"An unbelievable gem" Ted Heusel, radio personality and actor, calls the Whitney Theater "an unbelievable gem." He says the Whitney, located on the corner of Main and Ann from 1908 to 1955, was "the theater of southeast Michigan. It had the most perfect acoustics. You could whisper on the stage and they could hear you." In its day, that stage hosted such greats as Sarah Bernhardt, Nijinsky, and the Barrymores. Today its site is a parking lot. The Whitney was originally Hill's Opera House, built in 1871 by George D. Hill, a local entrepreneur, after another building he owned on the site burned down. When he replaced the food and clothing stores and the hotel that the older building had housed, Hill decided to make room for a theater upstairs. By then, Ann Arbor was large enough to need a big public hall, and Hill's location was perfect--right across from the courthouse square. Hill's Opera House opened August 10, 1871, with a benefit performance of a Civil War drama, "The Spy of Shiloh," performed by a cast of "prominent citizens." It played for five nights to sell-out crowds. The opera house also hosted traveling shows, starring such greats as Edwin Booth. (Booth was reportedly booed off the stage because his brother, John Wilkes Booth, had assassinated President Lincoln.) The theater thrived under Hill and, later, his son Harry. But it began to falter after Hill, suffering financial difficulties, sold it to a man from Syracuse, New York. Several absentee owners followed, all of them neglectful. Finally too expensive to repair, Hill's Opera House closed altogether. Herman W. Pipp, a local architect and city alderman, is credited with the theater's revival. Asked to draw up renovation plans, he became interested in the problem of funding the project. Mutual friends arranged a meeting with Bert Whitney, who owned theaters in Chicago, Toronto, and Detroit. Whitney agreed to buy the building. In 1906 he began renovations and repairs, and he added two stories to the three-story building, making the Whitney the largest theater in Michigan. Local contractors, the Koch Brothers, did the outside work. National experts were called in to finish the theater: Hiram Cornell as stage carpenter and Melbourne Moran of New York City for scenery construction. Since not all touring companies brought their own, Moran made nine basic sets--a fancy parlor, a plain "chamber," a kitchen, cottage, prison, garden, woods, street, and horizon. The new theater included three stories of dressing rooms, twenty-five in all. The fanciest, nearest the stage, had stars on the doors. Large changing rooms under the stage served the chorus. The public section of the theater was richly decorated with an Italian tile floor, walls of red burlap, three handsome French candelabra, red carpets, and red leather seats. Above the main floor were two balconies and at the top a gallery with hard bench seats. These seats, the cheapest, could not be reserved. On the afternoon of performances, people seeking gallery seats--mostly young townsfolk and university students--would line up on Ann Street, climb a fire escape, and buy their tickets at a special window on the second balcony. A denizen of the gallery, Arthur Schlanderer, recalls, "You looked almost straight down. It's a wonder we didn't fall." Like Hill's Opera House, the Whitney was launched with a gala opening, this one a performance of the play "Knight for Day." Whitney spent $175 to send his own fourteen-piece orchestra from Chicago to provide the music for it. He must have easily recouped his investment: main-floor tickets sold for the then astronomical price of $25. Gallery tickets were $1. The Whitney operated in the heyday of touring theater productions. Before television or movies, the only way people could see shows was in live performance. Touring companies could take a show on the road for years before running out of audiences. Thanks to Bert Whitney, all the theater greats played Ann Arbor. Working closely with the Klaw and Erlanger booking agency, Whitney made it clear that if they wanted their acts to play in Chicago and Detroit, they also had to include Ann Arbor in their plans. Old Whitney playbills read like a theater Who's Who: actors Ed Wynn, Katharine Cornell, and Helen Hayes, dancers Anna Pavlova, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. According to stories handed down to Ted Heusel, Maude Adams got chicken pox when she played here and had to stay in a "pest house" connected to University Hospital. Al Jolson's show had so many set changes, the sets had to be piled outside on Ann Street during his performance. In addition to plays, from light comedy to Shakespeare, the Whitney hosted vaudeville, opera, dance, and lectures. Local talent also used the stage, including the Michigan Union Opera and the Junior Girls Plays. Pauline Kempf, who ran a music studio on Division with her husband, Reuben, got her professional start when friends and backers arranged for her to give a vocal concert at the Whitney. The concert raised enough money to allow her to go to Cincinnati to study. The town's young people loved the theater. Schlanderer remembers seeing Sigmund Romberg's "The Student Prince" with a friend who was so thrilled with the show that he quit school to join the chorus. Don Mclntyre had been the theater's head usher when it opened, and in 1915 he bought the Whitney in partnership with James Murnan. Murnan, who had managed the Cook Hotel (predecessor to the Allenel and the Ann Arbor Inn), took over the Whitney Hotel next door (where all the glamorous touring stars stayed), while Mclntyre concentrated on the theater. (Murnan's son, James Jr., for many years manager of the U-M's Mendelssohn Theater, was the source of much of Heusel's Whitney lore.) Don Mclntyre's older brother, Frank, was a Broadway star who often played the Whitney. Don lived in a big house on Division near Huron (now Catholic Social Services), and Frank lived there between performances and then permanently after he retired in 1939. Schlanderer, who as a kid caddied at Barton Hills, remembers that the Mclntyres played golf almost every day in the summer. He describes them as physical opposites--Don as very skinny, Frank so big, "you wondered he could reach around his belly." George Sallade, who lived across Division from the Mclntyres, remembers Don as a great promoter of downtown. He was a very dapper dresser, Sallade recalls, who wore a Panama hat and used a cigarette holder. Morrie Dalitz remembers that Don ate at the old Round Table on Huron and hung out at the Elks, on Main at William (once the Maynard mansion, most recently the Civic Theater, and now a parking lot). When he died, his heirs gave the Whitney Theater organ to the Elks. Movies gradually crept into the Whitney's lineup. In 1914, after much discussion, the theater started to show movies on Sundays, promising that they would be "good clean pictures that anyone would be glad to see." The aim was to keep townspeople from going to Toledo for Sunday amusement. The first time a movie was the attraction was in 1917, a showing of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," accompanied by a twenty-piece orchestra. During the Depression, big road companies were no longer profitable, and the Whitney closed in 1930. In 1934, it was reopened as a movie theater, and two years later Mclntyre leased it for ninety-nine years to the Butterfield movie chain. The Whitney didn't come close to living out the lease. Butterfield, which also had the much newer and larger Michigan, Orpheum, and State theaters, ran only "B" movies at the Whitney--adventures, cowboy movies, serials. As a Michigan Daily article commented, the theater went "from grand opera to the horse variety." The fire marshall closed the Whitney in 1952 and ordered it torn down a few years later. The Butterfield chain talked of building a large community theater on the spot but never did. The county bought the land and used it as an exercise area for inmates of the jail next door on Ann Street. Since the jail moved in 1978 to Hogback Road, the space has been used for parking.

For over a century, a bevy of stores served the farmer and the fixer-upper

Downtown Ann Arbor was once a mecca for hardware shoppers. From the town's early days, there were always at least four hardware stores, which drew customers from the entire city and from all the small towns and farms in the area. During the week, the stores served the area's tradespeople--plumbers, painters, carpenters, plasterers, contractors, and builders. On weekends, farmers came into town to buy supplies--pitch-forks or baling twine for the harvest, axes or mauls for chopping wood, and all the myriad bits of hardware they needed to repair their farm machinery and to fix their barns and fences.

As the farmers' ranks dwindled in this century, they were replaced by growing numbers of home owners and do-it-yourselfers. If the part needed wasn't made, the hardware store could make one. And if it needed installation, they had work crews they would send out.

By 1835, just eleven years after promoters John Allen and Elisha Rumsey began selling lots in the village of "Annarbour," William Dennis and Hierome Goodspeed were advertising a hardware store on the corner of Main and Huron. Along with farm supplies like cowbells and horseshoes, their inventory included knives, scissors, coffee mills, waffle irons, razors, and latches. By the 1870's and 1880's, the early competitors had sorted themselves out into four major stores, all of which survived well into this century: Schumacher's, 1870-1940; Schuh's (later Schuh and Muehlig, Muehlig and Schmid, Muehlig and Lanphear), 1872-1962; Eberbach's (later Fischer's) 1880-1981; and downtown's sole surviving hardware store, Schlenker's, founded in 1886.

Hardware was big business back then. Schumacher's, located where Kline's is now, grew to fill three storefronts. Schuh's occupied all three floors of a building on the southeast corner of Main and Washington. Hardware stores were valuable assets that were passed on from generation to generation: after founder John Schumacher's death, his business was taken over by his sons, Bert, Philip, and Robert. Jacob Schuh took a younger clerk, Andrew Muehlig, as a partner and eventual successor. When Schuh's original store was torn down to make room for the First National Building in 1929, Muehlig's nephew, Edward Muehlig, and partner Don Lanphear moved to a new building at 311 South Main (now the Full Moon).

