, really.
• [00:04:48] DARLA WELSHONS: Well, it sounds like a good setup to get paid for.
• [00:04:51] MARK HODESH: Well, you know, not really character building.
• [00:04:53] DARLA WELSHONS: Right. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:04:53] MARK HODESH: But then here's a nice little colorful story. I got all those jobs in spite of having a police record. The way I got my police record was riding a freight train back from Jackson, Michigan. We got to Ann Arbor, and I jumped off and was greeted by police with shotguns.
• [00:05:17] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:05:18] MARK HODESH: There was some kind of ruse. Well, we thought you might have escaped from Jackson Prison. No, it wasn't that. I was getting an adventure. I'd fill out applications at these various jobs, and there was a little box that said police record. I said, yes, that's me. I put a tick in there, and I'd go in for the interview, and the interviewer would be going along and say, what's this? Police record? I'd say, I rode a freight train riding a public conveyance without paying fare. He said, that sounds like fun. [LAUGHTER] I went every time.
• [00:06:01] DARLA WELSHONS: Was that a common thing to do, or was that just something like a spur of the moment, let's jump on this train.
• [00:06:06] MARK HODESH: No, someone told me it could be done. You'd hide behind the old Broadway Bridge abutment, and the freight train would stop, the 1201 going west. It'd stop, you'd hop on and you catch the 330 something out of Jackson on the way back. It was pretty good. [LAUGHTER] The cars, the bells would be clanging at the crosses, and the car lights are there, and people are watching you on a car go by. It was pretty good.
• [00:06:36] ELIZABETH SMITH: There was an article in the Ann Arbor news about a chimney sweep position?
• [00:06:40] MARK HODESH: Yes, Ace Chimney Cleaning, one of my early businesses, and that was at the same time I was working at Red's Rite Spot. My parents had a fire in their chimney. It burned itself off. But Mr. Vanden Bosch who was Dutch, great hockey player, too. He played at Burns Park all the time. A friend of my parents said, yeah, what you do, what we did in the old country was stuff a Christmas tree down the chimney and light it, and it would just burn out. Well, there can't be too much to that. I went to the fire department and said, Well, I think I want to clean some chimneys. What do I need to do? They said, well, no, I don't go ahead. It's a good idea. No insurance, no nothing, just simple times. I stuffed a burlap bag with straw and put a brick in it, and I'd lower it up and down, and then I'd go down and sweep up the--usually the dead birds at the bottom, once in a while a raccoon. One of my first customers was Admiral Cowan on Devonshire, and I went over there and it was summer, July probably maybe August, old man sitting in front of his fireplace with a sweater on. He was Admiral Cowan who had sailed down the 5th of the 4th or the 4th of 5th in Scotland as a 14-year-old boy and sailed around to fight in the Boxer rebellion in China.
• [00:08:18] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:08:19] MARK HODESH: I just got to meet this really great 19th century guy by cleaning a chimney, so it was all worth it. I didn't clean very many chimneys, but I had a good time.
• [00:08:34] DARLA WELSHONS: I'd like to hear about Red's Rite Spot. We have photos of that in our archives collection, and I really have a crush on that old diner. I wish I could travel in time to see it.
• [00:08:43] MARK HODESH: He was the beginning of my adult life. Got a job working for him, $1 and a quarter an hour, and it was a 13 stool diner.
• [00:08:55] DARLA WELSHONS: Was it a popular student hangout? Or more townie, or a little both?
• [00:09:00] MARK HODESH: Big students, but also State Street area business. Right by the front door of where Tower Plaza is now. There were student housing next to it and all around it. He was a World War II drill sergeant. He'd opened it in early 1950s, and he had a woman working for him. This is dating diners. He had a woman working for him that did nothing but potatoes. She mashed them. She made french fries. She made hash browns, 13 stools, but he was very busy, and she made them. He respected the egg, too. He was a good egg cook, and he taught me how to cook eggs. He was irreverent. He would cut people's ties off and then flip them a $10 bill to go buy a new one. He didn't like how they were acting. [LAUGHTER] He's just full of lies. He once had a little jar on the counter. That was at the new place, actually, when he went around the corner where Frank's was. By the way, my name is still on the door in the basement of Frank's, House of Hodesh. That's, whatever, 60 years or something. Anyway, this little jar that said Little Blind Girl fund. There was no little blind girl. He was just being irreverent. How could you do that? But he did it. But he was really a great character, and I learned a lot of things from him, but one particular incident is doing him the favor of cleaning off the the stools, and I guess that's called a back bar or something under there. It was dirty, and I meticulously cleaned and scrubbed it, scraped stuff off. I was so proud. Red came in the next morning. Why didn't you finish the job? I hadn't mopped up. That's actually a huge lesson. I'd done the cleaning, but I didn't finish the job. That was homage to Red's right spot.
