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The Short Life of the Royal Cafe

Guy Bissell and the early years of Ann Arbor's restaurant trade

Between 1905 and 1909, the number of restaurants in Ann Arbor doubled--all the way from eight to seventeen. One of the newcomers was the Royal Cafe, opened in 1909 by Guy Bissell at 316 South Main.

Restaurants weren't a big deal early in the century. "People didn't go to restaurants like they do now," recalls Elsa Goetz Ordway, whose family owned the Goetz Meat Market on Liberty. "As a child I can't remember ever going to a restaurant." Bertha Welker, who was a teenager growing up on Sixth Street when the Royal Cafe opened, never went to a restaurant as a young woman, either. Frieda Heusel Saxon, whose family owned the City Bakery on Huron, remembers that they might run out for a quick bite at lunch, but they didn't eat in restaurants for enjoyment.

In 1909, saloons still far outnumbered restaurants in the city. (There were thirty-seven in 1909.) But they were mainly men's hangouts. Families who wanted to socialize around eating entertained at home or, as a special treat, went out to an ice cream parlor. Ordway remembers that the favorite spots for Sunday afternoon ice cream treats were Trubey's and Preketes's, both on South Main.

The Royal Cafe wasn't intended for the sweet tooth or the drinking crowds. Despite its fancy name, it was what Guy Bissell's daughter, Eleanor Gardner, describes as a "casual restaurant," with a quick-service counter, a few wooden tables, and a simple menu. The bill of fare offered nothing stronger than coffee (five cents), and the only sweet item was griddle cakes (ten cents).

Bissell ran the restaurant himself, doing the cooking with the help of his father, Ira, whenever he was in town. (He divided his time among his three children.) Bissell's wife, Marie, stayed at home with their small children, Eleanor and Clarence, and also cared for her mother, Frederica Bernhardt.

Bissell was just twenty-six when he opened the Royal Cafe. He was born in Ludington, Michigan, the son of an English father and a German mother, and raised in Ypsilanti. He left school after the eighth grade and moved to Ann Arbor when he was eighteen. He worked as a bellboy at the American Hotel (now the Earle Building) where he also slept, and held short-term jobs, including positions as a laboratory technician and a clerk at Overbeck's Book Store. He and Marie Bernhardt were married in 1904.

Bissell's only professional cooking experience before opening his own restaurant was a short stint as a baker for Bigalke and Reule, grocers and bakers, at 215 E. Washington. Gardner says her father learned cooking from his mother, who taught him German specialties.

When the Royal Cafe opened, most of the city's restaurants were on campus or clustered around the courthouse. For a time, it was the only eating place on Main Street other than the tearoom at Mack and Company, Ann Arbor's big department store, at the corner of Main and Liberty. Workers at nearby businesses were probably the nucleus of its customers. The biggest business in the vicinity was the Crescent Works Corset Manufacturers (where Kline's department store is now); others on the block included meat and grocery stores, dry goods and millinery shops, a plumber, a hardware store, an ice company, and an undertaker.

One year after the Royal Cafe opened, five more restaurants were listed in the city directory. The cycle of growth continued, and by 1911 there were twenty-five. That year, the Royal Cafe moved across the street to 331. A year later, Bissell moved it across town to 609 Church Street to serve the college crowd.

The frequent moves were typical of the period. Restaurants had a fast turnover rate and rarely lasted long enough to pass down to the next generation. (The longest-lasting of the 1909 restaurants was Preketes's, later named the Sugar Bowl.) After two years on Church Street, Bissell was bought out by the university. He never again ran a restaurant.

By then the city had twenty-seven restaurants. Eleanor Gardner says her father quit because "the restaurant business got too big for him." It's hard to imagine what he would think of the city today, when the Observer City Guide lists more than 200 restaurants, half a dozen of them in the 300 block of South Main. The original Royal Cafe is not one of them; it's now part of Fiegel's Men's and Boys' Wear.


[Photo caption from original print edition]: Gardner was born the year the Royal Cafe opened, and has no firsthand memory of it. But this old interior photo reveals that the menu was heavy on protein: steak, bacon, pork chops, salmon, and sardines. It offered no fruit and only one vegetable: baked beans. Prices ranged from five cents for drinks, to five and ten cents for sandwiches, to fifteen to forty cents for dinners, which included coffee, potatoes, and bread and butter.

Eighty-nine Years at the Corner of Main and Stadium

Schneiders' corner has been a fruit farm, a gas station, and a haven for hungry police officers

In 1903, blacksmith John Schneider sold his shop on Washington Street near Ashley and bought a fruit farm and a farmhouse on South Main Street. The family remained in business on the corner continuously until last summer.

The Schneiders' fruit farm was bounded by what are today Stadium on the south, Edgewood on the west, Main on the east, and Berkley on the north. Later, Snyder Avenue was cut through in front of the house. The new street was actually named for the Schneider family: the Anglicized spelling was a concession to anti-German sentiment during World War I. The war also brought the family a new line of work, when John's son Titus opened a single-pump gas station at the Main Street corner. Titus built a house for his young family next door to the station; originally it faced Main, but an addition in the 1930's gave it more prominence along West Stadium. Titus Schneider ran the gas station until 1946, then leased it to Standard Oil. In 1950, he sold it to his sons John and Titus, who is usually called "Ti." In 1957, the brothers replaced their first building with a new gas station built to Standard Oil's specifications. A perfect specimen of the immaculate, enameled-steel roadside icons of the postwar era, it's still there today, but it has changed use twice.

"In the early Seventies," Ti says, "there was a gas shortage. We couldn't get enough gas, so we started repairing cars. Then things started easing up, but by Seventy-Nine or Eighty, things got tight as far as parts go, and there was computer technology in the cars. So we changed to a convenience store."

The conversion was simply a matter of closing up the big garage doors and changing the blue letters on the wall to read "Grocery" instead of "Standard." But Schneider*s party store had only a brief period of prosperity. "That was sort of the beginning of a boom for convenience stores," Ti says. "Soon they were overbuilt. Every time a new business opened, it would take five or ten percent of ours. So we decided to sell in Nineteen-Eighty. In Nineteen Eighty-Six, we almost sold to Seven-Eleven, but the city wouldn't rezone it," he says. "They said it would make too much traffic. The politics in Ann Arbor has always been anti-business. The business climate isn't anything a small business can deal with."