Eberbach's, on the northeast corner of Main and Washington, was started by Christian Eberbach as a business for his two younger sons, Ernest and Edward, since his oldest son, Ottmar, was getting the pharmacy. Later, the State Savings Bank, which had an interest in the store, moved into the very corner, nestled in much like the Del Rio fits into the corner of the Old German. Bob Eberbach remembers that as a boy he could enter his great uncles' store from either Washington or Main. By 1892 the store was taken over by John Fischer, who had been a clerk there, although the Eberbachs continued to work there and kept an interest in it. In 1937 the store moved two blocks east, to 219-223 East Washington.

Schlenker's was first located on West Liberty in the building that is now Rider's Hobby Shop, then across the street in the store now owned by Ehnis & Son. In 1906 they built the present store a block west with room upstairs for the family to live.

The hardware stores sold all the small, practical items that other stores didn't want to bother with--tools, nails, fittings, and utensils. The owners were all tinsmiths, and before the days of mass production and easy transportation, they made much of what they stocked--gutters, furnace parts, funnels, coffeepots, pitchers, and pans. The tinning complemented the other stock in the store, and it also helped keep the employees busy during the slower winter months.

Each store also developed its own specialty. Schuh and Muehlig's was sewing machines: they sold and repaired all the major brands. They also sold such house finishing items as tiles, grates, mantels, and pressed tin ceilings. (Edward Muehlig put a tin ceiling in the house he built in 1909 at 801 West Liberty.) Later, Muehlig and Lanphear put in furnaces and made a specialty of installing locks. Schumacher had plumbing crews and later spun off Schumacher and Backus Plumbing and Heating. Fischer's and Schlenker's both had roofing crews. (Schlenker's put the slate roofs on the First Methodist Church and on many U-M sorority and fraternity houses.)

Until central heating became widespread in the 1920's, wood and coal stoves were a big part of the hardware business--Risdon's, one of the pre-Civil War stores, put stoves above hardware on their sign. Eberbach's sold Round Oak heating stoves and Adams and Westlank Monarch cooking stoves. Marty Schlenker remembers that in the 1920's his father's store had a row of stoves all along one wall from front to back.

Often newly developed products were first sold in hardware stores before being spun off to a store dedicated to them. Schumacher's sold washing machines as early as 1916 ("My neighbors can't understand how my washing can be on the line by 8 o'clock," said one ad). They also had a niche in sports equipment. Doris Schumacher Dixon, daughter of Robert Schumacher, remembers that as a girl she always had the newest in sports equipment from her family's inventory--bicycles, footballs, baseballs, tennis rackets, ice skates, roller skates, hockey equipment, and golf clubs.

Fischer's was the first area hardware store to specialize in housewares. It also was known as the store with the most university trade, maybe because it was closest to campus. Schlenker's sold the first refrigerators in town and was also a pioneer radio dealer, selling Atwater Kents. When Marty Schlenker's uncle Paul was involved in the store, he sold all kinds of fishing equipment--outboard motors, tackles, rods. And, as today, Schlenker's was known as the store where you could get anything: if you couldn't find what you were looking for anywhere else, you would go to Schlenker's.

A store's proprietors set the tone of their store, not only with what they sold, but with their personalities. John Schumacher was a leader of the temperance movement, and during his lifetime his store was known as a center for like-minded idealists, just as Eberbach's pharmacy had been a center for early Republicans. Muehlig and Lanphear contributed to the community by furnishing supplies for Albert Warhnoff, Ann Arbor's Santa Claus, who made toys for needy and sick children in the 1930's and 1940's.

When there were numerous hardware stores within a few blocks, the owners cooperated as much as possible, honoring their specialties and sending customers to each other. Mary Cruse, a stockholder of Fischer's and co-owner of East Ann Arbor Hardware, says they even traded inventory when something moved in one store and not another. Marty Schlenker remembers running joint ads with Fischer's, Ann Arbor Implement, and Herder's, figuring they were appealing to a similar crowd while offering different merchandise. They also sometimes ordered together, going in on train lots to reduce costs.

After World War II, a new generation of hardware stores opened on the commercial strips on Washtenaw, Stadium, and Packard. With easy access and ample parking, they gradually took over most of the business that had previously come downtown. Schlenker's singular survival was thanks in part to a 1950's decision to tear down the old tin and roofing shops to build its own parking lot.

With appliances and other mechanical products getting cheaper, fewer people repair broken appliances and the like, so there is less demand for traditional hardware services. Many stores now sell other merchandise, such as Christmas decorations, office supplies, table linens, and toys, to fill the gap.

Some of today's nonfixers give their broken or worn-out appliances to the Kiwanis sale instead of the landfill. On Kiwanis sale days, Marty Schlenker is reminded of the old days, when people flocked in to buy small parts to make their bargains work again.

[Photo caption from original print edition: Employees watch a parade on Main Street from Schumacher's upstairs windows. In its heyday, the store filled three storefronts in the spot where Kline's is today.]

Woodlawn Avenue was once his driveway

The majestic towered mansion on Woodlawn just north of Packard has piqued the curiosity of passersby for decades. What is it doing in this modest residential neighborhood?

Named Woodlawn, it was the country estate of Christian Eberbach, Ann Arbor pharmacist, businessman, and politician. He built the house between 1861 and 1866, when this stretch of Packard was still an unpaved country road. Today there are three houses between the mansion and Packard, set on what was originally Eberbach's front lawn. An orchard, flower gardens, and a working farm stretched back behind the house, across where Forest and Olivia now run, filling the entire area bracketed today by Wells and Granger as far as Burns Park Elementary School.

Born in Stuttgart, Eberbach emigrated to America as a young man. When he arrived in Ann Arbor in 1838, Eberbach was just twenty-one. But he had already apprenticed for three years with an apothecary and stud≠ied chemistry for two at the Stuttgart Polytechnicum, making him Ann Arbor's first trained pharmacist.

He found his first job here at William Maynard's general store on the corner of Main and Huron, working as a clerk and preparing medicines prescribed by local doctors. By 1843 he was ready to go into business for himself. He opened Washtenaw County's first drugstore in a small frame building on Huron across from the courthouse. He quickly outgrew the space and joined with confectioner Herman Schlak to build a commercial block on Main Street between Huron and Washington.

Just three years later, Eberbach took a partner, his cousin, Emanuel Mann, son of Jonathan Mann, one of Ann Arbor's original German settlers. The two built a store next door at 112 South Main Street (now Mayer-Schairer office supplies) and remained together for twenty-eight years. Open to new kinds of medicine, Eberbach knew about homeopathy because of his work in Germany. He also was a customer and advocate of Dr. Alvin Wood Chase.

Eberbach did not limit himself to his pharmacy; he had many other business and civic interests. In 1857 he and Mann and another relative, August Hutzel, started the Hutzel plumbing company next door to the pharmacy at 114 South Main (now also part of Mayer-Schairer). He was among the founders of the Ann Arbor Savings Bank and of Bethlehem Church of Christ and a member of the relief fire department. He was a musician and singer. (His son and grandson would become active in the University Musical Society.) But his greatest interest was Republican politics.

Eberbach started out as a Whig, supporting presidential candidate William H. Har-rison in 1840. After the demise of the Whig Party, he took part in the 1854 convention in Jackson that formally launched the Republican Party. Local Republicans began hanging out in a little room behind Eberbach and Mann's pharmacy to discuss the issues of the day. In 1864, Eberbach was a member of the Electoral College that re-elected the nation's first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.

In 1868, Eberbach ran for office himself. He was elected mayor of Ann Arbor but lost his bid for re-election the next year. According to a memorial talk given after his death, he was rejected after "a gallant fight to drive the hogs and cows from the streets but the people believed that the experience was contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution." Eberbach was paid a gold dollar for his year's service. His great-grandson, Robert Eberbach, still has it.

The same year Eberbach opened his store, he married Margaret (sometimes referred to as Margaretha) Laubengayer, who had been born near Stuttgart and immigrated with her family to a farm in Scio Township.

During the years Eberbach was establishing his business, the family lived in a brick house on West Washington in a spot now part of the Brown Block parking lot. In 1861, he decided to move to the country, where the air was better. He chose the site on Packard because it was still close enough to town that his children (he had eight, five of whom lived to adulthood) could go to Ann Arbor schools.

The grand house, solidly constructed with 15-inch walls, took more than five years to build. (The builders spent one year just waiting for the basement to settle after replacing a bed of quicksand with lime and cement.) The house was in the Italian Villa style and included a high tower reminiscent of German castles. It was said that you could see Ypsilanti from it on a clear day. Eberbach used the tower as an observation post to oversee his farm workers and also as a playroom for his children.