• [00:11:07] DARLA WELSHONS: Did you take all those skills that you learned there and transfer them to the Fleetwood?
• [00:11:10] MARK HODESH: He taught me how to run a diner, and how to be irreverent. Leads necessary skills to be a short order cook, fast hands and the bad mouth. That's what it takes to make it go.
• [00:11:24] DARLA WELSHONS: And a special potato woman.
• [00:11:25] MARK HODESH: You got to know your potatoes, too. [LAUGHTER] I did. I bought the potatoes at the Fleetwood, switching gears, from Bob Arnold's father who bought them up north, brought them by bags. We had eggs from Bilbies Farm before Cisco and all the places. Bread from Modern Bakery, in Detroit, it was the best bread available at the time. It was as good as I could make a diner. It was good. Smuckers jelly Heinz ketchup. No house special or anything like that. Made our own corned beef hash, sold tons of it, they'd cook five briskets at a time, made chili, probably 15 gallons a week.
• [00:12:13] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:12:13] MARK HODESH: $0.50 for a big cup.
• [00:12:15] DARLA WELSHONS: This was in the '70s when you were?
• [00:12:17] MARK HODESH: I opened January 6, 1972. I owned it for three years. I sold half of it after one year Rich Alford, and then I sold him the second half at the end of the third year, and I bought Hertler Brothers.
• [00:12:34] ELIZABETH SMITH: Hertler Brothers is the former name of Downtown Home and Garden?
• [00:12:37] MARK HODESH: Right. I sold after a number of years, I sold Hertler Brothers and its name, and they sold it to someone subsequently. I couldn't get the name back when I took over the store again in 1997.
• [00:12:53] DARLA WELSHONS: How did you get persuaded to sell the diner and move into Home and Garden territory.
• [00:12:58] MARK HODESH: Well, the diner was hard. An 80 hour week would have been easy for me, but it was really hard. That's one thing. I did wake up on the floor sometimes just work and fall asleep, standing there and collapse. But Tom Schuon from Schuon's Gulf, corner of Packard and Stadium. I think there's a Circle K there now. He was having breakfast one morning, scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast, sausage. He said I heard Hertler's is for sale. Well, I had no idea what Hertler's was. I'd been half a block from it for three years, and I had no idea. But something clicked. I turned back to the grill finishing up some things. I said, that sounds like my future. I went down and saw the Hertlers, Georgie Hertler, and he was the nephew. Hi, I hear this place is for sale. The first thing I said that, and he went right up a ladder, wouldn't talk to me. End of conversation. I went back a week or two later and tried it again, and he went right up the ladder, and I went right up behind him. I had him. [LAUGHTER] His aunt was Emma Hertler and she was the baby sister of the original Hertlers and she was 89. Her older brother, Herman was 94, and Gottlib was 102.
• [00:14:38] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:14:39] MARK HODESH: These were some long live Germans. I think there were nine kids and seven of them saw their 90s.
• [00:14:46] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow. Yeah those are good genes.
• [00:14:47] MARK HODESH: They had escaped the family farm, which was eventually sold to became--down by Milan--that eventually became the mental health hospital, Ypsi State Mental Health Hospital, and is now a Toyota proving ground or something down there. That was their farm. But those three escaped to the big city, Ann Arbor and avoided the drudgery of farm life. It was Emma that saw to it that I got the place because she had been sending Ray Seyfried, one of their employees, down to the Fleetwood for tomato soup on Wednesdays. There were some guys in there with hairy chests and gold chains trying to flirt with this 89-year-old woman. I said, I'm probably. I didn't know how it was going to work out, but I thought I was going to be okay somehow. [LAUGHTER] They are trying to buy it. She whispers because old people talk a little too loud. She said, Georgie, the one that escaped up the ladder, Georgie sell it to him. He's a good boy. He gets up early. That was the deal.
• [00:15:56] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:15:57] MARK HODESH: Land contract, I didn't take any money to speak of, and that was Old Ann Arbor. That's just how it went.