John Schneider retired in 1984. In 1986, when he thought 7-Eleven would be buying the party store, Ti bought the Fredonia Grocery in Freedom Township. He lives on Pleasant Lake next door to the grocery.

Schneider's party store finally closed this past summer. But while the Schneiders have left their corner, they still own it. Nick Chapekis of Capitol Cleaners and Saline police chief Jim Douglas and his family have taken a lease with an option to buy.

Chapekis and Douglas's first goal is to run a drop-off cleaners on the site. But in September, Schneider was hoping that City Council would approve rezoning of the station, the house next door, and the empty lot next to that. In that event, the Chapekis-Douglas option to buy will go into effect and they'll put up a new building to house the cleaners and some offices. Rick Fabian of Fabian realty company moved his offices to the West Stadium house last January, and he holds the lease on that part of the property. If the rezoning is approved, the new building will include offices for Fabian, who is also the agent for the lease and sale negotiations. "It's the best location in the city for visibility," Fabian says. "I don't have to walk too far to the football games, and I even have some parking thrown in."

Although it's not part of the deal, the old farmhouse facing Snyder is also in the throes of change. Last year, it was renovated by John Sirnpkins for his Group Four realty company. "We were thinking of tearing it down," Simpkins says. "But at that time, we went to Williamsburg in Virginia, and they were restoring buildings that didn't have one-third of the quality of the building we have here.

"You can't write about Schneider's without writing about football Saturdays," Simpkins says. "That was the place for the policemen to park and eat. They made the best hot dogs in town."

"I've been there on many a cold day warming up on a Schneider dog; we all called them 'Schneider dogs,'" police officer George Patak confirms. "We start around nine-thirty or ten on those days and stay straight through as late as five or six. Frequently we don't get lunch. In the morning, when we get there, they say 'Be on point by . . .' and tell you the time you're supposed to be at your place. That left time to stop at Schneider's. For a lot of the guys, that would be the only meal they'd get all day. I called it 'the police tailgate party.' There'd be hot dogs and coffee and whatever his wife and daughter [Betty and Linda] had baked up that day. You'd just throw some money in a jar. I don't know what we're going to do this year."


[Photo caption from the original print edition]: The street leading into the Schneider farm was chauvinistically renamed Snyder during World War I, but the war also brought the family a new line of work when Titus Schneider opened a gas station in a tidy frame building on the Main Street Corner (top). His sons Ti and John replaced it with an enameled-steel Standard Oil station in 1957 (above), converted it to a convenience store about 1980. Ti Schneider closed the store last summer and leased the building to Nick Chapekis's Capitol Cleaners.

The First National Building

It recalls the ebullient optimism of the 1920's

On February 21, 1929, the First National Building, the tallest and most lavish office building yet built in Ann Arbor, was opened amid great fanfare. More than 5,000 people attended the grand opening of the ten-story building at Main and Washington.

The building was designed by local architects Paul Kasurin and Lynn Fry, who also served as general contractors. Work had begun on the building on February 1, 1928, with the demolition of the three-story Wadham's Department Store, which had been on the site since 1887. Using local contractors as much as possible--Muehlig and Schmid for hardware, Mack and Company for linoleum flooring, Rohde for lime and plaster, and Killins for sand and
gravel--they were done in less than a year.

The 1920's were the golden age of the U.S. auto industry, and the whole state was booming. The First National's owners, a group of investors, spared no expense in their pursuit of elegance: the building had a granite base, bronze doors, and steel casement windows. Inside, they installed black terrazzo floors, Italian travertine walls, and a richly decorated paneled ceiling. They named it for its main tenant, the First National Bank, which occupied the two-story main lobby, a mezzanine, and the basement.

The grand opening was like a city wide party, with refreshments, live music performed by the U-M music school's symphony orchestra, and favors: corsages, nosegays, cigars, blotters, and picture postcards of the building.

By the end of the evening 2,700 corsages and 1,500 nosegays had been given away. The only untoward incident occurred when two university students managed to get themselves locked in the bank's basement vault during a demonstration of the door's mechanism. Bank officials quickly assured onlookers that the students were in no danger, since the vault had a fresh air supply and even a telephone. They had to obtain the master key to release the pair.

The bank opened for business the following Saturday. On the mezzanine opposite the bank president's office, Merrill Lynch opened one of its earliest branch offices. The new building itself was presumably part of the lure, but the choice was probably also influenced by the fact that founder Charles Merrill was a former U-M student.

The remaining eight stories were fully rented before the building was even finished, mainly to doctors, dentists, lawyers, real estate agents, and insurance businesses. Fry and Kasurin took ninth-floor offices for themselves. The whole eighth floor was rented to two prominent U-M doctors, R. B. Canfield and A. C. Furstenburg, while the entire tenth floor was taken by lawyers Frank Stivers and Joseph Hooper. Street-level storefronts on Washington were filled by the John Tice Confectionery and Sandwich Shop and Germanis Brothers shoe repair.

The space had rented out so quickly that the First National's owners decided immediately to build an addition on the south side to match the five-story section on the back. They finished it a year later. But by then the Depression had hit, puncturing the ebullient optimism of the Twenties. Demand for office space disappeared, and the owners never completed the rest of their plan, to enlarge both of these five-story sections to match the ten-story height of the building's central part. You can still see where the additions were expected to be: the south and east sides of the tower are finished in simple brick instead of the luminous white granite that covers the rest of the building.

Downtown never regained the buoyant, pre-Depression optimism symbolized by the First National Building. After World War II, new commercial development followed the housing expanding out toward the edges of town. The First National Building stood unchallenged as Main Street's tallest for almost sixty years. It was surpassed by the ill-starred One North Main only in the mid-1980's.

In 1936, the First National Bank moved out as part of a merger with the Farmers and Mechanics and Ann Arbor Savings banks to form the Ann Arbor Bank (which has since merged with First of America). The two mezzanines were then connected to form a second-story floor, which was rented out to various businesses. Over the years, the elegant details became obscured as the marble floors were carpeted, the painted ceilings hidden by a dropped ceiling, the bronze mailbox converted to a fire alarm, and the Main Street facade altered to accommodate various storefronts, the last being Daniels' Jewelry.

