With the repeal of Prohibition, Gust Sekaros turned his cafe into a bar

When Prohibition ended in Ann Arbor, at 6 p.m. on May 11, 1933, the Court Tavern at 108 East Huron was ready. One of twenty local establishments that had received permission to serve beer, the former Court Cafe was filled with patrons until it sold out, around 11 p.m. Sam Sekaros, son of then-owner Gust Sekaros, recalls that historic night: “Men, women--everyone was out celebrating that beer came back, that Prohibition was over.” The celebration continued around town until well after midnight, according to the Ann Arbor Daily News, “in a spirit of joy and festivity which outrivaled the celebration which annually ushers in the arrival of a new year.”

When Prohibition was repealed nationally, Michigan set up a state liquor commission that permitted breweries to begin production and make warehouse deliveries. By May 11, twenty-two breweries around the state had received this temporary approval. (The Ann Arbor Brewing Company, on Fourth Street, which had survived Prohibition by making ice cream, was not in that first batch, but it was soon up and running, making its “Old Tyme Bru.”)

Gust Sekaros had applied for a license the first morning they were available. Then he had gone to the State Savings Bank to borrow $500 to buy the beer. It was during the Depression, and the bank had lent him the money but required that it be repaid quickly. Business was so good the first night that Sekaros was able to repay the loan the next morning.

As 6 p.m. approached, the town geared up for action. Cars lined up near the grocery stores that had permits to sell beer. Downtown filled with people eager to make a night of it. Besides the Court Tavern, permits had been given to one hotel, the Allenel at Fourth and Huron; one club, the Elks; and one beer garden, Preketes on Main Street. Many students were among the celebrants, although the city council had purposely not issued any licenses east of Division Street. While early stories had promised that beer would sell for 5¢ a glass, the paper reported the price as 15¢ on that first day.

Since none of the establishments had sold beer (at least not legally) for fifteen years, they were not completely prepared. Sam Sekaros remembers that his family used three or four washtubs filled with cracked ice to keep the beer cold. At many taverns, especially the German ones, customers brought their own beer mugs. Fred Dupper, who had a beer distributorship at what is now the Bach School playground, used a fifty-five-year-old copper mug made in Germany by his father, Jacob, who claimed that the metal brought out the beer’s flavor.

Born in Greece, Gust Sekaros had run a restaurant in Sioux City, Iowa, before moving to Ann Arbor--his wife Angeline’s hometown--in 1925 to run the Court Cafe. In a prime spot across from the courthouse, sandwiched between a bank and a hotel, the restaurant had a reputation for serving excellent meals, such as pork loin with applesauce or roast beef and mashed potatoes--all-American fare that Sekaros prepared fresh every day. Meals cost 25¢ or 35¢, including coffee.

After May 11, Sekaros finished changing the restaurant into a bar. He took out the booths, replacing them with a bar along the right side and tables along the left. He replaced the full kitchen with a grill behind the bar. The tavern still served lunch, mainly sandwiches and hamburgers. “We had the best hamburgers and cheeseburgers in Ann Arbor,” says Sam Sekaros, who is seconded by former customers. The secret, he says, was the meat, delivered fresh every morning from Steeb’s. (The Sekaroses firmly refused to use frozen meat, which Sam claims is good only for spaghetti.)

Sam Sekaros started washing dishes in the cafe as a junior in high school. When he went into the service during World War II, his wife, Inge, helped her father-in-law run the tavern. It was open shorter hours then, because labor was scarce during the war and the tavern was allotted only a limited amount of beer per week. When Sam returned from the war, his father retired, giving the business to him and his younger brother, Dan.

More of a hangout than a serious drinking place, the tavern attracted customers from the area: courthouse employees--including judges--Ann Arbor Bank workers, lawyers from the Ann Arbor Trust Company, and employees of the nearby King Seeley, American Broach, and Argus factories. Walter Mast of the Main Street shoe store was a fan of the cheeseburgers. Ann Arbor News employees came in to unwind after putting the paper to bed. Friday was the busiest day, since people came into town for weekly errands to the barbershop or the bank. On Saturdays the tavern was busy early, but business tapered off in the evening.

With a window on the street and fluorescent lights within, the Court Tavern was not the place for a secret rendezvous. “If you don’t want to be seen, better not come in,” Sekaros told his customers. Women were always welcome, and people felt comfortable bringing their children. Sekaros was happy to serve them soda pop, white or chocolate milk, and he never allowed rowdiness or bad language.

The Court Tavern became an early sports bar, with its television set on for important sporting events. It was one of the first taverns to get Channel 50, which carried Michigan basketball. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Sekaros remembers, the tavern was filled all day long with people watching history unfold.

In 1960, the tavern celebrated another first: being allowed to sell hard liquor by the glass. Before then, liquor could be served only at private clubs, a local anomaly that had made the Town Club on Washington and the Elks Club on Main Street favorite downtown hangouts. Sekaros and other bar and restaurant owners had spent a year going door-to-door gathering the signatures necessary to put the proposed change on the ballot. When voters approved the change, Sekaros was once again ready, having done all the necessary work to qualify for a liquor license, such as changing the floor drains and upgrading the bathrooms.

But even with its enhanced liquor license, the tavern lasted only a few more years. In 1965, when the Ann Arbor Bank on Main at Huron needed their space to expand, the Sekaros brothers sold their liquor license to the Bolgos family, which had a restaurant on Plymouth Road. Sekaros recalls the last day of business as “like a jam session, with people coming from all over.” The tavern stayed open until it ran out of food at about 11 p.m.--the same hour it had run out of beer thirty-two years earlier.

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.

His Main Street parlors and westside factory were summer favorites

In the days before home refrigeration, ice cream was a rare delicacy. Available at only a few places in town, it was usually consumed right where it was made, either at an ice cream parlor or at summertime ice cream socials. "We didn't have ice cream much, recalls senior citizen Florence Haas. "It was a treat for us when we were kids."

When Ann Arbor's senior citizens were children, an important purveyor of this treat was Justin Trubey. He was proprietor of Trubey's Confectionary, first at 116 South Main (1909-1916) and then at 218 South Main (1917-1923), and later owned the wholesale Trubey Ice Cream Co., 438 Third Street (1923-1932).