• [00:16:06] DARLA WELSHONS: When did the name change? You said you had it and [OVERLAPPING] sold it?
• [00:16:13] MARK HODESH: Sold it to the people that bought the store, and they sold the store to someone else, and the name traveled. But in 1997, when we were returning from Maine where my wife and I owned a small hotel, summer hotel, I could take over the store, but I couldn't get the name back, so I changed it to downtown Home and Garden in 1997. Nobody's got that story right. It's a little complicated, but I'm fine just explaining it over and over. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:16:44] DARLA WELSHONS: The building itself kind of remained unchanged from the original?
• [00:16:48] MARK HODESH: That's key to the place. It's such a study in architecture. Architecture students come through every spring to this day, and they say, well, look at that. Well, that was built that way by Mr. Kurtz.
• [00:17:04] MARK HODESH: From Germany, and it's a peculiar style. The ceiling is supported by an inverted bridge. What it does is eliminates every other post that's holding it. You have a lot of clear space.
• [00:17:18] DARLA WELSHONS: Oh, okay.
• [00:17:18] MARK HODESH: It's very strong. We put 80 tons of merchandise on the second floor every spring. It's got horse stalls in the basement to this day.
• [00:17:29] DARLA WELSHONS: Oh, wow.
• [00:17:29] MARK HODESH: The Hertlers ran a livery stable, and they were so gritty. They opened in 1906 as a livery stable. You've probably got the picture, $0.10 for a straw all day, somewhere in your archives. Hay and water all day. It's been great. The building is really strong. I purchased the corner that's now Bill's Beer Garden and the little building around the corner, which is Evergreen Restaurant. It used to be the Union Hall for the trades. I actually hired out of that building at one time, doing construction work. But anyway, the building is sacrosanct. That's really what--whoever's in there is going to pick that up.
• [00:18:19] ELIZABETH SMITH: What changes did you make to the building? You did a greenhouse. When was that built?
• [00:18:28] MARK HODESH: The first greenhouse in the parking lot would be about 2000. Then a second one behind the store in 2008, 2009, something like that. I did clean out some old merchandise when I bought it from the Hertlers. They had leg hold traps, small, medium, and large.
• [00:18:53] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:18:53] MARK HODESH: I didn't know the difference. My mother said, you better get those out of here. It's not going to go well. But just for catching animals. I got rid of the DDT and dynamite that was in the basement. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:19:10] DARLA WELSHONS: That's probably a good move.
• [00:19:11] MARK HODESH: There were buggy whips upstairs, buggy whips and horse blankets, though time stopped in the 1930s for the Hertlers. Even the color, the green that's underneath that, appears in some places. It looks like Sears and Roebuck, 1930. When I went down to see it from having my epiphany over the grill, there were three 60-watt light bulbs in that big barn, three light bulbs.
• [00:19:45] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
• [00:19:45] MARK HODESH: It was dark. One day, when I was courting 'em in December that year, I went over, getting--it was dark at 5:00 o'clock, and Georgie Hertler was working, and someone came in and said, you got one of these? He produced a washer. Well, all the lights were off in the little store side where the bread is now in the clothing. George went over, turned the pool chain lights on. Matched it up with the washers that were on a shelf. "That do?" Yeah. "What do I owe you? $0.10 too much?" Then we went back, turned all the lights off, and he rang up the $0.10. [LAUGHTER] They had crutch tips. They were old. They listened to their customers. [LAUGHTER] They had five sizes of crutch tips to keep people upright.
• [00:20:42] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow. Did you know what you were getting into when you took over that business?
• [00:20:47] MARK HODESH: No, I did not. I knew the restaurant business, going in there. Don Reed, who'd run it for years, took good care of me and made me succeed. But I didn't know a thing about that Hertler Brothers. But in my crude way, I said, there's so much wood in this building. If it fails, we can knock it down and sell the wood. [LAUGHTER] That was a rudimentary mathematical way out. They have the same safe, too, by the way, that I got from the Hertlers, which is not that old, but probably 50s. In it, I found the construction documents for getting it built, and it was built by Mr. Kurtz. He was from Germany, and he was the general contractor and carpenter. Then I think he got $1,600 for his work, and then the Mason got $2,000 for his work. Then I lost the papers in a flood.
• [00:21:56] DARLA WELSHONS: Oh, no.
• [00:21:56] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was going to ask what happened to that.