In 1981, local developer Bill Martin bought the building and began the slow process of restoration. He removed the Main Street storefront and restored the original bronze entryway and terra-cotta detailing. Inside, he took out most of the later additions, restored the floors, walls, bronze elevator doors, and bronze mailbox to their original condition, and had the decorated ceilings cleaned and repainted.

Martin lured Merrill Lynch back to town, and today they occupy their former quarters. Other tenants are the same kinds of genteel business services that occupied the building in its heyday--from Michigan National Bank at street level to Beacon Investment on the tower's top floors.


[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Left) Built at the height of the 1920's boom, the First National Building was the tallest, most lavish office building in Ann Arbor's history. But the Depression killed plans to expand the wings on either side upward to match the main tower, and the building lost its namesake bank shortly after this picture was taken in the mid-1930's. (Below) During the 1980's, local developer Bill Martin re-created the two-story arched entryway and other obscured original details as part of a comprehensive restoration. But Martin, too, cautiously decided against completing the long-delayed expansions--a smart move that anticipated the present glut of office space downtown.

Ehnis and Son

From harness making to work clothes

Soon after Herman Ehnis opened his harness shop at 116 West Liberty, he realized he had gone into a dying field. But by adroitly shifting his focus from horses to the workmen who cared for them, Ehnis created a business that is still here eighty-two years later.

The son of a German immigrant, Ehnis grew up in Saline and attended both German and English schools before being apprenticed to the local harness maker. In 1910, he rented a storefront in the Schaeberle Block of West Liberty from Walter Mack, whose Mack & Co. department store was just up the street. Ehnis arranged to repair harnesses for Mack's horse-drawn delivery fleet and to have the fees subtracted from his rent. Evidently, Mack used a lot of harnesses: most months, the repair bill and the rent came out even.

Along with harnesses (most of which he made himself during the slower winter months) Ehnis sold saddles, bridles, horse collars, whips, blankets, and robes. As farmers prepared for the new season, Ehnis could repair their equipment or fit them up with new. But he soon realized that cars were fast replacing horses. When Ehnis opened, the city directory listed just four auto dealers. Ten years later, the classified section of the city directory devoted eight pages to car-related businesses.

By about 1914, Ehnis began selling shoes to make up for the declining harness business: not dress shoes, but the kind of work shoes worn by the farmers and tradesmen he was already serving. At about the same time, Ehnis was joined in the store by his older brother, Matt, who set up a shoe repair business in the back corner.

Ten years later, Ehnis called his shop a shoe store in the city directory, although he continued to sell harnesses to the dwindling number of farmers who were still using horses to plow their fields. A few farmers continued using horses until World War II, but by the mid-1930's harness sales had fallen so much Ehnis quit them altogether, leaving Malloy's on Ann Street as the last harness store in Ann Arbor.

Somehow, Ehnis survived the Depression, a time when many downtown stores--including Walter Mack's fabulous department store--went under. The first year after the crash, business dropped 55 percent, and on some days Ehnis made only a few dollars. But remarkably, he managed to come through with a store to hand down to his son and grandsons.

It was during the Depression that Ehnis began carrying work clothes. His son, Leroy, then a high school student working part-time, remembers there were two basic choices of work clothes before World War II: bib overalls, usually blue but also white for painters and carpenters, and two-piece gray uniforms--fleece-lined moleskin for winter and lighter covert cloth for summer. Although they never sold topcoats or suits, they were soon selling everything else for men--warm jackets, underwear, heavy socks, work gloves, suspenders, belts, and headgear.

Before World War II, Saturday night was the big shopping time of the week. Families from the surrounding farms and small towns would come to Ann Arbor for the evening, bringing along their children and hired hands. Kids might go to a movie at the Wuerth Theater (now Gratzi), the parents would run their errands, and hired hands would go off to buy candy or (after Prohibition) a drink.

Many of the Saturday night shoppers were regular Ehnis customers. They seldom bought in quantity ("In those days people got by with less," says Leroy Ehnis), but they were faithful, generation after generation. Herman Ehnis knew most of his customers by name; he kept track of their diverse genealogies and could talk to them in German if they preferred. Leroy Ehnis remembers that what he calls "low German" --German with a Swabian accent-- was spoken in the country for years after it was no longer heard in town.

After serving in World War II, Leroy Ehnis joined his father in the store. Work clothes began to appear in a much wider variety of styles and colors. No longer all cotton, they now came in synthetics for permanent press and easy care. Another postwar change was the widening popularity of work clothes, especially blue jeans. Ehnis & Son experienced a surge of student business in the 1960's and 1970's as painter pants and bib overalls became commonplace on campus.

Herman Ehnis retired in 1967. As they reached adulthood, his three grandsons, first Steve, then Jim, then Larry, entered the business alongside their father. Steve remembers that his grandfather still worked occasionally in the store until he died in 1974; sometimes he took over on football Saturdays so Leroy could go to the game. Steve remembers his grandfather greeting longtime customers and asking about their cousins and in-laws. He also recalls him wrapping their purchases in brown paper and tying them with string he pulled off a holder that still hangs from the store's ceiling.

Since 1985, when Leroy retired, his sons have run the store. Ehnis & Son still offers long-lasting work clothes, American-made whenever possible. The number of farmers, who once made up about half the customers, has plummeted, but a core of loyal customers from the farm families remains. As Larry puts it, "Farmers can come in here with muddy boots. They'd never think of going to Briarwood like that."


[Photo caption from original print edition]: When harness maker Herman Ehnis (left) posed for a picture c. 1910-1915, bridles, hits, and horse collars hung from the ceiling and fly nets hung spread across the window. As trucks took over, Ehnis adroitly shifted his focus from horses to the men who worked with them, adding work shoes and then work clothes. (Below) Two generations of Ehnises in the store today (1. to r.): Leroy, Jim, Steve, and Larry Ehnis.

Ann Arbor's First Skyscraper

The Glazier Building was a monument to its builder's financial chicanery

When State Treasurer Frank Glazier started the Glazier Building at the corner of Main and Huron in 1906, he was forty-four years old and at the height of his power. He was the most important man in Chelsea, where he owned the Chelsea Savings Bank and the Glazier Stove Company, and had held every local political office from school board member to state senator. Now he was intent on making a similar impact on Ann Arbor.