The interior of the house boasts the finest 1860's craftsmanship: carved woodwork, fireplaces, and four-over-four windows. Upstairs were five bedrooms (one since converted into a bathroom) and downstairs the kitchen, pantry, dining room, and library, and a parlor large enough to be divided into two rooms by folding wood doors. The basement included a large vaulted brick storeroom and a smokehouse. Except for the former servants' quarters, usually rented out as a separate apartment, the house has remained a single-family home since it was built.

In 1874 Emanuel Mann retired and Eberbach's oldest son, Ottmar, became his father's partner. Ottmar was well prepared, having studied science and pharmacy in Stuttgart and Tubingen in addition to working in the drugstore. He convinced his father to expand the business to supplying, and sometimes manufacturing, chemicals and lab equipment. That business continues to this day.

Germany at that time was the leading manufacturer of scientific instruments. Since Ottmar spoke German and had both scientific training and good connections there, he was in a perfect position to be an importer. Eberbach and Son grew to serve industrial labs, schools, and hospitals all over the world.

Christian Eberbach stayed active in the firm until six months before he died in 1901 at age eighty-four. He remained a loyal Republican to the end. As he lay on his deathbed, wracked with pain from spinal problems caused by lower-body paralysis, his doctor told him that he himself would almost be willing to assume the pain if it would relieve Eberbach. Eberbach replied that he wouldn't want anyone else to suffer so. Then, after thinking a minute, he reconsidered. "Yes, I would too. If you could only take it away and give it to that rascal Czolgosz, I would be glad." He was referring to Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who had fatally shot President McKinley earlier that month.

Margaret Eberbach remained in the house until her death in 1908. The year before she died, the surrounding prop≠erty was subdivided into eighty-one house lots and annexed to the city. In 1913 the school board bought the property on the corner of Wells and Forest for a new seventh ward school, to be named after Ottmar, who had served for twenty-one years on the school board. (The school was later replaced by what is now Burns Park school; the building on Wells and Forest burned down in 1971.)

Ottmar Eberbach held on to his parents' house until his own death in 1922, but he didn't live there. Back in 1883, he had built himself a house downtown at 402 South Fourth Avenue (now part of the Beer Depot). Until World War I, the Eberbach estate was looked after by a resident caretak≠er. The war cut off the Eberbach company's supply of glass beakers, all of which were made in one village in Germany. Before the U.S. entered the war, Ottmar brought one of the German glassblowers to America to make the beakers here, housing him and his family in splendor in the vacant house.

After Ottmar died, the house was sold to state senator George McCallum, who did a major remodeling, putting in a new furnace, modern plumbing, electricity, and hardwood floors. The business stayed in the Eberbach family through two more generations, passing to Ottmar's son Oscar and then to Oscar's son Robert, both of whom studied chemistry at the U-M. Gradually the lab equipment supply and manufacturing business became bigger than the retail pharmacy. As Robert Eberbach put it, "The tail began to wag the dog."

In 1909 they had moved from Main Street to a four-story building on Liberty at Fourth. By the time that building was demolished in 1971 to make way for the Federal Building, the three parts of the business had already been separated, in what Robert Eberbach calls a "reverse merger." Eberbach Corporation, the manufacturing division, had moved in 1951 to 505 South Maple. It's still there under the same name, although Robert, the last Eberbach in the firm, retired in 1980. The supplier division was sold to Will Scientific in 1961, and the retail pharmacy was sold in 1969.

The Eberbach mansion is today owned by John and Christa Williams. After they bought it in 1987, they did a major restoration to bring it back to its former glory, adding a garage designed to look like an old carriage house. The house is basically the same inside as in Eberbach's day, albeit with modern amenities. During the Eberbach occupancy, the house was a wonderful place for holiday gatherings and musical evenings. The Williamses continue the tradition: last year they hosted a Robert Burns evening for forty people in the double parlor.

[Photo caption from original edition: Christian Eberbach, pharmacist, businessman, and politician. He built his home outside the city limits in the 1860's, when Packard was still an unpaved country road.]

[Photo caption from original edition: Christian and Margaret Eberbach celebrating their fiftieth anniversary with the family in 1893.]

[Photo caption from original edition: The Eberbach estate was so large that it provided eighty-one additional home sites when it was subdivided and annexed to the city in 1907.]

A venerable building, an activist congregation

With its steep slate roof, stone walls, and pointed stained-glass windows, St. Andrew’s Episcopal was designed to look like a church out of the Middle Ages--you could almost picture Martin Luther nailing his theses to its heavy wooden doors. Standing at the northeast corner of Division and Catherine, it’s the city’s oldest operating church and its finest jewel of Gothic Revival architecture.

St. Andrew’s Parish was organized in 1827, just three years after Ann Arbor was founded. Its first meeting place was the home of Hannah Gibbs Clark, a widow who lived on the northwest corner of Ashley and Liberty. In 1839 the congregation dedicated its first building, at Division and Lawrence (then called “Bowery”). Nestled among original burr oak trees, it was a simple wooden church, painted white.

That building survived two near catastrophes in its first year--confiscation by the sheriff for nonpayment of bills (two members quickly made up the arrears) and a fire--and St. Andrew’s continued to grow. After the Civil War, members decided to build a larger church on land they owned to the south, the present location.

To design it they hired Gordon Lloyd, Michigan’s premier Gothic Revival architect. Lloyd was born in England in 1832, moved with his family to Quebec, and returned home at age sixteen to apprentice under his uncle, Ewan Christian (1814–
1895), an eminent English architect who specialized in designing and restoring churches. Gothic Revival, sometimes called Neo-Gothic, was at its peak in England at that time, and Lloyd was steeped in it during his ten years there.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, begun in 1868, is Ann Arbor's oldest church.

Setting up his own architectural practice in Detroit, Lloyd designed churches and other buildings all over the Midwest, primarily in the Gothic Revival style. “I don’t know through whose influence the vestry of that day was led to employ Mr. Lloyd; but to that person, whoever he or she may have been, St. Andrew’s Parish and the city of Ann Arbor owe an everlasting debt of gratitude,” wrote Henry Tatlock, the church’s rector from 1889 to 1922.

Despite the eminence of the architect, however, the congregation’s fund-raising campaign came up short. Deciding to start with just the nave, the main section of the church that contained the pews and altar, they laid the cornerstone in 1868. Silas Douglass, a professor in the U-M medical school who had overseen construction of several university buildings, did the same job for the church. The contractor was church member James Morwick, who also built the Lloyd-designed entrance to Forest Hill Cemetery.

The walls were made of local stone, mainly granite, with stained-glass windows in geometric designs made by Friedrick of Brooklyn, New York. Inside, the pews were made of butternut and walnut. Those original pews are still in use, complete with the dividers that once separated one family’s rented section from another’s.

The nave was finished in 1869; the rest of the present church complex was built as money allowed over the next eighty years. The old wooden church was used for a chapel and Sunday school until 1880, when the congregation built a new chapel east of the nave and a new rectory on the site of the old church. The bell tower rose in 1903, paid for by a bequest from member Love Root Palmer. “Mrs. Palmer told me that she intended to bequeath to the parish a sufficient sum of money to build the tower after [her] death,” Tatlock wrote, “regretting that she was not able to do without the income of the amount involved, so as to have the tower built while she was still alive. It was suggested to her that it was highly desirable that the tower should be designed by Mr. Lloyd, who at that time was still active in his profession.” Palmer commissioned Lloyd to design the tower while she was still living--a fortunate decision, since the architect died only a year after she did.

The last major change came in 1950, when the rectory was torn down to make room for a parish hall. Finances precluded building in the same style as the church, so the congregation decided on a more modern building. U-M architecture professors Ralph Hammett and Frederick O’Dell, using stones from the rectory, designed a building that blends well with the church. They also designed very modern-looking stained glass for the parish hall chapel.

Over the years, much of the original geometric stained glass in the nave has been replaced by representational memorial windows. Eleven of these are the work of Willett Stained Glass Studio of Philadelphia, a company founded in 1898 and still in business. “Willett’s does an excellent job of personalizing stained glass,” says Barbara Krueger, an expert on Michigan stained glass. Most of the new windows portray religious figures; four windows depict composers, honoring a choirmaster and other parishioners who had special connections to music. The bottom sections are filled with personal images: a schoolteacher is shown reading to children, and an athlete’s memorial features a baseball mitt and golf clubs. Carolers sing out on one window in remembrance of the organizer of the church’s Christmas sing, and no fewer than five dogs help memorialize their masters.