Justin and Sarah Trubey moved to Ann Arbor in 1909, probably to be near good medical care, since their son, Harold, was sickly as a child. They came from Jewell, Ohio, where Justin had run a grocery store and Sarah had been postmistress. Trubey's brother, Barevius Trubey, owned a creamery in nearby Sherwood, which was most likely where Trubey learned to make ice cream.

Trubey took over an existing ice cream parlor on Main Street. Assisted by his wife and son, he made ice cream and candy on the premises and also served light lunches. At the time, ice cream was steadily gaining in popularity. Although known to Europeans since Marco Polo brought a sherbet recipe home from the Far East in the thirteenth century, ice cream was rarely consumed by the general population until the middle of the nineteenth century. That was when a string of inventions—first the hand-cranked ice cream freezer, and later electricity and commercial refrigeration units—made ice cream quicker and cheaper to produce.

As it became more available, various methods of serving ice cream were devised. Most innovations started as the solution to a problem. In 1880 the ice cream soda was invented by Detroit's Fred Sanders when he substituted ice cream for plain cream in a carbonated drink because his cream supply had turned sour. The sundae followed in 1890 as a replacement for sodas, which some responsible citizens considered too stimulating for Sunday consumption. The ice cream cone surfaced at the 1904 World's Fair, when an ice cream vendor ran out of bowls and began wrapping the ice cream in waffles.

Justin Trubey (foreground) and his son and daughter-in-law, Harold and Elsa Trubey, in Trubey's Confectionary, 116 South Main Street, 1910.

Trubey's ice cream parlor met all these tastes, selling cones, sodas, and sundaes as well as plain ice cream. Its main competitor was the Sugar Bowl restaurant across the street. The Sugar Bowl was fancier and sold a larger variety of food, but many of Trubey's customers, especially children, felt more comfortable in the simpler establishment. According to Edith Kempf, "Trubey's was not fancy, but it was thought to be very clean. And the ice cream was very good."

Freida Saxton remembers that she "lived for" visits to Trubey's. On Sunday afternoons her dad would give her a dime. Then, accompanied by girlfriends, she would walk to Trubey's from her family's home on First Street and order a bowl of tutti-frutti ice cream—a multi-colored, multi-flavored concoction of vanilla ice cream and candied fruit.

After fourteen years of operating the ice cream parlor, Trubey decided to concentrate on the manufacturing end. In 1923 he moved his equipment to a factory he had built behind his home at 438 Third Street. The confectionary on Main was taken over by Mack and Co., the department store next door, who used the space to expand their dry goods department.

Trubey's ice cream factory was a very primitive operation by today's standards. Its equipment consisted of two ice cream machines and a sink. The only employees were Trubey and his son, Harold, who by that time had married Elsa Aprill, an employee of the ice cream parlor.

Harold Trubey's son, Bob Trubey, remembers watching his father and grandfather make the ice cream. He says they used a liquid mix to which cream, sugar, and flavoring were added. Vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate were the mainstays, although in later years they experimented with more exotic flavors like pistachio. After the ice cream was made, it was placed in the cold storage room, which the Trubeys had insulated with 4-inch-thick cork. Ammonia coolant was piped through coils in the room from a compressor in the basement. An office in front also served as a retail outlet, mainly for neighbors.

Harold Trubey's other son, Dorwin Trubey, remembers that after classes got out at Bach School on Fourth Street, groups of his classmates would sometimes follow him over to his grandfather's factory two blocks away. Justin Trubey would welcome the young delegations by giving each child a freshly made "smile," today called a Dixie cup.

Most of Trubey's ice cream was sold wholesale. Using Dodge trucks, which he said always started best, he delivered ice cream all around town, to stores and restaurants, sororities and fraternities, traveling as far afield as Groomes Beach at Whitmore Lake. The trucks weren't refrigerated, so the ice cream was packaged in heavy 5-gallon galvanized metal containers placed inside a wooden crate and surrounded by ice with rock salt sprinkled on top.

In 1932 Trubey's merged with McDonalds Ice Cream, a Flint firm with a branch on Main Street near the stadium. Two years later, Justin Trubey died of cancer, but Harold continued with McDonalds for the rest of his working life. The Trubey factory building continued to be used, either for small manufacturing operations or for storage.

In 1978, when John and Elsa Stafford bought the building and remodeled it, they found the 4-inch cork insulation in the cold storage room still intact and one of the walk-in coolers still there—remnants of the building's original use.

Summertime Ice Cream Socials
In the early years of the century, ice cream socials were eagerly anticipated by children seeking to supplement their meager ice cream consumption. Before she was old enough to go to ice cream parlors, Bertha Walker remembered that her main source of ice cream was ice cream socials held at the German Park off Madison, near her family’s home on Sixth Street. Her dad gave each of the kids in the family a nickel, and they would line up to buy the confection at a shanty set up for the purpose. They found the ice cream quite satisfactory, although vanilla vas usually the only choice.

Frieda Saxton remembered going to wonderful raspberry socials out Dexter Road, just past Maple. The annual event was a fundraiser for the Masons, hosted by a Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, raspberry growers who were very active in the group. Eating fresh raspberries over ice cream was a treat she looked forward to all year.

Edith Kempf remembered that Ann Arbor churches did not host ice cream socials, but left that activity for the country churches. Her favorite was one that is still going, as of this writing, at Bethel United Church of Christ, near Manchester.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The Trubey ice cream factory was actually an old horse barn with a cinderblock addition. The area closest to the street was sectioned off for an office, and the back was made into a walk-in freezer room, with the rest of the cinderblock area used for production. The second story was added by present owners John and Elsa Stafford, who now use it as a carpentry shop.

Grub for the workingman

Back in the days when Courthouse Square was the center of town, Prochnow's Dairy Lunch, at 104 East Huron, was strategically placed as a casual eatery for the many workingmen in the area. "Everyone in town ate there," according to Derwood Prochnow, second cousin of Theodore Prochnow, the owner of the restaurant from 1902 to 1929 and 1937 to 1940.

The county's Victorian courthouse (1887-1955) sat in the middle of the block surrounded by grass and trees, and it had identical entrances on all sides—Main, Ann, Fourth, and Huron. Anyone leaving from the Huron Street door could see Prochnow's Dairy Lunch right across the street. An interurban stop, a row of busy stores sandwiched between the Allenel Hotel and the Farmers and Mechanics Bank, the courts and other government services all drew people to that block. Morrie Dalitz, driver for and later owner of the Varsity Laundry (on Liberty where the Federal Building now stands), remembers Huron Street between Fourth and Main as "busy and vibrant."