Glazier spared no expense to secure Ann Arbor's most important corner for his edifice. According to the February 2, 1906, Argus-Democrat, he paid $26,500 just to buy the three buildings then on the site, making it "the biggest real estate transaction in the history of the city," before a single brick was laid. "Some of the interested parties didn't want to sell," the paper explained. "The price was finally set at such a figure that all objections were overcome."

His site obtained, Glazier set about planning the tallest building the city had yet seen. Glazier "had a passion for building," says local historian Lou Doll. His neoclassical Chelsea bank and sprawling red brick stove factory, with its signature clock tower, remain village landmarks to this day. Glazier modeled his Ann Arbor building on Detroit's fourteen-story Majestic, which when built in 1896 was that city's tallest building. Like the Majestic, at Michigan and Woodward, the Glazier Building had ornate bottom and top sections with a simpler brick area in between. Glazier's newspaper, the Ann Arbor News, proudly called it "Ann Arbor's First Sky Scraper." (Glazier's News was just one of several local progenitors of today's Ann Arbor News.)

By the time the Glazier Building was completed in 1908, its namesake had declared bankruptcy and been forced to resign his state office.

In the 1906 campaign for state treasurer, Glazier's opponent had tried to make an issue of Glazier's habit of depositing state money in his own bank in Chelsea. At the time, Glazier responded that he deposited treasury funds in 144 banks all over the state. But in fact, Glazier was guilty of massive fiscal chicanery.

Glazier's rise and fall is documented in detail in Lou Doll's recently published history, Less Than Immortal: The Rise and Fall of Frank Porter Glazier of Chelsea, Michigan. (The book is currently available at the Village Shoppe in Chelsea, and Doll hopes soon to have it in stores in Ann Arbor as well.) During the Panic of 1907 (an economic recession), he ran out of funds to pay his debts--including debts to his own bank that had been financed from state deposits. Glazier's 1910 trial for misusing state funds, Doll writes, revealed "a story of three-way bank, Stove Company, and state fund juggling that is amazing."

Glazier had not only been depositing state funds in his own bank; he had been borrowing huge amounts through what amounted to a shell game. He had used the same stove company stock as collateral for loans from eight different banks, including his own. The total exceeded $1 million, far more than the stove company was worth.

How was Glazier able to dupe both the state and his fellow bankers on so grand a scale? "A possible explanation is that he was Frank P. Glazier, wealthy manufacturer, state treasurer with the power of depositing or withholding state funds from banks, and possible future governor of the state, and they did not want to offend him," Doll writes. But once the extent of the debt became clear, Glazier was declared bankrupt in 1908.

Both the stove company and the bank went into receivership; though the bank survived under new ownership, the stove company, its products outdated by changing technology, soon closed permanently.

The money Glazier borrowed from the state was recovered. His other creditors were not so lucky. Most of his assets, including the Glazier Building, were sold at fire sale prices. According to Doll, Glazier had already sunk $130,000 of his own money into it, plus another $80,000 borrowed from the Chelsea Savings Bank. It sold for just $77,000 to the Goodspeed brothers of Grand Rapids, formerly of Ann Arbor.

Glazier himself was sentenced to five to ten years in Jackson State Prison. He was pardoned two years later and spent much of his time living quietly at his home on Cavanaugh Lake. He died January 1,1922.

The Goodspeed brothers rented the street front to the First National Bank. The office space not needed by the bank was rented to various businesses, mostly lawyers who appreciated the location near the courthouse and other banks.

In 1928 the First National moved into its own skyscraper--the eleven-story First National Building, one block south on Main Street. The Ann Arbor Trust Company took its place at Main and Huron, where it has continued (with several changes in ownership and identity) to this day.

The trust company was started in 1925 by Russell Dobson and purchased in 1928 by Earl Cress and future Ann Arbor mayor Bill Brown. The investment partners had been in business together since 1921, with offices on the top floor of the Glazier Building. By the time they took over the lease on the whole building in 1928, their businesses included securities, real estate, mortgage loans, insurance, and property management. In 1939 the two men divided the businesses, with Brown taking the insurance and Cress the trust company.

In 1973, the Goodspeed heirs finally agreed to sell the building to Ann Arbor Trust. The next year, the trust company changed to a full-service bank. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, it is now part of Cleveland-based Society Bank; George Cress, Earl's son, continues to run it, along with Society's other Michigan branches.

After more than eighty years, the exterior of the building looks much as it did in 1908, except for two changes made during a 1969 remodeling: the top cornices were removed because they were in danger of falling off, and a small addition was built on the back because the fire marshall said a second stairway was needed.


The Kelsey's Stone Castle

Was it a case of religious one-upmanship?

Newberry Hall, the miniature stone castle at 434 South State, is a fitting home for the U-M's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. But the sumptuous structure wasn't built as a museum, or even by the university. It was completed in 1891 as the headquarters of the U-M Student Christian Association.

Most early American universities were founded by churches. Even at the state-financed U-M, organized religion was a powerful force during the nineteenth century. The board of regents' insistence that religious indoctrination was essential to higher education was partly responsible for their dismissal of Henry Tappan, the university's visionary first president. And the Student Christian Association's palatial headquarters very likely also reflected a lively case of sectarian one-upmanship.

When the SCA was organized in 1858, "there was no Union, no League, no deans of men or women, no counselors in religion or workers with foreign students," notes C. Grey Austin in his 1957 booklet, A Century of Religion at the University of Michigan. The group became a social as well as religious center of campus. It sponsored lectures, published a student handbook, ran its own employment and room-listing service, and established a library open to members and guests.

By its twenty-fifth anniversary, the interdenominational SCA had over 300 members--more than 20 percent of the student body at the time and twice the number that could fit into its meeting place in South College. As an anniversary project, members decided to raise money to build a permanent home. They purchased a lot on State Street across from University Hall, predecessor of Angell Hall, and in 1887 began construction.

The SCA's first plans called for a simple, one-story structure. But at some point the group's ambitions expanded drastically. Austin's book doesn't say why, but SCA leaders could hardly have missed the sight of a rival student religious center rising just three blocks to the north, at the corner of State and Huron. Completed in 1887, it was renamed Harris Hall in 1888 in honor of its sponsor, the Right Reverend Samuel Smith Harris, Episcopal Bishop of Michigan.