• [00:22:00] DARLA WELSHONS: I was, too.
• [00:22:02] MARK HODESH: Then one more. This is a good story, too. On my first day, I go in, and I'm now going to take over the store. Emma has got up from her chair, and she's left, and now it's my store. I go, and I pull out the desk that's still there and still being used, it's a steel case from Grand Rapids. I pull out the top drawer, and there in the stamp tray are five Hertler gold teeth.
• [00:22:32] DARLA WELSHONS: Ew. [LAUGHTER] Do you know which Hertler's those belonged to?
• [00:22:37] MARK HODESH: No, but I can tell you where those teeth are.
• [00:22:42] DARLA WELSHONS: [LAUGHTER] For anyone that's listening; he is pointing to his own mouth. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:22:47] MARK HODESH: I don't know what came over me, but I kept those teeth. It was after I sold the store. I had the teeth. I was having some dental work done. I needed some gold. The dentist said, it's not going to save you any money.
• [00:23:01] DARLA WELSHONS: You have a permanent Hertler souvenir that you carry with you.
• [00:23:04] MARK HODESH: Every day I walk you through the door, Emma is returning. That's a story, isn't it?
• [00:23:10] DARLA WELSHONS: Yeah, definitely. [LAUGHTER] I mean, you're tied to that building for life now.
• [00:23:16] MARK HODESH: [LAUGHTER] I've even inquired, Muehligs and Nie don't get gold out of your.--I wanted to give them to my daughter. [LAUGHTER] They said, no, you can't get them back. Come on. I know somebody's sifting those ashes somewhere. But, anyway, I think I have a connection with a dentist who said he'll get over there and pluck them out. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:23:41] DARLA WELSHONS: Is your daughter okay with it?
• [00:23:45] MARK HODESH: She puts up with it. [LAUGHTER] She humors me.
• [00:23:49] DARLA WELSHONS: She could put them on a necklace or something.
• [00:23:52] MARK HODESH: Or run the other direction. She may not want anything to do with them, but I want to give them to her. That's as far as it goes.
• [00:23:59] ELIZABETH SMITH: When did you retire from the business?
• [00:24:03] MARK HODESH: Well, I guess I have. Although I was teaching just yesterday about how to get the plants going on the roof and how to get the Dosatron set up to keep them watered and fertilized and all that. I like being the old guy that knows stuff.
• [00:24:23] ELIZABETH SMITH: Your involvement isn't totally done with it?
• [00:24:26] MARK HODESH: Yeah. I've got an office upstairs. I just opened junk mail. I don't do anything up there. But I pass through, coffee and go downstairs. People say, oh, hi, Mark. Good to see you.
• [00:24:40] ELIZABETH SMITH: You own the building still?
• [00:24:43] MARK HODESH: Yeah. That's the key. Owning the buildings, that's important to keeping things. That's what I'm really proud of, that's when you have control. It's not about money, really.
• [00:25:02] DARLA WELSHONS: It is an amazing building preserved right downtown there.
• [00:25:07] MARK HODESH: I'll give you a tour if you come by.
• [00:25:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: That'd be amazing.
• [00:25:10] MARK HODESH: Kelly, who owns the store now, Kelly Vore, periodically, she stopped during COVID, but they may get rekindled, but I can take people through anytime. It's just cool. There's just a little marks in the concrete in one place. It's like a Jewish mezuzah. I think it's just a German good luck to you thing, like you'd see in a Pennsylvania Dutch barn. There's little stuff around that the Hertlers--There's an iron ring that a chain went through to the back of a model T driven away would raise the elevator up to the second floor.
• [00:25:58] DARLA WELSHONS: Oh, wow.
• [00:25:59] MARK HODESH: Little stuff. There's a grain elevator in there that predates the Hertlers, actually. The Hertlers bought it in 1906, but they built the barn. But before that, the other side was the Mann and Zeeb Elevator. I think it was when there were backyard flocks all over the Old West Side, and they would be mixing bird food. They weren't grinding, but they were mixing seeds for birds, I think, for flocks.
• [00:26:34] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you know what year the building was built?
• [00:26:36] MARK HODESH: 1906, the barn that you drive through. Grace Shackman tried to figure out what the date was on the other building, and I think we got to 1894, 1896, something like that. Just a little bit older.
• [00:26:52] ELIZABETH SMITH: We were curious about the cats that you keep there?