Prochnow's Dairy Lunch was tucked in behind the Farmers and Mechanics Bank in a building so narrow that there was no room for tables, just a horseshoe-shaped counter. However, the restaurant boasted many accoutrements that today are de rigueur for fancy yuppie restaurants: pressed-tin ceiling, ornate cash register, marble counters, wainscoting on the lower wall, and fancy mirrored coat racks.

Theodore Prochnow is remembered by his cousin as "not tall, about five-nine or five-ten. He walked with a limp because he was crippled in one leg, but he was a strong man. He ran the Dairy Lunch for years as the number-one operator." The kitchen was in the back. Dalitz remembers the sight of Prochnow cooking away, a cigar hanging out of his mouth.

For almost four decades, Theodore Prochnow's lunch counter was part of a "busy and vibrant" block opposite the old courthouse. This photo was taken near the end of World War I; Prochnow is probably the man third from left.

Prochnow opened the restaurant in 1902, when he was only twenty-seven years old. He began in partnership with Otto Schaible, but by 1909 he was the sole owner. He operated the restaurant until 1929 when, tired of the daily grind, he sold it and started the Prochnow Food Specialty Company. But in 1937 he was back at the restaurant. The interim owners, first Fred Slade, then Raymond Smith and Thomas Fohey, weren't able to make a go of it during the Depression.

Prochnow served full meals, mainly breakfasts and lunches, but nothing fancy. There was no liquor, and it was not the sort of restaurant people went to evenings or on dates. In fact, it was "men only," according to Bertha Welker, who remembers the restaurant well because her older sister dated an employee, Ben Oliver. "It was a men's luncheon place," Welker explains. "Women didn't go out much in those days."

Derwood Prochnow describes the fare as "food the workingman wanted, food that filled his ribs"—meat, potatoes, gravy, and vegetables. He reports that Prochnow "didn't monkey with salad." Dessert was homemade pies. Overall, he rates the food as "good grub."

Dalitz gives a dissenting opinion: he remembers once finding a cigar butt in his oatmeal. Feeling sick, but not wanting to offend Prochnow (who was a good Varsity Laundry customer), Dalitz just stepped out for some air until he felt better. "I couldn't eat oatmeal for a long time after that," he recalls.

Dalitz remembers that pancakes, both regular and buckwheat, were Prochnow specialties. He also remembers revolving specials according to the day of the week—for instance, "terrible liver on Thursday." According to Dalitz, the draw of the restaurant was the low prices.

Of course, a mainstay of this kind of casual restaurant was coffee. Derwood Prochnow says that the Dairy Lunch was famous for having "the best coffee east of the Mississippi." His cousin bought it in barrels from a supplier in the East and put his own label on it. One of the main offerings of Prochnow's specialty food business was the coffee.

The Dairy Lunch customers were mainly people working or doing business in the area—at the courthouse, the Farmers' Market (then located on the Fourth Avenue side of the courthouse), or the many businesses on Prochnow's side of the block. These included two telegraph offices, two cigar stores (one reputed to run a betting operation on the side); a photography studio, real estate offices, a barber, a tailor, and a cab company.

Dalitz remembers other customers: farmers coming to town for the day, truck drivers, milk wagon operators, construction workers, and policemen who worked nearby in the old city hall at Huron and Fifth (kitty-corner from the present one). While there were other food places on the block, they were not in direct competition. Court Cafe served more snack-type food, like sandwiches and hamburgers, while Candyland's specialties were sweets and ice cream treats like banana splits and tin roofs.

Prochnow finally left the business for good in 1940. He died four years later. During the years he was feeding Ann Arbor, other Prochnows were also making their marks. His cousin David, father of Derwood, owned the Prochnow Grocery Store at 208 South Ashley, next to Hertler's. Another relative, Walter Prochnow, started Ann Arbor Buick in 1923.

Today, the block where Prochnow's Dairy Lunch was once part of a busy business district has been swallowed up by two monumental buildings, the First of America Bank, facing Main, and the Courthouse Square Senior Apartments facing Fourth. The small gap between them where Prochnow's once stood is now First of America's parking lot.

It returned to German hands when it became part of Metzger's restaurant One German-American family followed in the footsteps of another when Metzger's German Restaurant expanded into 201 East Washington in 1991. The brick building with the eye-catching turret that overlooks the corner of Washington Street and Fourth Avenue was built in 1883 by butcher J. Fred Hoelzle. Hoelzle (1859-1943) came to Ann Arbor when he was seventeen and went to work for butcher John C. Gall at his store on East Washington where Austin Diamond is now. Hoelzle married a relative of Gall's named Alice and took over the business when Gall retired. In 1893 he moved down the street to the new building at Fourth Avenue and renamed his shop the Washington Market. A 1905 promotional booklet about Ann Arbor boasted that he "supplied the tables of Ann Arbor with the best meat that the world produces, makes the best sausage on the market, keeps poultry and fish in season, gives a clean cut and full weight, is impartial and obliging and has the confidence of the best citizens." Hoelzle advertised as a "dealer in fresh and salt meats, lard, sausage of all kinds." The salted meat he treated right on the premises. The sausage he also made himself, probably from authentic German recipes handed down from Gall. The fresh meat, brought in whole or in halves, was slaughtered in a space dedicated to this activity on the banks of the Huron River, east of the Broadway Bridge, and stored in big walk-in ice boxes behind the store. It took strong delivery men to lift the huge ice blocks, ranging from twenty-five to 300 pounds, into place almost at ceiling level.

Washington Street and Fourth Avenue in 1893.