The most intriguing window in the collection is a lovely angel that may be a genuine Tiffany. Although it is not found in Tiffany records, Mark Hildebrandt, author of The Windows of St. Andrew’s, which is being published in celebration of the congregation’s 175th anniversary, says it may have been transferred from another site. But Krueger cautions, “There were more than a dozen East Coast studios doing that kind of work.”

Besides gracing Ann Arbor with a beautiful building, St. Andrew’s has fed the aesthetic appetites of the community with music and plays. Reuben Kempf, of Kempf House fame, was organist and choir director from 1895 to 1928. He organized a famous boys’ choir, recruiting talent citywide. Veteran local radio host Ted Heusel, a church member who recognizes a good theater space when he sees one, has produced A Man for All Seasons and Murder in the Cathedral in the nave, as well as a rendering of the stations of the cross in which readings were interspersed with dance. One of the dancers in the late 1970s was U-M student Madonna Ciccone.

St. Andrew’s has also developed a reputation for community activism. Many of Ann Arbor’s mayors have been St. Andrew’s members, including Silas Douglass and Ebenezer Wells in the nineteenth century and Cecil Creal and Sam Eldersveld in the twentieth. Henry Lewis, minister from 1922 to 1961, was leading picketers around City Hall to urge city council to enact a fair housing ordinance at the same time that Mayor Creal was senior churchwarden. “They’d have pitched battles during the week but come together on Sunday,” recalls longtime member Barbara Becker.

St. Andrew’s was the first local church to react to the growing problem of homelessness caused by releasing people from mental hospitals. In 1982 the congregation began a breakfast program that is still in operation. “It started as a Monday-through-Friday program until we realized most people eat breakfast seven days a week,” recalls church member Pat Lang. The church’s efforts to also provide homeless people with a place to sleep helped lead to the organization of Ann Arbor’s Shelter Association.

In 2000 St. Andrew’s became the first church in the area to have a staff person dedicated to welcoming and affirming the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities. The Oasis Ministry, as it is called, originated in New Jersey, where rector John Nieman served before coming to Ann Arbor in 1997. “We all are created in the image of God,” says Oasis coordinator Kate Runyon. “We all have gifts to share with one another.”

As part of the congregation’s 175th anniversary celebration, St. Andrew’s and the Washtenaw County Historical Society will jointly sponsor tours of the church and surrounding historic neighborhood from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 27. See Events for details.

A living monument to feminism’s first wave

“It is estimated that over 5,000 men pass through the doors of the Union every day. They meet around the cafeteria tables, they read together in the lounging rooms, the Pendleton Library, and swim together in the swimming pool.” In striking contrast, “the girls have a little corner of the upper hall of Barbour Gymnasium partitioned off for the League offices where only a small committee may gather at a time.”

The year was 1926, and the speaker, Mary Henderson, was advocating construction of a building for the Women’s League, the female counterpart to the all-male Michigan Union. The alumnae she was addressing scarcely needed to be reminded of the unequal status of women at the university. In 1870, U-M placed itself in the forefront of American colleges by admitting women. Since then, however, it had fallen behind the rapid gains women were making in society at large.

In 1919, after a fifty-year battle by America’s first generation of feminists, Congress approved a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote and sent it to the states for ratification. Yet even as they took a giant step toward equality on the national scene, women remained second-class citizens at the U-M. The only facilities for female students were two dorms (Martha Cook and Helen Newberry) and a few sororities. Most women lived scattered around town with families or in rooming houses, “where they have no opportunity to come into contact with the more refining and more highly cultural influences,” in the words of another League proponent.

So in 1919, the Women’s League started seriously discussing building a place of their own. In 1921 they asked the Alumnae Council (of which Mary Henderson was secretary) to support the effort. The council, in turn, petitioned the regents.

The regents approved the concept and offered to provide the land, but required that all other costs be covered by donations. The goal was $1 million—$600,000 for construction, $150,000 for furnishings, and $250,000 for an endowment to support the building’s operation.

The women raised money in many small ways. Students made flapper beads out of lamp pulls, hemmed handkerchiefs, and even shined shoes (a fund-raiser christened “She Stoops to Conquer”). Some double-bunked so that they could rent their rooms out on football weekends. Students and alumnae alike sold all sorts of small items, including “freshies” (thin leaves of paper in booklet form with films of face powder between the pages), pineapple-cloth linens from Hawaii, and League playing cards. Paul Robeson gave a benefit performance of Porgy (the play that Gershwin’s opera was based on) in Detroit, and Clara Clemens, daughter of Mark Twain, toured major Michigan cities performing Joan of Arc.

But the big money was raised by Mary Henderson, a U-M grad and the wife of the director of university extension. In a reminiscence for the League’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Mary Frances Gross characterized Henderson as “determined and ruthless in getting what she wanted.” Henderson traveled all over to talk to alumnae groups and potential donors, somehow convincing the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce to underwrite expenses. “Whenever she heard of a possible donor, or one who could afford to give, she always had a contact, and off she would go. And she always came back with a contribution,” recalled Gross.

“Toward the end of the campaign, after consulting with the architects, she [Henderson] was in her office and still trying to think of someone to contact for a large donation so that a theater could be included in the plans and building,” Gross recounted. “All of a sudden she thought of Gordon Mendelssohn of Detroit. He was wealthy and had a real interest in the theater. She immediately phoned Detroit but learned that he was in Europe. Securing his address there, she composed an obviously successful cablegram and sent it to him. In a few days she had her answer by cable. He would give $50,000 if the theater would always bear his mother’s name.” And so the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater was born.

By 1927 the women had gathered $1 million in gifts and pledges. Eliza Mosher, first dean of women, turned the first shovelful of dirt at the ground-breaking on June 18, 1927. The cornerstone, filled with items the women had sold as fund-raisers, was laid on March 29, 1928.

The League was designed by Allen and Irving Pond, the same Ann Arbor–born architects who had designed the Michigan Union. Compared with the Union, “the woman’s building will be more gracious and more feminine in its atmosphere, but the underlying strength will be there,” Allen Pond wrote. “The day of the purely charming young lady is past.” The Ponds also designed many of the building’s decorative touches, including the statues above the front entrance (female figures identified as Character and Friendship), the stained glass windows, and the murals. Allen Pond, sadly, never lived to see his creation completed. The building was dedicated on June 14, 1929, two months after his death.

Henderson ran the League for its first year on behalf of the Alumnae Council. But with the arrival of the Great Depression, even she had trouble getting pledges redeemed. Though the cost of the building and furnishings was in hand, the promised endowment was never collected. Left without operating funds, the alumnae had no choice but to give the building to the university in 1930.

Under Dr. Ethel McCormick, the U-M’s social director of women, the League nonetheless became exactly what its founders had wanted: the center of women’s activities on campus. Mary Marsh Matthews, who attended the university in the 1950s, remembers McCormick as “a small person, energetic, funny, fierce, but lovable. She made the League part of our lives.” The building hosted orientations, teas, dances, meetings, and recreational classes (such as bridge and ballroom dancing), but the real bonding activity was the annual play put on by each class: Frosh Weekend, Soph Cab (for cabaret), the Junior Girls’ Play, and Senior Night.

The school year ended with the Drama Season, which always followed the musical May Festival and attracted the same caliber of discerning audience from far beyond Ann Arbor. The Drama Season ran from 1929 to the late 1950s; Ted Heusel, who directed the series in its later years, recalls Grace Kelly appearing in Ring around the Moon, Charlton Heston in Macbeth, and E.G. Marshall in The Crucible.
Drama Season actors stayed at the League’s third-floor hotel, as did many musical performers appearing at nearby Hill Auditorium. Aileen Mengel-Schulze, who worked in the League while a student in the late 1940s, recalls seeing Danny Kaye, Skitch Henderson, and Eugene Ormandy. Another alumna remembers sitting in the lounge and hearing some wonderful piano music in an adjoining room. The pianist turned out to be Van Cliburn.

In 1954 the Union signaled a new age by letting women enter the building--though at first only through a side door. By 1965 both buildings were fully integrated. To eliminate needless duplication, the governing bodies of the Union and the League were merged to create the University Activities Center, today part of the Office of Student Affairs under vice-president Maureen Hartford.

In 1997, the Friends of the League was organized to increase student and community appreciation and use of the historic building. They’re researching the League’s history, restoring the enclosed garden on the building’s east side, and offering monthly docent-led tours of the building. Call 647–7463 for more information.

State Street’s hidden “Venetian palace”

"The prettiest building in town” is the way Elizabeth Dusseau remembers Foster’s Art House at 213 and 215 South State. Today the two original buildings are thoroughly obscured by later additions, and few passersby ever notice that lurking behind the slate-roofed first floor are a Prairie-style storefront on the north and an Italianate house on the south.