The evidence of a rivalry between Newberry and Harris halls is all circumstantial. But the resemblances between the two are too numerous to be entirely coincidental. The SCA first discussed building a headquarters in September 1883. The first mention of building an Episcopal student center appears in the minutes of St. Andrew's Church one month later. Harris Hall was built of brick in the then-fashionable Richardson Romanesque style. Newberry Hall was built in the same style, but with stone. Both centers had parlors and libraries on the first floor and auditoriums upstairs. Harris Hall's seated 500; Newberry Hall's seated 550.

The expanded Newberry Hall was finished as impressively inside as out, with inlaid wood floors and tile fireplaces. For the head of the imposing central staircase, the SCA commissioned a Tiffany window in an abstract, Art Nouveau style--one of only two Tiffany windows in Ann Arbor.

In all, the SCA raised $40,000 to build Newberry Hall. That's exactly the amount that Bishop Harris raised for Harris Hall. The Episcopalians' list of donors included fur baron John Jacob Astor. The SCA's largest gift came from Detroiter Helen Newberry in honor of her late husband, Judge John Newberry, U-M class of 1849. Newberry Hall is named for him. (After Helen Newberry's death, their children donated the money to build the U-M's Helen Newberry Residence, next door to Newberry Hall.)

The SCA flourished in its stone castle. In 1917, it built and moved into an even bigger headquarters, Lane Hall, at the corner of State and Washington, and made Newberry Hall available to the U-M. During the terrible flu epidemic of 1918, Newberry was used as an infirmary. In the 1920's the U-M used it for classroom space before turning it into an archaeological museum in 1928. Francis Kelsey, the museum's eventual namesake, was a Latin professor at the U-M from 1889 until his death in 1927. He was both a distinguished scholar (his edition of Caesar's Gallic Wars was a standard text for many years) and an inspired fund-raiser who single-handedly launched and built the U-M's Near East collection. His greatest coup was persuading Detroit attorney Horace Rackham, one of the founding investors in Ford Motor Company, to finance a U-M excavation at Karanis, Egypt, a farming community about fifty miles southwest of Cairo that for several centuries was part of the Roman Empire. Findings from the eleven-year dig--textiles, coins, glass, papyri, wood, dolls, pottery, and terra-cotta lamps--account for almost half of the Kelsey's holdings.

The SCA fell on hard times in the irreligious 1930's. In 1937 it deeded Lane Hall and Newberry Hall to the U-M, and its services were taken over by a new U-M Student Religious Association. The association was later absorbed into what is now the Office of Ethics and Religion. (A similar fate befell Harris Hall: it was leased rent-free to the USO during World War II, then rented to the U-M for decades before St. Andrew's finally sold it in 1974. Beautifully renovated in the late 1970's, it's now home to Harris Advertising.)

The first floor of the Kelsey Museum still looks much as it did in the SCA days. The upstairs has been divided into offices and storage areas. However, the stage is still discernible, and the floor, which slopes slightly, is full of drill marks where the auditorium's 550 seats once were bolted down. The Tiffany window, unfortunately, is no longer publicly accessible, but it still graces the north side of the stairwell, now protected from weather and vandals by Plexiglas.


[Photo caption from original print edition]: Newberry Hall today (top) and under construction in about 1890 (left). Completion of the ecumenical Christian center was delayed four years to allow fund-raising for a much more lavish building than originally planned. The upgrade may have been spurred by rivalry with the Episcopalians' new student center, Harris Hall (above).

From Wooden Ladders to Computer Software

The Associated Spring building recaps the city's economic history

The Associated Spring building, at 401 E. Stadium near Crisler Arena, has witnessed firsthand Ann Arbor's amazing economic evolution during the twentieth century. From 1910 to 1919, it housed a company that made wooden ladders. From 1919 to 1988, its workers produced metal springs for Detroit's carmakers. Subsequently renovated for office use, it's now the home of C-Text software, a national player in the fast-growing computer typesetting business.

The first tenant of the building, according to the City Directory, was the Newton-Haggerty Ladder Company. It was one of the first factories to locate away from the center of town, in what a 1926 Chamber of Commerce pamphlet called the "South End Industrial Section." The U-M athletic complex had not yet been built, and Stadium was then "Boulevard Drive"--a dirt road just outside the city limits.

It's unclear why the ladder factory folded after less than a decade; perhaps the Michigan Ladder Company in Ypsilanti, which is still in business, offered too much competition. In any case, the building was purchased in 1919 by the Cook Spring Company, a New York firm that was moving to Michigan to get closer to the state's fast-growing auto companies.

Cook Spring was founded in 1896, and as early as 1909 it was already selling springs to Michigan carmakers. The company, which is still in business, is today Buick's oldest continuous supplier. By the time of the company's move from New York City, three men owned nearly all of Cook Spring's stock: A. J. Donally, his nephew Melvin Donally, and William Scholey. In 1928, when A. J. Donally and Scholey were getting ready to retire, the three partners decided to sell the business.

The sale ran into an unusual complication. In 1900, Melvin Donally's father (also named Melvin) had given ten shares of his company stock to a sailor named Connors. By 1928, Connors was in the Antarctic as a member of Admiral Richard E. Byrd's Little America expedition. The other stockholders had to wait for the right atmospheric conditions before they could contact Connors by ham radio to ask him if he was willing to sell--and then wait again for the right conditions to receive his reply. As a result, the deal, which should have been completed in January 1929, took an extra month.

The buyer was Barnes-Gibson-Raymond, another East Coast spring company eager to win a share of Michigan's automotive business. (Though based in Bristol, Connecticut, it had opened a Detroit plant of its own in 1923.) The new owners continued to use the Cook name for the Ann Arbor plant until after World War II, when the entire company was renamed Associated Spring. They also kept on most of the employees, including two of the former Cook partners. Scholey served as manager until he retired, in 1932; Melvin Donally, who said he would stay as long as they paid him, was employed as production manager and then as general manager to replace Scholey.

Peg Harrigan Joseph was the plant's secretary when it was sold. Asked if the place changed, she says, "Heavens, yes." The new owners set up their own systems and added people. One of the newcomers was Oscar Joseph, an accountant trained at Ohio State who had been working as timekeeper in the Detroit office. He became head accountant of the Ann Arbor plant and succeeded the younger Melvin Donally as manager when Donally retired in 1958. He also married Peg Harrigan.