When Hoelzle moved into his new building, his was just one of eighteen meat markets in downtown Ann Arbor. Without transportation or good home cooling, most people shopped daily for fresh meat, preferably at a store within easy walking distance of their homes or jobs. Saturday nights were especially busy, with farmers coming into town to stock up on supplies and townsfolk buying meat for their big Sunday dinners. Cal Foster, who as a teenager worked at Merchants' Delivery, a horse-drawn delivery service, remembers picking up orders from the Washington Market. They were packed in wooden crates--which he describes as "heavier than the devil"--and delivered to student rooming houses, sororities, and fraternities. Hoelzle sold his business in 1926, but continued to work at other meat markets as long as he was able. The building continued as a meat market under a succession of owners until the late 1940's. In the 1950's it was Sun Cleaners, then Martin's Gems and Minerals, and most recently, Harry's Army Surplus, until Metzger's expanded from next door in 1991. Metzger's was founded in 1928 and moved to 203 East Washington in 1936. Founders William Metzger and Christian Kuhn both grew up in the village of Wilhelmsdorf, in southern Germany. They left to escape the inflation that wracked Germany in the 1920's. At Metzger's father's bakery in Wilhelmsdorf, customers needed a bushel of money just to buy a loaf of bread. Metzger's first Ann Arbor job was at the bakery of his sponsor, Sam Heusel. (Heusel, the grandfather of radio personality Ted Heusel, sponsored most of the bakers who came during those years.) Metzger went on to work at the Michigan Union as a pastry chef (his pot washer was Bennie Oosterbaan). Meanwhile, Kuhn worked on a farm near Saline, then as a janitor at the U-M Hospital, and finally as a cook at Flautz's restaurant at 122 West Washington (recent home of the Del Rio).

Fred Hoelzle's butcher shop on Christmas, 1909. The staff had worked all night cutting fresh meat for their customers' holiday celebrations.

When Kuhn's boss, Reinhart Flautz, decided to go back to Germany, Kuhn and his friend Metzger rented the space and started their own restaurant, the "German American." Kuhn was the cook and Metzger ran the dining room. The German American was right next door to the Old German restaurant, then still being run by founder Gottlob Schumacher. (Fritz Metzger, William's brother, bought it in 1946. A third brother, Gottfried, who also came over in the 1920s, ran the Deluxe Bakery, and, until he retired, made the dark pumpernickel bread served by both the Old German and Metzger's.) Business was booming when Kuhn and Metzger started in 1928, but a year later the Depression hit. To survive, the partners had to serve three meals a day, 364 days a year (they closed for Christmas). Metzger's wife, Marie, helped with waitressing, cleaning, cooking, and public relations. Their workday started at 6 a.m. and ended at midnight. Luckily, the Metzgers and Kuhn, a bachelor, lived above the restaurant at both its locations, so they could usually go upstairs midafternoon to take a nap. In 1936, Flautz returned to Ann Arbor and wanted to reopen his old place. Metzger and Kuhn moved two blocks down, to 203 East Washington, and reopened as "Metzger's German American." By 1937, the business was doing well enough that the family decided they could close on Sundays. When World War II came, they further decreased their hours, opening only for dinner because help was so hard to find. Food was also scarce, and meat was rationed. Even after the war, Walter Metzger, William's son, remembers people waiting to buy meat at the next-door butcher shop in a line that went all the way down to Huron Street.

Washington Street and Fourth Avenue in 1993.

When Walter Metzger returned from World War II, he began working full-time at the restaurant. (He had started at age ten, washing dishes, cutting beans, peeling potatoes, and even pouring beer and wine at the bar.) In 1959, Kuhn and William Metzger retired, and Walter bought his father's share. Kuhn sold his share to his nephew, Fritz Kuenzle, who stayed until 1974. Walter's son, John, joined in 1975, becoming sole owner in 1986. Walter, although retired, still helps out a lot. It was John who arranged for the expansion next door into the old meat market. His goal was twofold: to preserve the historical appearance of the building and to make the two parts work together. He redid the outside to match old photographs, while inside he continued the decorating scheme of steins and other German memorabilia from the original restaurant. The most dramatic change, at least to passersby, is the cow weather vane on the turret. In Hoelzle's day, a cow weather vane proudly indicated what he sold, but it had long ago disappeared. John and Walter Metzger had been looking for a replacement for some time when relatives found a perfect one in Boston and gave it to them to celebrate the opening of the expanded restaurant. In 1999 Metzgers closed in Ann Arbor and later reopened in Scio township, thus continuing the family tradition another generation. Their Washington Street store has been used for several different restaurants, but one thing has remained; the cow is still on the roof demonstrating the history of the first two occupants.

[Photo caption from book]: Post World War II students enjoying a night out at Metzer’s. Note the formality of their dress. “Courtesy of Walter Metzger”

From creamery to music

Two connected buildings at 722-726 Brooks, nestled at the back of a driveway in a residential neighborhood, are puzzling to people passing by unless they know it was once a family-run dairy. The front part was constructed in 1919 and the large part in back in 1940. Brothers-in-law Adolph Helber and Alfred Weber owned and operated the West Side Dairy for thirty-four years, delivering fresh dairy products to city residents until 1953.

Adolph Helber, born in 1886, grew up in a large family on a farm on Dexter Road in Scio Township. He left school in the seventh grade, not uncommon at the time, and worked as a hired farmhand until 1904, when he went to work delivering milk for Jake Wurster, a brother-in-law. Wurster's dairy was on the corner of Catherine and North Fifth Avenue.

When Helber started in the dairy business, milk was still sold "raw," or untreated, fresh from the cow. (Although pasteurization equipment, developed to kill milk-borne infections, was available in the 1890s, it hadn't yet been universally adopted.) The raw milk was stored in a big tank at the front of the horse-drawn delivery wagon and scooped out into a pitcher or milk can supplied by each customer on the route.

In 1912 Helber married Alma Weber, the sister of a fellow driver, Alfred Weber. The Weber family house was at 809 Brooks, then the last residential street off Miller. Alma and Alfred's father, Jacob, owned much of the land in the area. In 1914 the Helbers moved to 720 Brooks, and in 1919 Helber and Alfred Weber opened a dairy out of a small one-story cement-block building they built in the Helbers' backyard. Milk was supplied by Helber's brother Carl, who had stayed on the family farm, and also by the Seyfried and Hanselman farms.

Helber and Weber started their days at 4 a.m., feeding and harnessing the horses. They delivered milk in the morning and in the afternoon pasteurized and bottled it for the next day. Because neither the farmers nor the customers had good storage, the partners accepted and delivered milk seven days a week. Their only time off was Sunday afternoon. Their wives, Alma Helber and Rose Weber, ran the office, did the bookkeeping, handled over-the-counter sales, and helped with production.