From 1914 to 1941, the elegant structure of Dusseau’s memory was a favorite shopping destination for Ann Arbor’s cultured elite. Owners Clarice and James Foster sold pictures and frames, pottery, statuettes, jewelry, stationery, leather goods, and, as their letterhead boasted, “rare odd things.” They imported brass from India and dishes from England, Japan, and Germany. “People took out-of-town guests to see it,” Dusseau recalls. “They didn’t have anything cheap. Everything was a treasure.”

“Even though I was strapped for money, I loved to go in,” Augusta Dillman recalls. She still remembers purchases she made there: a sixteen-piece set of Blue Willow china from England and a piece of jade, which she still has. Dusseau remembers that her sister fell in love with two brass lamps--a table lamp and a floor lamp. She kept an eye on them until they went on sale, bought them, and kept them her whole life. Jesse and Emily Dalley, who worked in the store and became lifelong friends of the Fosters, still have several pieces of Rookwood pottery they bought there.

The Fosters came to Ann Arbor in 1903 and a few years later moved into an Italianate house at 215 South State. Built about 1872, the house was originally the home of the Benjamin Brown family. At the time the Fosters moved in, that section of State Street, between Liberty and Washington, was still partially residential, and the main shopping area was on the west side of the street closer to William.

James Foster, the son of a Methodist minister in Moore Park, south of Kalamazoo, was in his thirties when he came to Ann Arbor. Jesse Dalley recalls him saying that although he was a Yale graduate, “he had no job” before arriving in Ann Arbor. “He sold things door to door--flatirons--but he never did well. He set up a lending library at the back of his house for two or three years. It wasn’t until he started selling art goods that he was really successful.”

Former customers credit Foster’s wife, Clarice, with much of the art store’s success. Dillman describes her as “a lovely, gracious, refined lady.” Jesse Dalley concurs, saying, “She was a lady of the first order and very artistic.” Clarice Foster worked in the store, helped select the merchandise (the main buying trip was a fall visit to Chicago to order for Christmas), and was responsible for the displays. “Things were not just piled up,” Dusseau recalls. “They were one of a kind, maybe on a polished surface, like one demitasse cup.”

The Fosters started the art store across the street from their house on the corner of State and Liberty (where Discount Records is now). In 1913, they hired Emil Lorch, dean of the U-M School of Architecture, to design a store on the north side of their house. Lorch, who was responsible for the U-M School of Architecture (now Lorch Hall) and many private residences, was an admirer of the Prairie style of architecture. He designed an elegant, simple building with clean lines that fit surprisingly well with the Italianate house. In a thank-you note to Lorch, Foster wrote, “It stands as peaceful and well-balanced as a Venetian palace, in spite of surroundings and the turmoils attending its erection.” (He doesn’t say what the turmoils were.)

The first floor of the new building was the main sales area, while the second floor sold furniture. The Fosters kept the second floor of their home as living quarters, but the basement and first floor were given over to store functions. Former customers remember fondly the elegant tearoom on the first floor of the house. A Miss Betts was the hostess, while Katherine Schaible cooked, helped by Jean Jacobus, who made the salads in the family’s kitchen. When the store closed at 5 or 5:30 p.m., the Fosters, along with several student boarders who lived with them, ate dinner in the tearoom, where they also had breakfast.

Jesse Dalley was one of the student boarders from 1925 to 1931. A Utah native, he followed his older brother’s footsteps in finding employment at the art house. “From the first, it felt like a home away from home,” he recalls. “It was a joy to sit at the table for meals. There was great conversation--no frivolity. Mrs. Foster was very bighearted and genteel. She set a high standard.”

Dalley did whatever was needed. He stoked the two furnaces, unpacked incoming shipments and packed outgoing ones (the Fosters had a large mail order business, mainly among U-M alumni). He also made frames for the artwork sold in the store, and turned out the front display lights every night at ten o’clock. He remembers that many shipments came in big wooden barrels, packed in grass hay. James Foster thriftily instructed him to save all the packing materials to reuse.

Dalley met his wife-to-be, Emily Benson, when she started working at the store, clerking and helping in the tearoom. When Dalley finished his degree, he couldn’t get a job because by then the Depression had hit. Foster told him, “You have a home here,” so Dalley stayed and earned a master’s in education. Even after he and Emily married and moved out of town, they remained friends of the Fosters.

Before retiring, Foster added a third architectural style to his building: Tudor. He hired a young architect, Ward Swarts, to design a single-story addition that filled in the remainder of the lot around the house and store. Swarts’s wife, LeRea, worked as a saleswoman in the store.

In 1939, when Foster was seventy-two, he sold both buildings to Goodyear’s, which wanted to open a campus branch of its well-established Main Street apparel shop. Foster continued running his art store in the north building for a few years longer, retiring entirely in 1941. Dalley remembers that Foster gave up the store “reluctantly.” Goodyear’s did some remodeling before moving in, but they kept the tearoom as it was--in fact, Clarice Foster continued to run it for a while.

James Foster died in 1949, Clarice in 1962. Goodyear’s stayed there through the 1950’s, after which the building saw a variety of uses: children’s clothing store, restaurant, drugstore, bookstore. Today the building is owned by the Big Market’s Mohammed Issa and functions as a sort of mini-mall, with three street-level storefronts: Mr. Greek’s on the north, Route 66 in the middle, and Kaleidoscope Books on the south. Hinodae restaurant is at the back, and the upstairs rooms of the house, including the attic, are used for several other small stores. Issa has remodeled the building since he bought it in 1994, carefully keeping what remained of its original elegance, such as the banister on the stairs to the second-floor stores and the fancy ceiling in the former tearoom (Route 66). Lorch’s geometric windowpanes can still be seen at the tops of the first-floor windows.

(-Grace Shackman, with research help from Susan Wineberg)

Many Ann Arborites today consider the First Congregational Church, on the corner of State and William, one of the most beautiful buildings in town. But the 1872 structure was lucky to survive the improving impulse of the early twentieth century. In 1924, a disdainful visitor wrote that it was “as inadequate, shabby, and disreputable as any church I have seen in such a [prominent] location.” Twice the congregation voted to replace it with a bigger, more modern structure, but the first plan was derailed by World War I, the second by the Depression. The delays gave the congregation time to realize what a gem they had. Today, in spite of limited parking and high maintenance costs, the Congregationalists are committed to staying in their historic church.

The church was designed by Gordon Lloyd, “one of the most prominent Gothic church architects of his time,” according to his great-granddaughter, Anne Upton, who lives in Ann Arbor. Other local examples of Lloyd’s work are St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Harris Hall, and the entrance to Forest Hill Cemetery. Around the state, his commissions included the Whitney home in Detroit (now the restaurant of the same name) and churches as far afield as Marquette.

Gothic Revival architecture, with its steep roofs and tall pointed windows, was rarely used for Congregational churches. The denomination traces its origins to the Pilgrims, and its prototypical church in New England was a simple wooden structure with a tall steeple. Lloyd made some concessions to this history in his design. “It’s simpler, more open, not typical Gothic Revival,” says retired assistant minister Dorothy Lenz.

First Congregational Church.

Although many of Ann Arbor’s early settlers came from New England, the Congregational church was not organized until 1847, more than twenty years after the town was founded. Under an agreement called the “plan of union,” the Congregationalists had originally deferred to the Presbyterians in organizing churches west of the Hudson River. But in 1847, forty-eight members left the First Presbyterian Church to start First Congregational. According to the Presbyterians’ history, the group that branched off “preferred the Congregational form of government [each church governs itself], they didn’t care for the recent revival, and they were more ardent in their antislavery feelings” than the Presbyterians’ current minister.

The new group purchased land at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington (now Bank of Ann Arbor), meeting at the county courthouse until their church was built. They remained strongly antislavery. In 1861, they hosted controversial abolitionist Wendell Phillips at a time when other churches refused to let him speak for fear that protesters would do physical violence to their buildings.

In 1876 the Congregationalists moved to their current location on William and State. (They sold their original building to Zion Lutheran Church, which itself had recently broken off from Bethlehem Evangelical Church.) At the time, State Street was still a dirt road, and although the university was across the street, the neighborhood was mainly residential. Most parishioners walked to services. Judge Thomas Cooley, a U-M law professor who also served on the state supreme court, lived right down the street on a site where the Michigan Union now stands.

Like Cooley, many of the church members were important in the development of the university or the town; the church’s form of self-government and tolerance of personal beliefs appealed to people who enjoyed dialogue and new ideas. Other prominent members included opera house owner George Hill, physician and hospital owner Reuben Peterson, and U-M presidents James Angell and Marion Burton. Walter S. Perry, the superintendent of Ann Arbor schools, headed the church’s Sunday school program.