Despite the changes, says Peg Joseph, "it continued operating like a family plant. The workers took pride in what they did." Melvin Donally III, who himself started working at Associated Spring in 1942, concurs about the loyalty of the work force. "When a windstorm tore the shipping room off, the workers came back the next day," he recalls. "When the furnace went out, the workers came and worked in their coats." And the tradition of hiring members of the same families continued. Donally remembers warning a new employee "to check out [family] relationships before saying anything."

The company had ups and downs during the Depression but was still able to add new employees. In 1932, a brick office building was added on the west side of the property. During World War II, the plant made valve springs for aircraft engines. During the energy crisis of the late 1970's, they helped General Motors develop torque converter clutch springs to improve fuel efficiency.

By 1988, the plant was too small and out-of-date, so Associated Spring moved to a new 100,000-square-foot facility in Saline, where it continues to turn out engine valve springs and torque converter clutch springs. The old complex was purchased by Nub Turner and Jay Hartford, owners of GT Products.

Turner is the person who saved Ann Arbor's last downtown factory from closing in 1982, when he led a leveraged buy-out of the former Chrysler parts plant at the corner of First and William. GT Products is still based there, manufacturing fuel vapor valves, diesel governors, and oil pumps.

Jay Hartford oversaw the renovation of the old spring factory. Architects Brice Lambrix and Michael Rupert did the design. The brick office building, which was in fairly good shape, now houses offices (including those of Lambrix-Rupert Architects) plus a large recreation room with an added deck that GT Products uses as a hospitality suite to entertain customers on football Saturdays.

The factory portion was a greater challenge. Lambrix and Rupert started by hauling out fifty tons of debris and then sandblasting the walls to get rid of the residue left by years of factory use. They strived to retain the original look, keeping the high ceilings and clerestory windows and adding wood compatible with the wood trusses already there to shore up the under-designed and overloaded structure. They refurbished the stucco on the outside.

C-Text, the new tenant in the factory space, designs computer-based publishing systems for newspapers, magazines, and books. (Nub Turner is an investor in the company.) They use the space mostly for offices that, although divided by partitions into fairly small work areas, feel very spacious because of the height of the ceiling and the number of windows. Turner and Hartford plan to use the back area, which was used by Associated Spring for shipping and receiving, as additional factory space for GT Products.


[Photo caption from original print edition]: Since 1910, the same Stadium Boulevard building has produced wooden ladders, automotive springs, and lines of computer code. Cook Spring Company (top) took over from Newton-Haggerty Ladder in 1919. In 1988, the building was rebuilt and renovated as the home of C-Text software (above).

Main Street's Last Shoe Store

When Walter Mast went into business for himself in 1942, there were nine shoe stores on the street. Today, Mast's is the sole survivor.

When Walter Mast opened his shoe store on Main Street in 1942, friends warned him he would never make a go of it. Not only were there eight other shoe stores nearby, but he sold only one line. Now, forty-nine years later, Mast's is the last shoe store on Main Street.

Mast's first store was at 121 South Main between Washington and Huron (now part of the NBD branch), near the courthouse and across from Goodyear's department store. Though Mast was only thirty at the time, he'd been selling shoes for well over a decade. Born here in 1912 (his family home on Third Street was on this year's Old West Side Homes Tour), he started working as a teenager at Mack and Company, the big department store on the corner of Liberty and Main, just a few blocks from his house.

Mack's was the training ground for many of Ann Arbor's future business owners (Mae Van Buren, who founded the Van Buren Shop, worked in Mack's lingerie department). Owner Walter Mack was a grouchy man, Mast says, but took a liking to him and hired him for a variety of odd jobs, including unpacking china and filling the drinking water tanks on each floor. The teenager got to drive Mack to his cottage on Whitmore Lake in his fancy Cadillac.

After a succession of these small jobs, Mast became a shoe salesman. Mack's shoe department was on the first floor near the Liberty Street entrance. Only a few shoes were kept out on display. Most of the inventory was stored behind a partition, and salesmen brought out boxed shoes for their customers to try on--a system that has been replaced by self-service in many stores, but which Mast's uses to this day.

Walter Mast graduated from Ann Arbor High School and took business classes at Ypsilanti Normal College, but decided he would rather be in business than study it. He went to St. Louis for a one-year training course with the Wohl Company, the shoe manufacturer that managed Mack's shoe department. At that time, St. Louis was the shoe capital of America: all the major shoe companies were located there. After his training, Mast serviced fifteen Wohl stores in Michigan, then managed one in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. When a Susquehanna River flood closed that store, Mast returned to Ann Arbor to manage the shoe department at Jacobson's, also a Wohl outlet at the time.

After two years at Jacobson's, Mast decided to make the big leap and open his own store. He began by selling Tweedie shoes, a line of dress shoes made in Jefferson City, Missouri. He thought it was a good line, and he was a friend of the company's local sales representative. He convinced his friend to give him some shoes to start with, which he paid for as he sold them. Mast gradually added other lines, but he continued to sell Tweedie until the company went out of business.

The first Mast's was so small that deliveries were made to the front door--althere was no back entrance. Mast and his wife, Helen, fixed the upstairs into an apartment for themselves that could be reached directly from the store or from an outside stairway. Following the model he had learned at Mack's, Mast stressed personal service, a wide variety of sizes, and good, practical brands that fit well and wore well.

Since war rationing was in effect when Mast started his business, customers needed government-issued coupons to buy a pair of shoes. Mast in turn collected the coupons until he had enough to place his own next order. He also had a stock of "coupon-free" shoes made of nonessential materials, such as gabardine, cardboard, or what Mast remembers as "a synthetic felt-like substance." Occasionally, free days were declared when customers could buy shoes without coupons.

A year after he started the business, Mast himself was called to serve in the war, so Helen took over the store's management. After Tom, their first child, was born, she supervised both a sitter upstairs and the staff downstairs. Although it had once been very common for owners to live upstairs over their stores, it was rare by then. She remembers that policemen on the Main Street beat, knowing she was by herself, would stop by every night to make sure she was all right.

When Walter Mast returned from service, he began expanding his business, opening a store in Owosso in 1945 and a second Ann Arbor store, on Liberty near the U-M campus, in 1947. At first, the two local stores had identical inventories--penny loafers and saddle shoes for students and pumps and oxfords for the adults. In 1968, the Main Street store moved a block south to its present location at 217 South Main.