In the days before cholesterol worries, dairies competed for the richest milk the farmer had. Before homogenization, customers could see at a glance how rich the milk was by the thickness of the cream on top. (Narrow-necked milk bottles were developed to exaggerate the visible cream.) The West Side Dairy made skim milk (or buttermilk) only as a by-product of butter making, selling it back to the farmers for a penny a gallon as feed for their pigs and chickens.

The West Side Dairy buildings in 1994.

As the number of their customers grew, Helber and Weber were able to hire help, giving priority to relatives. The delivery men included Eddie Weber, Alfred's brother, whose route included what is now known as the Old West Side; Leon Jedele, Rose Weber's brother; and Henry Grau, who was married to Alma's sister Clara. After relatives, neighbors were hired. The employee who probably lived the farthest away was Fred Yaeger, who walked to work every morning from his home on Pauline.

The family employees built houses in the neighborhood near their work. Alfred Weber's neighbor, Will Nimke of 827 Brooks, built him a house at 730 Brooks. Eddie Weber lived at 727 Gott, where he grew wonderful dahlias. When the Helbers' sons grew up, they lived in the neighborhood, too, Erwin at 706 Brooks and Ray at 725 Gott. Jacob Weber owned and rented other houses, one at the corner of Brooks and Summit and three others on Gott Street, right behind the dairy. Weber and Helber owned the house between their two houses and rented it to the Moon family. The Weber property also included a big field west of the house, where the horses sometimes grazed.

Making deliveries, the milkmen would walk along the sidewalk as the horses plodded alongside them in the street. Sam Schlecht, who helped out on the routes as a teenager, recalls that the horses "knew more about the route than the human beings." If milk was delivered on a dead-end street, the horses would turn around while the men delivered to the last houses. If the milkmen cut through a backyard to deliver milk on the next street over, the horses knew to meet them there. Schlecht remembers that at the end of the route, as they went down Chapin toward Miller, the horses would pick up their pace, eager to get home for their oats and hay. When Helber and Weber switched to trucks in 1934, the milkmen found them a mixed blessing. They no longer had to feed and harness the horses each morning, but their routes took them longer without the horses' help.

Deliveries were made every single day except Christmas and Thanksgiving. On the day before those holidays, the milkmen would go around twice, in case a customer had forgotten anything that morning. Henry Michelfelder, a relative of Leon Jedele's, remembered that if his family ran out of something during the day, they could call the dairy and it would be brought over.

The milk and cream delivered for sale by retail stores was very fresh, since every day the milkmen would take back any that wasn't sold. The day-old products were used to moisten the cottage cheese the dairy made. In the 1940's, when refrigeration had become common, the dairy scaled back to three deliveries a week. Marian Helber, Ray's wife, remembers that "people had a fit. They thought they needed fresh milk every day for their coffee or cereal."

Erwin and Ray Helber grew up working in the dairy part-time and summers. After graduating from Michigan State Normal College (now EMU), Ray worked bottling and also delivering. During World War II he left to work at King Seeley (he learned of the job opening because the plant was on his route) and ended up staying there until 1975, when he retired. Erwin stayed at the dairy, gradually taking over more of the responsibility from his father and uncle. In 1953, when the brothers-in-law retired and sold their business to United Dairies (later Sealtest), Erwin stayed with the new owners, eventually moving to Flint with Sealtest.

Today the buildings looks similar from the outside but have totally new uses inside, mostly related to music. Four Davids (Orlin, Sutherland, Collins, Peramble) between them teach or repair guitar, violin, pianoforte, and piano. The neighborhood is also filled with evidence of the dairy for people who know where to look: a four-car garage (used for delivery trucks) at the corner of Summit and Brooks, a barn at 809 Brooks (later used for a construction business), and a big lot at 827 (now a big private garden). After the dairy moved out, tenants included a sugar packing manufacturer and a bookbinding operation. In 1964, Robert Noehren, a U-M organist and a pioneer in the organ revival movement, rented it for a pipe organ factory, presaging its present use. The field behind the Weber house is now the site of the Second Baptist Church.

[Photo caption from book]: The West Side Dairy in the mid-1930s. Left to right: Henry Grau, Alfred Weber, Eddie Weber, Adolph Helber, and Leon Jedele. All are related by blood or marriage. The dairy had just switched from horse-drawn milk wagons to trucks and was experimenting with various models-three different makes are visible.
“Courtesy Paul Helber”

Delivering coolness door to door

Before the days of electric refrigerators, people kept perishable foods in ice chests cooled by blocks of ice. For most of Ann Arbor's early history, the ice was harvested from frozen lakes and rivers. But after 1909, natural ice was supplemented, and then totally replaced by, artificial ice, so named because it was manufactured rather than gathered.

The main sources of natural ice were the dams on the Huron River and Whitmore Lake. The ice would be cut at the end of January or the beginning of February—after it became thick enough to make the effort worthwhile but before the danger of a thaw. Using horse-drawn ice plows, harvesters would cut the ice into square slabs, then move it to an insulated icehouse for storage.

In 1909 Ann Arbor supported six ice dealers. They made home deliveries to icebox owners and also supplied butcher shops, restaurants, saloons, and beverage companies. Henry Velker, whose grandfather and uncle owned Dupper's beer distributorship on Fifth Street from 1901 to 1919, remembers that their ice came from lakes north of Ann Arbor. The ice was sent by rail, unloaded at the Ann Arbor Railroad depot on Ashley Street, and delivered to a barn on the back of their property that was devoted solely to ice storage.

Farmers, who needed ice to preserve their meat and dairy products, usually had their own icehouses, and often filled them with ice harvested from ponds on their property. Ann Arbor's most famous farm, Cobblestone Farm, originally had a stone icehouse on the east side of the property near the smokehouse. Mary Campbell, granddaughter of the 1881 owner, William Campbell, remembers reading in her grandfather's diary of trips to the Huron River to collect ice.

Relying on ice from natural sources had several drawbacks, including the vagaries of the weather (an early thaw could be a disaster), melting during the long summer storage season (dealers cut two pounds for every pound they sold), and the risk of infection from contaminated water. So in the late nineteenth century, inventors began experimenting with ways of manufacturing ice. By 1909, commercial ice making reached Ann Arbor with the formation of the Artificial Ice Company.