This high-powered congregation hired challenging thinkers as ministers. The most famous in this century was Lloyd C. Douglas, minister from 1915 to 1921, who went on to become a nationally famous religious novelist. Many of his books were made into movies, including The Magnificent Obsession, The Green Light, and The Robe.

After leaving Ann Arbor, Douglas went on to preach in Montreal before his success as a writer allowed him to retire from the pulpit. “He always enjoyed being a celebrity,” says Ray Detter, who wrote his 1975 doctoral dissertation on the minister. Douglas eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he hobnobbed with actors who starred in his films, among them Arthur Treacher.

After his wife died in 1944, Douglas moved to Las Vegas to live with one of his daughters. “He described Las Vegas as a place where ‘the Ten Commandments are viewed as a forthright insult to the freedom of the human spirit--a hell of a place for an elderly prophet to end his days,’ ” Detter recalls. Not long before his death, Douglas wrote to a friend, “The happiest years of my life were spent in the Congregational Church of Ann Arbor.”

Douglas died in 1951 and today is memorialized in a chapel named after him. Before his death, his daughters contributed money to the church to build the chapel, part of an addition organized by Leonard Parr, minister from 1937 to 1957. Parr, a scholarly man who also wrote hymns, appreciated the beauty of the church building and developed plans to adapt it to the needs of the congregation. In 1941 the church underwent a major renovation, including the addition of more stained-glass windows (there were only two originally) and the removal of the side balconies. In 1953 the new wing was added. Designed by U-M architecture professor Ralph Hammett, it includes the Lloyd C. Douglas Chapel, Pilgrim Hall, and Mayflower Lounge, as well as offices and classrooms.

Near the end of Parr’s ministry, the church faced the big question of whether to join the United Church of Christ, a new denomination formed by the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Church. After much discussion, the Ann Arbor congregation voted in 1956 to remain separate. Today they are part of a national association of Congregational churches but remain free to make their own decisions.

In 1965, minister Terry Smith came to Ann Arbor. A former basketball player at Ohio State, he attracted parishioners involved in U-M athletics, including Fritz Seyferth, Gus Stager, Bill Frieder, Newt Loken, Johnny Orr, Bob Ufer, and Lloyd Carr. Smith, who retired last year and still gives the invocation at U-M athletic department events, was the longest-serving minister in the church’s history.

Most of the changes in the church’s more than 150-year history reflect larger changes in town. Few members still live near enough to walk to church, and the congregation has become more diverse in race and ethnicity. Says present minister Bob Livingston, “It’s impressive, coming as I do from Grand Rapids where it is more homogeneous.”

But many things have been constant over the years. An emphasis on good music is one. From 1890 to 1895, the church employed Reuben Kempf, one of the best musicians in town, as choirmaster. Today, Marilyn Mason, world-famous organist, provides music, and Willis Patterson, associate dean of the U-M music school, is choir director.

Probably the most consistent element in the history of the First Congregational Church is its tolerance of a wide variety of views. Longtime church member Louise Allen says, “You can have your own thoughts. Religion isn’t thrust at you.” According to Smith, “It’s a thoughtful congregation. When I was preaching, I knew they were thinking. They were responsive, they’d talk to you afterwards.”

Smith’s description of the congregation parallels comments written by Calvin Olin Davis in his 1947 history: “members were often bluntly outspoken in their judgments and often wearisomely stubborn in their convictions . . . but [they believed] that all men are of equal worth in the sight of God and that each one is entitled to the full and free expression of his thoughts and feelings.”

Former president Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, spent their wedding night at Ann Arbor’s Allenel Hotel in 1948. “I thought I was giving her a great treat,” Ford recalled in a 1975 visit to Ann Arbor. “I paid for that a thousand times.”

In her autobiography, The Times of My Life, Betty Ford writes, “You never stayed above the second floor at the Allenel Hotel because it was such a fire trap you wanted to be sure you could jump.” The newlyweds were in Ann Arbor because Jerry wanted to see Michigan play Northwestern the next day. (Betty left after the first half.) And they stayed at the Allenel because the nearly eighty-year-old firetrap was still the best hotel in town.

The Allenel was the direct descendant of Cook’s Temperance House, which opened in 1836. Owner Solon Cook and his wife, Anna, were teetotalers. (Anna managed the Ladies Total Abstinence Benevolent Society, and Solon was a trustee of the Presbyterian Church.) A harness maker, Solon Cook exchanged saddles and harnesses for produce, lumber, and feed for his horses, who pulled the “omnibus” that took hotel guests to and from the train station. The Cooks ran the hotel until after the Civil War, enlarging it twice.

In 1871, the wooden Cook’s Hotel was demolished and replaced by a four-story brick building. The Cooks had retired by then, but the new hotel retained their name and a reputation as “the” destination for visitors to town. In 1896, presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan stayed at Cook’s and gave a speech standing on the marquee above the entrance. According to contemporary accounts, Huron Street was jammed as far as the eye could see.

On Christmas morning in 1910, the hotel was badly damaged by a fire that started in the basement. No one was hurt, but some of the guests barely escaped. After two months of remodeling the hotel reopened, boasting the latest in luxuries: telephones in every room and an electric elevator. It was renamed the Allenel—a blend of the words Allen (presumably after Ann Arbor founder John Allen) and hotel.

The hotel was remodeled again in 1928, after Angelo Poulos and Ted Dames took it over. Distant relatives, the two men had known each other as boys growing up in Kapsi, Greece (now Artisimon). Both came to the United States as young men, Dames to Chicago and Poulos to Ann Arbor. Poulos owned the Ann Arbor Restaurant at 215 South Main and in 1923, he invited Dames to Ann Arbor when he needed help to build the Michigan Theater.

Poulos’s nephew James Maharis remembers that his uncle and Dames worked very well together. Dames’s widow, Inez Dames, agrees, recalling that Poulos was the more reserved of the two, while her husband was the more outgoing. Active in the Greek community, Poulos was one of the founders of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.

Dames became the Allenel’s manager, settling into a two-room suite on the second floor. According to Maharis, Poulos “lived on West Washington Street and walked to the hotel every morning before six. He would do most of the buying during the morning hours. Mr. Dames would come down around eleven and start his day. . . . Everyone worked the same--seven days a week.”

About a dozen employees lived in small rooms on the fourth floor—cooks, waitresses, bellboys, and a retired chef who cooked for the staff dining room. The public dining room, off Fourth Avenue, became one of the town’s most elegant eating places. The Tap Room, accessible from either Fourth or Huron, served breakfast, casual meals, and drinks. The kitchen also prepared food for the private Town Club, which had its quarters in the hotel--Jerry and Betty Ford ate their first dinner as a married couple in the Town Club.

Rare steaks were a favorite in the dining room. Poulos’s brother-in-law, James Colovos, carved the turkeys and hams, and Maharis’s parents, Stella Poulos Maharis and Nick Maharis, took care of the salads and ice-cream pie a la mode was always popular. While guests dined, three musicians played soft chamber music. On football Saturdays there were lines for the dining room all day long. After the game, the U-M band often marched through the hotel’s public rooms, playing as they went.

Unless people had university connections and could book the League or the Union, the Allenel’s upstairs banquet room was just about the only place for large events. Alice and Lawrence Ziegler held their wedding rehearsal dinner there, and Pat and Ed Murphy’s wedding brunch was there. The Washtenaw County Medical Society, the Young Republicans, and various service clubs held their meetings there and the May Festival was always celebrated with a big banquet for the visiting orchestra.

Poulos died in 1943, at age fifty-three, of a heart attack. Dames tried to retire in 1952 but, unhappy with the way things were being done in his absence, moved back in 1958. By then, however, the Allenel’s days were numbered. The Town Club had moved to West Washington in 1957; the dining room had closed, leaving only the Tap Room, and the building was showing its great age. In 1964, Dames and Poulos’s heirs sold the hotel. It was torn down and replaced with a Sheraton Inn, which opened in 1967.

Though far bigger--202 rooms instead of 60--the new hotel never achieved its predecessor’s pivotal role. Highway traffic no longer came through the downtown, and most travelers began staying closer to the expressways. Meanwhile, two closer hotels, the new Campus Inn and the renovated Bell Tower Hotel, won most of the U-M trade. After going through several name and ownership changes, the Ann Arbor Inn closed permanently in 1990. Construction is now under way to convert the building into 116 apartments for seniors.

The congregation of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church celebrated for two days in 1896, after finishing the church at 632 North Fourth Avenue that they had been working on for five years. Built of brick with a stately tower, beautiful stained glass windows, and intricate woodwork, the church was worth the wait.