In the 1960's, the two Ann Arbor stores began to diverge, mirroring changes in demand. The campus store sold stretch boots and platform shoes to U-M students, while the Main Street store continued with the classic adult styles. Interestingly, the stores have come almost full circle and now carry very similar stock. The people who grew up wearing tennis shoes are old enough to have jobs and to need dress shoes. But having grown up in unconfining shoes, they are buying the lightweight, comfortable brands that have long been the mainstay of the Main Street store.

"Fashion goes in cycles, with different themes repeating themselves over and over again, but nothing ever comes back exactly the same," says Mast. When he opened his first store, open-toed and open-heeled shoes were the style for women. Right now, he says, similar styles are big in Europe and will probably hit the United States in the near future. In between have come spike heels, pointed toes, monster chunky shoes, western boots, and clogs.

Mast is now semi-retired, and his sons, Tom and Greg, have taken over the day-to-day management, Tom of the Liberty Street store (plus a Cadillac store that he started) and Greg the Main Street store. (The Owosso store was closed last year.) Both sons worked in the stores part-time and summers as soon as they were old enough, studied business in college, and then got jobs--Tom teaching business at a small college and Greg working at a bank--before returning to Ann Arbor and the family business.

Mast is pleased with that. Studies show, he says, that the average life of a family business is thirty-seven and a half years, or one generation. Mast even has his eye on the third generation--he notes that he and Helen are blessed with six grandchildren.


[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Left) Walter Mast in his original store in the 1940's, standing second from right. His family lived in an apartment right upstairs from the tiny store. (Below) Mast and son Greg in the present Main Street Mast's.

The Colored Welfare League

North Fourth Avenue building was the meeting ground of Ann Arbor's Black community The building at 209-211 North Fourth Avenue has played a unique role in the history of Ann Arbor's black community. Now J. D. Hall's barbershop and Birkenstock Shoes, the brick building with the sunburst-topped windows has been a hotel, provided commercial space for black businesses and meeting rooms for black groups, and served as low-income housing. Many of its uses testify to the black community's longtime commitment to helping each other and to having a good time, despite the low wages and de facto segregation that prevailed during its heyday in the 1930's and 1940's. The three-story structure was built in 1899 by Charles Kayser. It was used as a hotel through World War I, run by a long series of managers. At least eight are named in the city directory, most of them listed as "colored"--a designation the publisher seemed to feel necessary at the time. The frequent changes in management imply that no one was making a go of the business. In 1921, the Colored Welfare League bought the building. In a 1978 interview, John Ragland (1905-1981), lawyer for the CWL and sometime tenant of the building, recalled how the purchase came about. "In World War I, black men called into the army felt they were not getting the same recognition accorded to white recruits," recalled Ragland, a 1938 U-M law grad who was for a time the only black lawyer in town. "A group of local black leaders therefore raised money for send-off parties. When the war ended, the money left was used to purchase 209-211 North Fourth." The CWL hoped to pay for the building by renting out rooms. Many black workers were coming to town to work on U-M buildings and on roads and were having trouble finding places to stay. Since the building was in bad shape and needed more extensive repairs than the CWL could afford, the Reverend Ralph M. Gilbert, then pastor of the Second Baptist Church, persuaded the Community Fund (forerunner of United Way) to help pay for rejuvenating the dilapidated building. The CWL raised additional operating money by renting their street-level space to commercial businesses. By 1930 two long-term businesses were in place on the north side of the building--a beauty shop and a barbershop, both run by blacks and catering to black customers. The barbershop, which continues to this day, was originally in the back of the building; it was run by Samuel Elliott, also a member of the CWL. The beauty shop, "Ever-ready," was run by Olive Lowery in the 1930's and by Sadie Harmon, now Sadie Fondren, in the 1940's. The storefront on the south side (209) was used as a restaurant. Room on the second floor was saved for club meetings and social events for the black community. One of the first groups to take advantage of the meeting space was the newly formed Dunbar Center, later to evolve into the Ann Arbor Community Center, now on Main Street. The Black Elks and their women's auxiliary, Daisy Chain Temple No. 212, met there until they bought their own building on Sunset. Other black fraternal groups that met there included the Masons, St. Mary's Lodge No. 4, the Odd Fellows, the Household of Ruth Lodge, Eastern Star, and Isis. The Wild Goose Country Club met there, too. It was made up of black families who owned land on Wild Goose Lake in Lyndon Township. Maids' Night Out, which met every Thursday evening, was open to women employed as servants. Member Edna Williams remembers that they played cards and enjoyed refreshments while exchanging information and lining up rides, especially to Ypsilanti, where they liked to go square dancing. Another group that reflected the limited job options open to blacks was Alpha Sigma Omega, whose name is made up of a letter from each of the three national black fraternities. It was made up of men who worked for white fraternities on the U-M campus. They did charity work for children and the elderly, and they hosted a big party every year--"always at a different lake," Edna Williams recalls, "with a banquet, good music and dancing, and of course, drinking. You'd go prepared to stay all night." In 1937, after many groups moved on to places of their own, part of the upstairs was converted into Josephine's Tea Room, run by a widow named Josephine Williams. She was assisted by another widow, Julia Smith, who took over the business from 1939 to 1943, renaming it Julia's Tea Room. Nellie Monamus, a longtime Ann Arbor resident, remembers the tearoom as "very nice," with good Southern-style food and simple breakfasts. Edna Williams remembers it sponsoring seances as fund-raisers. She says no one took them seriously, but they were a lot of fun. After the tearoom closed, the second floor was made into additional apartments, one the home of Jim Crawford, now the head of the Black Elks. The Colored Welfare League became less of a force in the community as the original members aged or died. By 1966 the Fourth Avenue building was in disrepair and losing money, and J. D. Hall, a young barber in town, offered to buy it. When he discovered that the CWL owed back taxes, and that lots of repairs were needed to bring the building back to code before he could start renting rooms again, Hall remembers, he almost got cold feet--especially since he and his wife were expecting a child. But Hall went ahead, and today he is glad he stayed with it. He has continued to run the building a lot like it was in CWL days. The third floor has six reasonably priced rooms for rent, while the second floor is still used by community groups. (The Platt Road Baptist Church began there.) Recent occupants include Model Cities and the Women's Crisis Center. Currently, it houses the offices of the Community Leaning Post, run by Hall's sister, Lucille Porter. A nonprofit organization, the Leaning Post is best known as a tutoring service for youth with academic problems. It also helps hard-to-place adults find homes and jobs. Hall himself is still chief barber in his shop on the first floor.