The company's first plant was located at 301-315 West Huron, running from the corner of First Street down to the railroad tracks. (In the 1990s an elegant restaurant, named “Robby's at the Icehouse” was in that building but a floor above where the ice was made.) The company owned more land, on the north side of Huron just west of the railroad tracks, which they used for horse barns and for coal storage. In 1927 they moved the whole operation there, having built a larger, more modern plant at 408-416 West Huron.

Both plants had a production area, a storage room, a loading dock, a truck repair space, and an office. In the first plant, water took forty-eight hours to freeze, while in the newer one the time was cut to twenty-four hours. City water was poured into 200- or 300-pound molds. After it froze, the ice was lifted with cranes and removed from the molds with running water, then stored upright in the storage area until needed.

A few customers came to the factory to get their ice, but most had it delivered. Walter Schlecht, who worked as a driver at the first plant, loaded his horse-drawn delivery wagon by hand, sliding the ice to the loading dock with the aid of ice tongs. Clarence Haas, a driver in the second plant, had it easier: he drove a truck, which he loaded by pushing the ice blocks onto a conveyor belt that automatically notched the ice into twenty-five-pound sections on its way down.

Schlecht had a longer day than Haas—he had to spend time each morning getting the horses from the barn and hitching them to the wagon—but he found that horses did have advantages. He was hired in the summer of 1918, while still a teenager, to replace a driver who had been fired when he showed up for work drunk. When Schlecht asked where to go, his boss answered "Just follow the horses—they know the route."

Customers placed square cards in their windows, each corner differently colored to indicate orders for 25, 50, 75, or 100 pounds. The icemen would cut the desired amount on site, since carrying the ice around in large blocks reduced melting. Even so, some melting occurred during the day, and customers toward the end of the route sometimes complained that their 25-pound pieces were not as big as they should be.

Electric refrigerators were first seriously marketed for homes in the teens of the 20th century, but it took them a long time to totally replace iceboxes. "The change was gradual," recalls Haas, who began work as a driver in 1929. He says the change was further slowed by World War II, when manufacture of refrigerators ceased so those factories could be used to make war supplies.

Because ice sales were heavily concentrated in the summer, the Artificial Ice Company developed a complementary business selling coal during the winter. But coal sales also were hurt by technological improvements, as people switched to oil and gas furnaces.

To eke out more money as the ice and coal business waned, the Artificial Ice Company changed the truck repair shop in the back of the factory into a cold storage area for keg beer used by area bars. This area has been remodelled into the kitchen for Say Cheese.

The last owner of the Artificial Ice Company was Carl Rehberg, son of Louis Rehberg, the brewmaster of Northern Brewery on Jones Street. Rehberg inherited the brewery, and during Prohibition started Arbor Springs water company, selling the spring water formerly used for beer. A part owner and employee of the Artificial Ice Company from the early days (he was the immediate boss of both Schlecht and Haas), he worked out joint contracts with many local companies to have drinking water and the ice to keep it cool delivered simultaneously.

After the Artificial Ice Company was dissolved in 1965, Rehberg continued running Arbor Springs. After he died, his wife, Elsa, ran it a few years and then sold it to the present owners, Bill and Judith Davis.

[Photo caption from book]: The complex at 408-416 W. Huron, now houses offices. “Courtesy Bentley Historical Library”

Bach School's new playground was once a West Side bar

Children playing on the Bach School playground probably have no idea that it was once the location of adult recreation. From 1901 to 1919, a beer distributorship and popular West Side drinking spot was located behind Jacob Dupper's home at what was then 439 Fifth Street, now the north end of the playground. In those pre-zoning days, he ran several businesses from out-buildings on the property. His barn was the Ann Arbor distributorship for Buckeye and Green Seal beers, both made by a Toledo brewery. And a small structure usually called "the shop" was the neighborhood bar.

The Dupper family lived at 439 Fifth Street, now the north end of the Bach School playground, and ran a beer distributorship from their barn.

The shop stood across the driveway from Dupper's house and farther back from the street. Neighborhood men came in the evening to share a companionable drink, to chat, and to play cards. Dupper's grandson, Henry Velker, from whom most of this information was obtained, remembers that the clientele came from all over the Old West Side, then still known as the city's Second Ward.

The building (also sometimes called "the caboose") was furnished with tables and a short bar. It had room for about thirty or forty people, who could buy beer, wine, or whiskey. Velker remembers that customers came in all seasons, although in the summer they usually came later in the evening after their chores were finished. In the winter, when darkness descended sooner, they came earlier and stayed longer.

The customers were all men. Erna Steinke Jahnke, who grew up on nearby Jefferson Street in the years that Dupper's business was in operation, says that she never heard of any women going there. Parents also discouraged their children from hanging around the neighborhood bar.

George Voelker delivered beer with the aid of a horse named Sam.

Jacob Dupper was born in 1860 in Bondorf, a small town thirty miles south of Stuttgart. According to Velker, Dupper learned the brewery and distributing business while still in Germany. When he moved to Ann Arbor in his twenties, his first job was working for the Northern Brewery on the north side of town.

In 1901, Dupper obtained the Ann Arbor franchise for Buckeye and Green Seal beers. Although there were two local breweries, many local residents disloyally claimed that the Toledo brands tasted better. Dupper kept them supplied, delivering the beer to stores, restaurants, fraternities, and private parties.

As a sideline, he also delivered ice. He had his own icehouse on the property, stocked with ice cut and shipped in from Whitmore Lake. The barn served as his beer warehouse and also housed the horses and wagons he used for deliveries.

The beer was shipped from Toledo, in both bottles and kegs, via the Ann Arbor Railroad and was unloaded at the Ashley Street station on a First Street spur of the tracks. From there it was taken by horse and wagon the five blocks to the Dupper house.

Fred Dupper behind the counter of his shop.

When Dupper died in 1907, his son, Fred Dupper, took over the business with his wife, Minnie. Fred Dupper's brother-in-law, George Voelker, who lived across the street, worked as a driver for the company. (George Voelker was Henry Velker's father. Velker changed the spelling of the name to more closely match the pronunciation.)

Though the shop and the distributorship closed with the beginning of Prohibition in 1919, the Duppers continued to live in the house for many years. Sam Schlecht, who lived on Fifth Street in the 1920's, remembers the painted ads for Buckeye Beer on the sides of Dupper's barn long after the beer itself had disappeared.

Fred Dupper died in the early 1940s. The house was used as a residence for about twenty more years, until it was torn down to make room for an expansion of the Bach School playground.