On Sunday, April 5, 1896, Bethel held three services--morning, afternoon, and evening. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who had laid the building’s cornerstone, served as guest preacher. Turner, then residing in Atlanta, Georgia, had been the first black chaplain in the U.S. Army, thanks to an appointment from Abraham Lincoln. Other guest preachers included Rev. Mrs. G. T. Thurman of Jackson; Rev. James Barksdale, pastor of Ypsilanti’s AME congregation; and, representing the white Methodists, Rev. Camden Cobern of Ann Arbor’s First Methodist Church. The celebration continued the next day with a dedicatory concert and recitations by four elocutionists. “Altogether it was an occasion which will long be remembered by the members of the A. M. E. church,” reported the Ann Arbor Argus.

Building the substantial church was a stretch for a congregation that numbered about forty at the time of the dedication. Bethel AME was an offshoot of Ann Arbor’s first black church, the “Union Church,” founded in 1855. Members built a small Greek Revival place of worship at what is now 504 High Street (with a porch added, it is today a very small private residence), but just two years later, some split off to form Bethel AME. The other Union Church members went on to organize another historic black church, Second Baptist.

Bethel AME Church was located in this building at 632 North Fourth Avenue from 1895 to 1971.

The AME Church, the first independent black church in the United States, was founded in 1816 by Richard Allen. Born a slave, Allen saved his earnings to buy his freedom. He became an ordained minister and was hired by a Methodist church in Philadelphia to preach the early morning and early evening services. But when his preaching began attracting blacks to the congregation, some of the white members were displeased. Their objections led Allen and his black congregants to leave and found a church of their own.

The church they left was called “Methodist” for its form of worship and “Episcopal” because it was organized under bishops. Allen carried both terms over at his new congregation, and added “African” after the heritage of its founders.

Ann Arbor’s AME congregation was founded by John Wesley Brooks, who was, like Allen, a former slave. Born in Maryland in 1798, Brooks was sold to a New York resident when he was still a child. Slaves in New York at the time were supposed to be freed when they reached age twenty-eight, but Brooks’s owner ignored the rule. When Brooks was thirty, a lawyer named John Spencer successfully argued Brooks’s case and won his freedom.

Brooks stayed in New York another year as Spencer’s employee and moved to Ann Arbor in 1829, just five years after the town was founded. He paid $100 for eighty acres in Pittsfield Township, where he farmed for twenty-five years. He moved back into town, to a house on North Main, at about the same time the Union Church was being organized.

Bearing the same names as John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, Brooks must have been born into a Methodist family. The biographical sketch of him in the 1881 Charles C. Chapman county history says, “Mr. Brooks experienced religion at the age of thirteen, and has been a member of the M.E. [Methodist Episcopal] church for 70 years. He was ordained to preach by Rev. Swift, and for five years after his arrival in Michigan was engaged in the missionary work.” Just when Brooks joined the AME Church is not known, but since he was eighteen and living in the East when Allen founded his church, it is likely that Brooks was involved in it before coming to Michigan.

Bethel AME’s church history says that for some time before 1865, the congregation shared worship space with the Quakers at State and Lawrence. It was a natural pairing, because local Quakers had helped escaped slaves on their way to Canada during the days of the Underground Railroad. In its early years, Bethel also worshipped in a small cottage that Brooks owned on the west side of Fourth Avenue.

In 1869 Bethel moved to its first permanent home, buying a lot across the street from Brooks’s cottage and building a wood-frame church. The post–Civil War building boom was providing new job opportunities, and Ann Arbor’s black population had grown to 230. Members of the church held such jobs as laborers (John Britton, Martin and Robert Carson, Stephen Adams), carpenter (Henry Williams), plow setter (John Brown), barber (Lucian Brown), porter (George Brown), and drayman (Henry Smith).

In 1890 Rev. Abraham Cottman, the minister at the time, suggested that the members build a bigger church. The next year they moved the frame building to the back of the lot and laid the cornerstone for the new building. A group of young people formed the Furnishing Club; as soon as the basement was done, they fitted it out for services, and the congregation moved in.

The parishioners, many of whom were skilled craftsmen, continued to work on the sanctuary. Members contributed money for windows, pews, and other furnishings. Two of the stained glass windows are named in memory of early church members John Brown and B. Fassett. Fassett’s husband, a minister, had led Bethel in 1865, and the Fassetts’ daughter, Mrs. John Freeman, paid for the window. According to one local history, O. W. Stephenson’s Ann Arbor: The First Hundred Years, some of the money also came from white businessmen in town (one stained glass window has “Eberbach Hardware” on it).

Bethel nearly lost its hard-won church only a few years after moving in. In the economic depression that followed the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, church members were thrown out of work, the congregation fell behind on its payments, and the mortgage was about to be foreclosed. On the day the foreclosure sale was scheduled, church members sat in court silently praying for a reprieve. Just as the gavel was about to go down, trustee Stephen Adams came running in.

“They were in trouble. They were behind in their mortgage,” says Judy Overstreet, Adams’s great-granddaughter, relaying the story as her grandmother told it to her. “He [Adams] came tearing in with the money. He had put another mortgage on his house [to cover the church’s debt].”

Just half a block away from Bethel, on the corner of Beakes and Fifth Avenue, Second Baptist built its first church. Longtime Bethel member Rosemarion Blake recalls that on summer Sundays when both congregations had their windows open, they could hear each other singing. Blake remembers some funny coincidences--like the time one congregation sang “Will there be any stars in my crown?” and the other, singing a different hymn, responded, “No, not one.”

In Ann Arbor’s early days, blacks lived spread around town, but by the end of the nineteenth century most were concentrated around the two black churches and across the Huron River in Lower Town. The Bethel history explains that the church stood “in one of the few neighborhoods in Ann Arbor where blacks were permitted to purchase property. Consequently, Bethel was ideally situated to provide its congregation and the larger community with services that went beyond being a primary place of worship. Anyone who walked or drove past Bethel--at practically any time of the day or evening--saw a brightly lit church inviting them to come in and participate in whatever activities were taking place.”

“There were always so many activities,” remembers Irma Wright, who grew up in the church in the 1940s. She sang in the junior choir, worked on Christmas pageants with the other kids, and enjoyed the big outdoor dinners in the back in the summer. The basement was used for Sunday school and for meetings and clubs. During the week the church was open for Bible study.

Blondeen Munson has wonderful memories of the ACE youth group (short for “Allen Christian Endeavor,” after the denomination’s founder) that met at the church in the 1950s under the leadership of Harry Mial and Shirley Baker. “It was a really, really important place to be,” Munson recalls. “It attracted not just the Bethel teenagers but kids from Second Baptist and a few black Catholics in the neighborhood. It was really rap sessions. There was lots of talking about life, school. We’d get help with homework, went on hayrides, had parties.”

Mial, who at the same time was running the youth canteen at Willow Run, often organized joint activities to lessen the rivalries between the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti communities, such as taking both groups roller-skating at a rink in Inkster. When he discovered that these weekly excursions were keeping the segregated rink in business, he used the leverage to persuade the owner to integrate it.

In the 1960s Mial was also a leader of the Ann Arbor Fair Housing Association. The desegregation group held many of its meetings at Bethel. “We’d have weekly, biweekly, triweekly meetings there, and no one ever objected,” he recalls. “We were welcome because they supported what we were doing.”

After a year of picketing Pittsfield Village because it wouldn’t rent to blacks, the group convinced the Ann Arbor City Council to pass a resolution banning discrimination in housing and employment. “It was the reference from then on, the enabler,” says Mial.

Bethel’s minister at the time was Rev. Lyman Parks, who himself was very involved in community affairs and was often asked to serve on city boards and commissions. When Parks was later transferred to Grand Rapids, he became even more involved in politics, ending up as mayor of the city. “Ann Arbor whetted his appetite,” says Mial.

Parks’s successor was John A. Woods. “Parks was more aggressive about getting on committees,” Mial says, comparing the two. “Woods was more a seer, a wise man. He would listen and counsel.” Woods’s son, John A. Woods Jr., agrees, calling his father “rabbinical, meaning teacher.” Although different from Parks in style, the elder Woods was equally involved in the community. His son remembers him as “accessible. He lived on West Summit, in the heart of the community. He was seen sitting on the front porch. People knew their pastor was there.

“There was no such a thing as making an appointment. People just showed up. I remember late-night counseling sessions, people distraught because their son or daughter was arrested. He’d do what he could to ameliorate the situation.”

Woods extended his concerns to the larger black community. “Although he had no mantle other than local pastor, he was one of the de facto leaders of the community,” his son says. His wife, Juanita Woods, was a teacher, and he became concerned over tracking in the public schools. The police would call him in to help defuse explosive situations. He also served the community by making Bethel Church available for funerals. “Some churches only bury you if you’re a member,” John A. Woods Jr. explains, “sometimes only if you’re a member in good standing. But his only requirement to be buried at Bethel was that you had to be dead.”