[Photo caption from original print edition]: According to the late John Ragland, the Colored Welfare League was formed to give black soldiers a proper send-off in World War I; after the war, the CWL purchased 209-211 North Fourth for housing and meeting space. (In the 1940's photo at upper left, you can just make out the sign for Ragland's own law office upstairs). Barber J. D. Hall owns the building today (above).

The Tuomy Farm

How Cornelius Tuomy's farm became his children's subdivision

The Italianate house at 2117 Washtenaw, an anachronism of an old farmhouse on a busy thoroughfare, is now the headquarters of the Historical Society of Michigan. The Tuomy family lived there for nearly a hundred years, from 1874 to 1966.

The oldest part of the house--a small Greek Revival structure with a center entry and two rooms downstairs and two up--was built about 1854 by George and Jane Bell on what was then a country road between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. The elegant Italianate front portion, which more than doubled the size of the original house, was built about 1864 by Frederick and Almina Spalding. The Spaldings raised five children on the farm; one of them, Volney, grew up to become a U-M professor of botany and zoology and co-founder of the U-M's botanical gardens.

Cornelius Tuomy bought the house and farm in 1874. Though he taught school as a young man, his real vocation was farming, which he learned from his father, Timothy, an Irish immigrant who had developed a successful farm in Scio Township. Cornelius made a success of his farm, growing vegetables, oats, corn, and potatoes; winning prizes for his horses; and raising sheep. He had a herd of twenty-two dairy cows and sold its products in a milk route in Ann Arbor until 1904, when he switched to selling wholesale.

Cornelius Tuomy quit teaching to become a farmer. He grew vegetables, oats, corn, and potatoes, raised horses and sheep, and sold dairy products on his own Ann Arbor milk route.

Cornelius Tuomy was active in St. Thomas Church and also served three terms as a Democratic supervisor of Ann Arbor Township. (Here, too, his father had set the example, serving as treasurer of Scio Township.) In 1885 he married Julia Ann Kearney, also from an Irish family; they had three children--Cornelius W., known as Bill or Will (1886), Kathryn (1888), and Thomas (1890).

Thomas Tuomy died prematurely in the great flu epidemic of 1918, but Bill and Kathryn lived long lives in Ann Arbor after brief periods elsewhere (Bill in the Army Ordnance Corps in World War I, Kathryn teaching business in Kenosha, Wisconsin). They went into business together as Tuomy and Tuomy, selling real estate and insurance. Their office, originally at 122 North Fourth Avenue, was later in a little building behind the handsome stone gas station that they built in 1930 at the convergence of Washtenaw and Stadium.

The Tuomy siblings turned the family farm into the subdivision now usually called "Tuomy Hills," but which they themselves named "Julia Tuomy Estates" in honor of their mother. They gave the streets either family names, like Tuomy and Kearney, or Irish place names such as Adare, Shannondale, and Londonderry.

Julia Tuomy Estates was marketed as "the most exclusive residential district in the city." The Tuomys stipulated that a house could not cost less than $15,000 and the garage could not be built until the house was two-thirds done (perhaps to prevent the not uncommon practice of living in the garage while the house was being built). They also excluded any buyers who were not Caucasians. Such racial stipulations, now illegal, were never common in Ann Arbor; it's possible the Tuomys were trying to keep up with their competitors in the nearby Ann Arbor Hills subdivision, which had a similar racist restriction.

The streets of Julia Tuomy Estates were given family names, like Tuomy and Kearney, or Irish place names such as Adare, Shannondale, and Londonderry.

Neither Bill nor Kathryn Tuomy married, but both kept busy in community activities that mirrored their interests. Kathryn was a founding member of the Ann Arbor Business and Professional Women's Club and an early president of the Michigan Federation of Business and Professional Women. Bill was a charter member of the Erwin Prieskora post of the American Legion, active in the Army and Navy Club and the Reserve Officers Association, and was first city chair of the Citizen's Military Training Camp.

Following his grandfather's and father's examples, Bill was also active in politics, although he switched to the Republican party. He was elected county drain commissioner from 1932 to 1944. He ran on a platform of doing as little as possible, stating, "If I am elected I propose to eliminate every unnecessary drain project from the county program and cut taxes assessed on drains down to the bone."

Kathryn and Bill followed the family tradition of being active in their church. When the Catholic population in Ann Arbor outgrew St. Thomas, the Tuomys were helpful in the founding of the new church, St. Francis, organized to serve the east side of town. In 1945 they sold to the new parish, at a nominal price, eight acres of land facing Stadium at what had been the southern edge of their farm. Later they donated two more acres and paid for the road around the church, now called St. Francis Drive. When they died (Kathryn in 1965 and her brother in 1966), they left a number of generous bequests, including an athletic scholarship in brother Tom's name and a woman's scholarship in Kathryn's name. The remainder went to St. Francis, allowing the church to pay off its building debt of about $137,000.

The Tuomys stipulated that the family house should be used for a "historical or public purpose." Their executor, attorney Roscoe Bonisteel, Sr., was at the time both a U-M regent and a trustee of the Historical Society of Michigan; he arranged that the house should go to those two groups. The society moved in downstairs, and at the invitation of the regents, the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters occupied the upstairs. (An interesting footnote is that Volney Spalding, who grew up in the house, was a co-founder of the academy.)

In 1982 the regents gave up their share of the house, leaving the Historical Society of Michigan as the sole owner and occupant. Founded in 1828, the HSM is a statewide not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving state history. It publishes books and magazines, sponsors meetings and conferences, and has lately embarked on a new program to help teachers to teach Michigan history.

Since gaining ownership, the HSM has been restoring the house, making improvements as they raise the money. "Historic restoration is not for the faint of heart," says executive director Tom Jones. He expects the final cost to be about $725,000.


[Photo caption from the original print edition]: The Tuomy farm was still in operation when the photo at right was taken, but not for long: as Ann Arbor spread eastward, farm kids Bill and Kathryn Tuomy turned the land into an expensive neighborhood. Only their old farmhouse still survives (above); it's now the headquarters of the Historical Society of Michigan.