The city-owned market turns eighty next year. Its future looked bleak a decade ago, but today the biggest problem is competition for space.

“I have been to markets all over the world,” says Al Kierczak, a farmer who’s been coming to the Farmers’ Market since 1927, “and Ann Arbor is the nicest. It has the most variety.” His wife, Florence, confirms that wherever they travel, Kierczak spends part of their vacation taking a busman’s holiday, checking out the local markets in Europe, South America, and Japan.

Kierczak started coming to the Ann Arbor market with his parents when he was eight years old, riding in from their farm near Milan in an open Model T pickup. In those days the market was held around the old courthouse at Main and Huron, which had sweeping lawns on all four sides. Kierczak’s dad and the other farmers would back their trucks up to the sidewalk and set up tables to display their produce. If it was a hot day, they’d put up umbrellas.

The curb market, as it was originally called, was started in May 1919 by the Community Federation, composed of representatives from several women’s organizations. The group believed it could cut food costs by eliminating the middleman. In fact, several grocers, fearing the competition, went to the common council to object to the plan. They were overruled, and the council and the board of public works approved the federation’s request to let the farmers sell from the streets adjacent to the courthouse.

The Curb Market on North Fourth Ave.

The original market began with ten farmers on the Main Street side of the courthouse. According to Rudy Weiner, each farmer sold something different: Adolph Weiner, Rudy’s father, sold flowers (he had emigrated from Austria where he was head gardener for Emperor Franz Joseph); Flora Osborne sold celery, Chinese cabbage, and onions; and the Riecherts of Chelsea sold fruit. Many of the farmers came in horse-drawn wagons. They’d leave their wagons at the curb and stable the horses in the dairy barn on the corner of Miller Avenue and First Street. If they had any produce left at the end of the day, they’d hitch up the horses and peddle it around town.

The city’s growth has long since overrun some of the early growers’ farms. The Weiners’ farm was on Packard, near where the Darlington Lutheran Church is now. The Osborne place was near today’s city airport, and the Dickinsons, another early market family, had a farm on Broadway. The market organizers talked of limiting the market to only Washtenaw County farmers, but since one of the early participants was from outside the county, they decided against it. But another rule they made at the time is still rigorously enforced: everything sold at the market must be produced by the vendors themselves.

The early vendors sold everything their farms produced--not just vegetables, fruit, and flowers, but also honey, eggs, dairy products, baked goods, and poultry--chickens were the most common, but turkeys, ducks, and geese also could be found at the market. Esther Kapp remembers that her family sold beef and pork that her father butchered. Several people even remember seeing dressed muskrat for sale.

With so many things for sale, it’s obvious why some of the local merchants were worried about the competition. But, bowing to the inevitable, some began buying market produce--such as seasonal strawberries, or Flora Osborne’s onions--by the crate or bushel to resell in their stores. Not wanting to sell out and disappoint their regular clientele, some of the farmers set aside a certain amount for wholesale or brought in an extra buggy-load for the stores.

As the number of farmers increased, people objected to clogging up Main Street, so the market moved to the Fourth Avenue side of the courthouse, then eventually wrapped around onto Ann Street. The market never used the Huron Street side, since it was too busy a street to block off. (Before expressways, Huron/Washtenaw was the main highway through town.) During the peak of the growing season, there were so many farmers that the market expanded to the far side of Fourth Avenue, in front of what was then the YMCA and is now the county annex. To limit traffic congestion, the farmers who used that space had to move their trucks out of the way after they unloaded. The market was such a success that in 1921 the common council decided to take it over. It has been a city market managed by a council-appointed commission ever since.

Anna Biederman was the city’s first market master. Born in Germany, she moved to Ann Arbor with her husband, John, and raised nine children. “She knew all about growing,” says Warren Staebler, who remembers her as the director of the victory garden he was involved in as a child during World War I, on land between Seventh and Eighth streets. Biederman did the same in World War II, and between the wars directed the children at Bach Elementary School in gardening on their own plots on what is today the school’s playground.

Biederman traveled to other markets around the state and became an authority on how to organize a community market. “Throughout the trying early years and the development into the present large market Mrs. Biederman has been the ruling spirit,” claimed a 1934 Ann Arbor News article. Her grandson, John Biederman, remembers her as “a little, short, chubby woman, very outspoken. When she ran the market, she ran the market.”

John remembers that his family benefited from one of the perks of Biederman’s position. “On market days we would get a call from grandma saying, ‘I’ve got a whole bunch of cabbages, or carrots, or beets. Come get them.’ The farmers would give them to her, and there would be too much for two people to eat.”

As the amount of traffic and the number of sellers increased in the 1920s, the courthouse square became a less satisfactory location for the market. In 1931, Gottlob Luick, a former mayor (1899–1901), solved the problem by donating land for a permanent site between Fourth Avenue and Detroit Street, which had been used by his lumber company. Adolph Weiner worked with Luick to design the market.

It was the midst of the Depression, so the city didn’t have money to develop the site, but the farmers made do, selling their produce from the sidewalk that fronted Detroit Street. They used wooden sheds from the old lumberyard for protection in rain and to keep warm in the winter. They created more space by adding a boardwalk along the northern edge of the property, creating an L-shaped layout. The wooden walkway protected people from the mud and also helped level a sloping piece of land. “It was three feet at the highest and then tapered down,” recalls fruit grower Alex Nemeth, who, like Al Kierczak, started coming to the market with his parents when he was a child. “I’d crawl under it with the other kids, looking for coins that dropped through.”

WPA Construction of the Farmers' Market in Kerrytown.

From 1938 to 1940, the present 124-stall market was built by the federal Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era jobs program. WPA workers roofed and paved the market and added another short wing extending west from Detroit Street. A market headquarters, a small tan brick building, was built in the middle, where the parking dynameter is today. Market managers used the back room for an office, while farmers used the lounge in front to get warm and to eat sack lunches.

Shortly after the market was finished, Charles McCalla built a cinder-block building just north of the market for his Washtenaw Farm Bureau store. He used the new building as a store and feed mill, and the old lumber warehouse on the corner of Fifth and Kingsley for storage and parts. (Both buildings are now part of Kerrytown.)