Woods’s biggest legacy may have been his work in shepherding the new church on Plum Street (now John A. Woods Drive) to completion. The church had owned the land across the river near Northside School since 1953 but didn’t decide to build on it until after Woods came and the congregation became too numerous to stay on Fourth Avenue.

“It was a great thing to have the church there. Lots of members lived in the neighborhood. We were sorry [to move], but we had to go on,” says longtime member Pauline Dennard. The building was too small for all the congregation’s religious and outreach activities, and parking was inadequate.

When Munson was growing up, as she remembers, “we didn’t have a large parking lot. We didn’t need it--everyone walked.” But as desegregation opened up new neighborhoods to black residents and people moved farther away, more began driving to church. Some suggested that they stay on Fourth Avenue, tear down the old church, and rebuild, but parking would still have been a problem.

The congregation moved to the new church in 1971, using the education wing for services until the sanctuary was completed in 1974. “It was remarkable,” says Irma Wright, remembering the first time she saw the new building. “There was so much parking. The church looked so big.” Second Baptist also left the old neighborhood in the 1970s, moving to a big new church on Red Oak off Miller.

In August 1989, after a successful fund-raising campaign led by Rosemarion and Richard Blake, Bethel AME burned the mortgage on its new church. John A. Woods Sr. died four months later. “He hung on to see the fruition of his dreams,” says his son.

The three ministers who followed Woods--Clifford Gordon, Archie Criglar, and current pastor Alfred Johnson--have all been active in the community. According to Mial, “Each pastor had to come and get active because it’s an active church. They inherited what their predecessors had done.”

They definitely need the parking space: today members live all around town, and most drive to church. Dennard, whose husband served on city council in the 1950s, running on a platform of fair housing, recalls that back then, housing for blacks “was limited to where you lived in that time. Now, lots of people are living all over Ann Arbor. It’s beautiful.” A scan of the church directory shows members living in every zip code in Ann Arbor, plus a handful from surrounding communities.

New Grace Apostolic Church bought Bethel’s Fourth Avenue building in 1971 and remained there until last September. “They had choir practice in the evening,” recalls Heather Phillips, who lived nearby. “Their music filled the neighborhood. It was great.”

But history has repeated itself: New Grace, too, has outgrown the Fourth Avenue church. Member Bobbie Baugh says the congregation has tripled in size since buying the building and is now close to 100 members.

“We moved because the building was functionally obsolete,” says Baugh. “It was inadequate for our needs. We want to serve the community, reach out to youth, offer weekend activities to people outside the church.” While awaiting completion of its new church on Packard across from Buhr Park, New Grace is renting space for weekday programs at First Church of the Nazarene and holds Sunday services at the Red Cross.

Mike Bielby, himself a neighborhood resident who appreciated the old church’s charm, bought the building and is turning it into four apartments (see Inside Ann Arbor, January). “I’ll have it match the earliest appearance as close as possible,” he promises. Bielby plans to create two handicapped-accessible apartments on the lower floor, where community activities were held; a luxurious three-bedroom apartment in what was the sanctuary; and a fourth apartment in a newly created third floor in the upper area of the sanctuary. He’s already restored the stained glass windows and has pledged to fix up the tower.

As Bielby starts working on the building, he is amazed at what good shape it is in after more than 100 years of use. “The craftsmanship was excellent,” he says.

A former factory in floodway limbo

The fate of the former furniture factory at 109 East Madison, a key building in the debate over the use of local floodways, has been delayed. The present owner, the University of Michigan, tried to sell it but took it off the market after failing to receive any offers that were close to its appraised value.

Built in 1883, it is a classic three-story brick building, with subtle detailing and large windows. But visions of turning it into condos for downtown’s hot housing market ran into a seemingly insurmountable problem: the building is in the Allen’s Creek floodway. Although normally hidden in an underground pipe, the creek reappears during a “hundred-year flood” (the kind of flood that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year; see “Storm Warning” in the November Observer). In such a flood, 109 East Madison not only would get wet, but would receive the full force of the flowing water.

There was no regulation of floodway construction in the late nineteenth century, when cabinetmakers George Gruner and George Kuebler decided to go into business for themselves. Gruner and Kuebler built their factory on the corner of South Fourth Avenue and East Madison, nestled into a bend of Allen’s Creek--the creek passed along the building’s Fourth Avenue side and then curled around the back. Gruner and Kuebler’s equipment was steam driven, so they didn’t need the creek’s waterpower; more likely, they chose the site to be near their labor market, the skilled craftsmen who lived on what is now known as the Old West Side.

In 1899, after Kuebler died and Gruner moved to Cincinnati, Charles Sauer bought the property. Sauer was born in Canada to German parents and learned carpentry from his father before moving to Ann Arbor at age twenty. He worked as a draftsman and as a contractor before forming Sauer Lumber with his two brothers, Adam and John.

The new business offered architectural services and contracting, as well as lumber for all kinds of building. In the early years, the Sauers also still sold furniture, possibly using the same tools and craftsmen who worked for Gruner and Kuebler. They extended the business west, building a small mill in the yard for custom work, and an office at 543 South Main. “They have a well equipped planing mill in connection with the lumber plant and are doing an extensive business,” Samuel Beakes wrote in the 1906 edition of Past and Present of Washtenaw Country, Michigan, “their patronage having continually grown in a gratifying manner since the organization of the firm in 1899.”

The Sauer brothers built Ann Arbor’s 1906–1907 city hall, kitty-corner from the present one, on the corner now occupied by the Dahlmann City Center Building. Eight years later, Charles Sauer himself moved into the mayor’s office. Sadly, he died just six months into his term, at age forty-nine. On the day of his burial, all business and governmental offices closed from 2 to 3:30 p.m. during the funeral.

Although it passed out of family hands, the Sauer Lumber business kept going until the mid-1940s. Colin Fingerle, whose family owned a competing lumberyard nearby, recalls that Sauer’s specialized in doors and windows, making them from scratch.

Bob Beuhler, whose dad owned a coal company across the street, remembers the Sauer employees as skilled craftsmen. When he was a boy, he was in the middle of building something--a model boat, he thinks--but couldn’t finish the project with the tools he had, so at his dad’s suggestion he went across the street to Sauer’s to ask for help. “They ran it through their machine. They obviously knew what they were doing. They were old guys, very kind, and did it for nothing,” says Beuhler.

Nelson Plumbing, a company that sold plumbing supplies to builders and contractors, was the next occupant of the building. Fingerle remembers going to the third floor, then unused, and seeing the shaft, belts, and pulleys that had distributed power from the steam engine throughout the building. After Sauer went out of business, the Fingerles bought the property west of the building. They are still using the old custom mill and occupied the Main Street office for a while, but have since torn it down for a lumber shed.

The university bought the former factory building in 1970. It has housed various offices, including the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, Alumni Records, and Marketing Communications. Workers there enjoy the charm of the exposed brick walls and large windows, although they say that the building shakes when trains go by. They also report that in a big storm the first-floor carpeting gets wet and gives off a musty odor. While the building was on the market, all the occupants made plans to move, which the last of them are now carrying out.

People were interested in buying the building, but none at the price the university wanted. “We were frankly disappointed with the offers we received,” says Norm Herbert, U-M associate vice-president and treasurer. “From a use standpoint, keeping the building is of more value to us.”

One of those who expressed interest was local developer Peter Allen, who would have liked to convert it to living units. “It’s a magnificent building inside,” says Allen. “It would be good for young faculty.”

But “state law prohibits residential use on the floodway,” says Jerry Hancock of the city’s Building Department. “Peter Allen would have to change state law.” Office use is all right, according to Hancock, because “typically people are awake and alert and can get out of harm’s way.” But people sleep in residential property and might not be able to get out in time if surging water damaged basement utilities or if the building weakened enough to collapse. People also could be trapped on an upper floor during a flood, Hancock adds, unable to get out for a medical emergency.

Asked about the floodway problem, Allen answers, “That’s patently foolish. It’s up out of the ground. It would be great in-fill [housing]. It fits with all public policy. The idea that it’s dangerous doesn’t hold up. It’s been there for a hundred years.” Allen sees this building as a “kingpin--if you could do residential, it would give the lever to do some more, to open a bigger loophole.”

But that showdown will be delayed for at least three or four years. After rethinking the matter, the university has decided to use the building for “surge space.” It will provide temporary quarters for offices displaced by planned renovation work on several Central Campus buildings, including LS&A, Mason and Haven halls, the old Perry School, West Hall, and the Dana Building.

One thing is almost certain: the building will not be demolished. Since under current rules no one could get permission to build a new structure on the site, it would not be in anyone’s interest to tear it down. Just what it can be used for, though, is still to be determined.