A-squared was moderately post-hippy when I was imn grad school there in the 1980s, but when I lived there two summers in the mid-90s, working in Detroit law school summers, it was totally and utterly yupped out. There are still local merchants, but there is a lot of the same Gap/J Crew/Abercombie & Fitch, etc. stuff you get everywhere. And ubiquitous (iniquitous?) Starbucks. Which, despite its evil effects on local coffee shops and its lousy coffee nonetheless seems to be a reasonably decent employer.) The anchor bookstore --w hen I was a grad student there in the 80s -- was Borders. It was the only Borders there was. ANd it didn't sell coffee or music, just books. Borders is still there, but its role as a scholarly bookstore has been taken over by my friend Karl Phort's Shaman Drum.
jks
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> At least into the '60s Ann Arbor was (so to speak) a
> paradise of local
> merchants. When Robert Hall tried to open a shop
> there, the local
> merchants arranged that no trucking company would
> carry goods from the
> Detroit Rail Freight yards to Ann Arbor for Robert
> Hall. The local
> merchants also had a private club (one of those with
> a stream running
> under a glass floor in the dining room) one of whose
> rules was no one
> connected to the university could be a member. I
> presume by now the
> local merchants' grip on the town has been broken,
> but in the 1950s it
> made Ann Arbor, _except_ for the university, a
> pretty grim place. It
> didn't seem to have change an enormous amount
> (except for a build-up on
> Stadium Boulevard) when I was there for a conference
> in 1970, but that
> was only a few days and I could have missed a lot.
> The biggest change I
> remember from that year was that they had replaced
> crockery with plastic
> cups in the Mens' Union cafeteria.
>
> Carrol
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