McCalla ground grain into livestock feed and sold prepared feeds, seeds, pet supplies, and penny candy. With such a convenient location, many market farmers bought supplies there. In 1962, McCalla’s son and daughter-in-law, Ray and Shirley McCalla, took over the business and renamed it Washtenaw Farm and Garden Center. In 1969, they sold the buildings to Kerrytown’s developers and moved their operation to Dexter.

Another nearby business that catered to the farmers was a small eatery run by Bill Biederman, Anna’s son. At the time the WPA market was built, there were still four houses along Fourth Avenue west of the market. Bill Biederman lived in one of the houses and ran a modest restaurant in his kitchen, serving breakfasts and light lunches--hamburgers, chili, soup. John Biederman worked as a dishwasher and cook for his uncle when he was a teenager. He remembers there were about nine stools and some little armchairs. When Anna Biederman retired, Bill took over as market manager.

During the food shortages of World War II, the market was busier than ever. Mildred Parker remembers customers lining up five or six stalls back to buy her chickens. “Finally,” she remembers, “I counted how many were left and then came out and said I’d sell one to each and the rest should go home.”

From its inception through the 1960s, market stalls were in great demand. “Quite a few [growers] would stay all night the night before to get a preferred spot,” Alex Nemeth remembers. Bob Dieterle, who still works the family farm near Saline, remembers that his mother used to go at 2 a.m. and park across from the armory to make sure she’d get a stall.

Once they had secured a spot, many stayed up all night, or close to it, getting ready for the market. Dieterle’s wife, Luella, used to spend the night picking flowers, a flashlight under her arm. Esther Kapp remembers harvesting until 1:30 a.m. and then rising again at 4 a.m. for the trip to town. Her three brothers stayed behind on the farm on Northfield Church Road to continue picking; while Kapp and her mother sold, her dad would drive back and forth all day to pick up fresh produce.

Winter was an even more trying time. Bob Dieterle didn’t miss a Saturday for fifty-seven years. “People depended on us to bring eggs,” he says. “Once when there was a big snowstorm, when we still had horses, I knew my dad’s ’34 Ford couldn’t reach the corner [to the main road], so I had the horses pull it there. I met him there with the horses when he returned at three.” Mildred Parker remembers selling eggs on a day when it was nineteen degrees below zero. “I had just the empty containers on the table. When I made a sale, I’d go to the truck, but every carton had at least one cracked egg. I could see they were frozen, so I just went home.” The farmers dressed warmly and rigged up homemade stoves, called “salamanders,” to keep warm.

Over the years, fewer and fewer people were willing to endure such hardships. For one thing, health regulations kept limiting what the farmers could bring to the market. In the 1950s, stricter standards stopped the sale of unrefrigerated dairy products: butter, milk, cottage cheese, buttermilk. Next, the state barred the farmers from selling meat. Kapp recalls, “We always had the meat in ice. It was a Lansing problem, not the meat inspector’s. We went up to Lansing to complain, but they had made up their mind.” In 1977 baked goods were banned unless they were prepared in a separate, licensed commercial kitchen.

The market went through a low point in the 1970s and 1980s. With farmers finding it harder to stay in business and local retailers luring shoppers away with more and better produce, the number of vendors plunged 40 percent between 1976 and 1988. That year, the Observer published an article asking, “Will the market survive to the year 2000?”

To keep the market going, the commission implemented two important changes. Some veteran growers were allowed to spread out, renting three or even four stalls. And for the first time, a dozen booths were permanently rented to craftspeople--woodworker Coleman Jewett’s Adirondack chairs, for instance, are now a fixture at the market’s north end.

Today the market is again full. According to Maxine Rosasco, market manager since 1987, there is even a waiting list: the `54 produce vendors and 144 craftspeople, who currently rent daily as space permits, want to be assigned permanent stalls.

While the turnaround is good news for the market, it also means that the two stopgap changes in the 1980s have become a problem. Pointing to their numbers, the craftspeople are lobbying for more space. “We set up Sunday for an artisans’ market, but they’d rather come on Saturday,” says Rosasco. And there is also friction among the growers themselves.

The waiting list for produce vendors is surprising--after all, farming has only gotten tougher in the last decade, and farms around the city have continued to be gobbled up by new subdivisions. But those losses have been more than made up for by growers coming from farther afield, as far away as Allen and Coldwater. And despite increased competition from supermarkets and produce markets, shoppers have continued to flock to the market for specialties, like Ken King’s organic produce and George Merkle’s Chinese vegetables.

“Buyers are more sophisticated,” says Florence Kierczak. “Years ago we didn’t sell kohlrabi, people didn’t know what it was. Now they do.” The Nemeth family has expanded its variety of fruit, offering customers different tastes, and also gaining a longer harvest. And many growers have responded to shoppers’ demands for bedding plants, especially perennials, as well as for cut flowers and herbs. The downside of the market’s resurgence is growing tension between longtime vendors and newcomers who’d like to get into the market. Some of the growers on the waiting list think that the vendors with four stalls should be made to give one up.

That, of course, isn’t going over well with the veteran growers. Says Mildred Parker, “They think they should get a stall right way. Some of us waited four or five years, or even ten, to get where we wanted.” The growers with multiple stalls say they need the space because they have to sell more now to make up for rising costs--for instance, new state health rules require that farmers making apple cider to have a separate press building with a cement floor. “One stall was adequate for each farm in the early days,” says Alex Nemeth. “Now you need two or three to make a living.”

Physically the market’s layout hasn’t changed much since the WPA finished its work, except for gradual expansions as houses on Fourth Avenue were acquired and demolished or moved. In 1980, city voters turned down a bond proposal to rebuild and winterize the market, apparently feeling the changes would make it too glitzy (although most of the farmers would have appreciated the warmth!). But by saving up vendors’ fees, the market commission was able to replace the roofs and gutters and build a new office at the market’s south end.

Crowds at the market remain strong, especially in midsummer when foot traffic gets so thick shoppers sometimes find it hard to move. The farmers for their part have warm feelings for the market beyond just making a living. Many have been involved for several generations and have become close friends, almost family, with their fellow farmers. Parker first brought her daughter in a playpen. In later years, her daughter became such good friends with the Kapps’ daughter that people didn’t know which kid belonged with which stall. The farmers have also made friends with their customers over the years. Says Olive Conant, “They’d talk to you, tell you things they wouldn’t tell others—they think farmers have a more down-to-earth life.”