• [00:26:55] DARLA WELSHONS: Yes. Wallace, I believe, is the current cat. And there have been predecessors?
• [00:27:04] MARK HODESH: Well, it started with a really evil black female. Every spring, I'd be going through, looking for hoses or something like that, and there would just be white fangs and wide eyes coming at me. I'd got too close.
• [00:27:20] DARLA WELSHONS: This cat just moved in from wherever?
• [00:27:25] MARK HODESH: Barn cat. She was in there. She didn't have a name. I started to tame her with little bits of kidney. In the '70s, you could buy a kidney in the grocery stores. I cut up the pieces. Closer, closer. I finally got her close enough to reach down and pet her, and I went to the roof with cat fever for three days. Cats just scratch and go away. She tried to kill me. She was just tough, and that was that era. Then John McGovern, who owned the store, in between, when I wasn't there, along with camp fitters had a cat I don't know much about. But then I had Lewis, who became famous. Lewis, I mean, there's a lot of Lewis stories, but he loved people and easy to pet. But when a dog came in, you never saw it happen. There was suddenly a bunch of yipping and a speck of blood on the dog's nose. You couldn't see how it happened. He struck from nowhere, and he died. I can't tell you. 2012, '13, 2014, something like that. He had 50,000 views on Facebook.
• [00:28:46] DARLA WELSHONS: I remember him well.
• [00:28:47] MARK HODESH: He was at the top of the Ann Arbor News Obit. The top. Not your parents or grandparents. Lewis was at the top.
• [00:28:58] DARLA WELSHONS: I loved him. I would write him at the top, too.
• [00:29:03] MARK HODESH: He was a charmer. He got kidnapped once. The whole town went on alert.
• [00:29:08] ELIZABETH SMITH: Oh, my gosh.
• [00:29:09] MARK HODESH: He was just out getting pets on the sidewalk, and someone said, oh, poor Lewis and picked him up and took him home up on Division. About two weeks later, someone said, we spotted him. I went up and got him. Louis was great. Now, there's Wallace, who's a cat. He's also orange, but he's got a different-shaped nose. He's a different intellect. Lewis was special. He was a good one. Thanks for asking.
• [00:29:39] ELIZABETH SMITH: [LAUGHTER] Is there anything that you would like to see preserved and or changed as the business continues on?
• [00:29:46] MARK HODESH: Well, everything is possible. You have to keep paying taxes and keep the roof in repair. There's a lot of a lot that has to go on. Getting the beer garden going on the same site has been a tremendous help. It takes a lot of economic pressure off the store, so that's good. But my wife designed that garden outside, the parking lot. The trees around the edge, the European hornbeams that David Michener from Matthaei Botanic taught us how to do. Then that nice iron fence, it's just much more than anyone would expect from a parking lot. But it makes all the difference to the store and the neighborhood. It was my wife's idea to make it come hither, rather than a junkyard fence that says stay out. It's come in, and it works just both for the store customers and the beer garden people. I'd like it to go forever, but it won't. We hear rumblings about buildings going up on the Kleins' lot. I think the city is exploring that goes on and on. My wife had the design. But what I had was the idea that they use at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where they have an exquisite garden outside and the multimillion-dollar condominiums around the edge. It's the jewel in the setting. That is the jewel of the west side of Main Street, there. That's the game. I think if you can keep that nice enough, the development can go on around it, and it can stay. That's what I'm aiming for. The choices.
• [00:31:49] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are you most proud of?
• [00:31:51] MARK HODESH: Well, that it's a going retail store in a changing downtown, and it's got high esteem in the community. I'm proud to say, I took it over from the Hertlers and captured what they had done inadvertently, and got rid of the dynamite and the leg-hold traps and changed it like that.
• [00:32:18] DARLA WELSHONS: Next time I shop there, I'll think about that.
• [00:32:22] MARK HODESH: It's amazing. There it was. There was even one more dangerous than DDT. It was nicotine sulfate that you'd put on chickens to kill lice. My mother said, If you drop your watch in that bucket, don't reach in and get it.
• [00:32:36] ELIZABETH SMITH: Wow. Well, thank you so much for talking with us today.
• [00:32:42] DARLA WELSHONS: Thank you.
• [00:32:42] MARK HODESH: My pleasure.
• [00:32:43] DARLA WELSHONS: We do look forward to that tour. Let's go right now. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC]
• [00:32:46] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.