Ann Arbor Ypsilanti Reads Event: Historic Photographs of Ann Arbor With Local History Experts Wystan Stevens and Kingsbury Marzolf

Sat, 06/10/2006 - 3:21pm

When: February 21, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Join Wystan Stevens, local history buff and Former Kempf House Museum Curator, and Kingsbury Marzolf, retired UM Architecture Professor, for a delightful look back in time as they present photographs from the very rare local history book, Art Work of Washtenaw County, published in 1893. Photos include buildings, Main Street scenes and more. Marzolf and Stevens will provide delightful commentary for each.This event is co-sponsored by the Washtenaw County Historical Society and is also held in conjunction with Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads 2010, which, this year focuses on the subject of Michigan.

Transcript

[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC]
[00:00:36.03] TIM GRIMES: Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. My name is Tim Grimes -- I'm the manager of community relations and marketing here at the library. It is a beautiful February afternoon, and I want to thank you for spending it here with us and this wonderful program. This is one of many events that we have here at the library. You can find out more about our events at aadl.org or by grabbing our brochures in the back. This is also a special event because we're connecting it with Ann Arbor Ypsilanti Reads. We hold Ann Arbor Ypsilanti Reads each year. It's a community initiative to get people talking and reading and discussing a common book and a common theme. The book this year is The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis, and the theme this year is Michigan. So, we have a lot of programs about Michigan. Our final program is going to be this Thursday, it's Green Industry and the Future of Michigan -- I think that'll be a wonderful event Thursday night here at 7:00. But today's program centers on a special part of Michigan, Ann Arbor. It's co-sponsored by the Wastenaw County Historical Society, and here from the society is Ralph Beebe.
[00:01:50.58] RALPH BEEBE: Well, we're getting a nice break from the Olympics. Why not? I'm Ralph Beebe. I'm program chair for the Historical Society and the museum on Main Street -- many of you know about that. We have two more programs in the series this year, February, March and April -- this is the February one. In March our speaker will be the restoration of 1526 Pontiac Trail and the program will be held at the Ypsilanti District Library. And then the final meeting for the year is on April 18, 90 Years, Lake Michigan Crossings, and that will be at the Traverwood -- the Ann Arbor District Library Traverwood branch. I'm very grateful to the library association and the district library for permitting us to use and have a coordinated meeting with them. We've done this several years now and it's wonderful, because the museum space is so limited, and if there's an exhibit there's just not enough room there to have programs. So, we're filling up this -- I think it's standing room only almost, right.
[00:03:00.62] The next exhibit -- the museum does not have an exhibit on right now. They are working on installing a new exhibit that will open on March 6 and run through June 20, and it will be called Use It Or Lose It -- isn't that right? Use It Or Lose It. And it was having to do with preservation of buildings and the properties involved. That's why the speaker that we have in March will be the restoration of that house on 1526 Pontiac Trail.
[00:03:41.40] But to get to today's program -- thank you all for coming. The title of the show, you can see here, Wystan Stevens and Kingsbury Marzholf. They will be doing this program as a Mutt and Jeff combination - the two of them tossing this program back and forth between them. So it should be a lively program, so I'll turn the program over to Kingbury and Wystan. Thank you.
[00:04:03.28] WYSTAN STEVENS: Actually, we do Laurel and Hardy, not Mutt and Jeff.
[00:04:05.97] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right. We've been talking about doing it for years but we've never done it, Ollie. When are we gonna do it?
[00:04:13.03] WYSTAN STEVENS: We do it every 17 years until we get it right.
[00:04:17.61] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right. Tell them about the book before we start.
[00:04:20.33] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yes. And actually this program was Kingsbury's idea I think in the first place, back in 18--. Back in 1993.
[00:04:28.66] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: 189--. Yes.
[00:04:30.95] WYSTAN STEVENS: I knew it was a previous century. He had been copying the photographs from this wonderful book called Artwork of Washtenaw County using the Bentley Library's files of the photos. I think the Bentley Library copy of the work is disassembled. I'm not sure, I haven't looked at it for a long time.
[00:04:53.73] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: No. I think the one here was--. You reported in your message that the one here has been taken apart.
[00:05:00.63] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah. You work from a solid copy?
[00:05:03.85] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I work from a book.
[00:05:05.52] WYSTAN STEVENS: Because when I looked at the Bentley photos years and years ago, they had some loose ones -- I didn't realize they had a book, too. It doesn't matter. We're kind of maundering here. The point is that this book came out in 1893. It was put together by an outfit in Chicago, which I think was capitalizing on an interest in American architecture and history that had been stimulated a bit by the Chicago World's Fair, the Columbian exposition of the 400th anniversary of the discovery the New World by Columbus. And that fair was held in Chicago, The Great White City on the Lake it was called, and brought a lot of people into that area.
[00:05:51.82] Anyway, this company started to put out books for various municipalities around the country, and we don't know exactly how it was done but it was probably some kind of missionary effort where they would send out an agent to talk to the prominent citizens of a community and persuade them to invest in the work or at least to promise to purchase a certain number of copies of the finished work. It turns out if you Google "artwork of," that phrase, on the internet, you can come up with 64 different titles that this company put out in a period of about seven or eight years. I think the last one was in 1898. One of them, one of the early ones, happened to be the artwork of Washtenaw County. So, in 1993 it seemed a logical thing to do when we have these photographs to put them together with commentary and present it as a program to the Washtenaw County Historical Society. We did it at the Bentely Historical Library on that occasion. If you were there then, you don't have to stay now because it's the same pictures.
[00:07:16.48] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: You've seen it all.
[00:07:17.32] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah. We do this every 17 years, as I say, until we get it right.
[00:07:22.73] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right. I think it's interesting, you told me that these were put out in 12 segments so that they came out, apparently every month you got a group of these and then you could put together your own book.
[00:07:38.87] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think those are called facicles.
[00:07:40.81] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh. Good.
[00:07:41.76] WYSTAN STEVENS: You take the fascicles and you bind them at the end. The word fascism related to that?
[00:07:48.75] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, I guess it does, doesn't it, this pulling together of something. It's interesting because it was in each of these 12 parts, there's no order or any logic. By the way, Ypsilanti is in there, and so is Milan and Dexter, and I think maybe Chelsea in some other places, and a few sort of landscapes and rivers. But otherwise they are all in certain small communities. With Ann Arbor not surprisingly getting the most of these pictures. There also is no particular order in any kind of chronology -- the buildings are just a mix in the book. So, that means you can take these and do anything you want with them. And we've put these together to form a kind of tour through the city.
[00:08:36.81] I first wanted to show you what is not in the book. These are a couple of examples of our very nice classical revival -- houses in Ann Arbor and they are not in there. And maybe as we go on we could figure out why, but it's possible that they thought these were too old-fashioned. Can you imagine somebody in 1893 say oh, we don't want that old-fashioned classical revival stuff , we're going to do this up-to-date stuff we're doing now, right. And the fact is of the pictures that we're going to show you, the earliest date on any building in it that we can identify is 1860. So that means they really stuck to the last 33 years in putting this together.
[00:09:27.15] This is a view from up on Cedar Bend Drive back when you could see down over the city, and now the trees are all grown up so you don't get such a view, but it's fun to see this thing as it was then.
[00:09:41.75] WYSTAN STEVENS: The university hospitals on Catherine Street, there was a row of about five buildings there eventually and you can see some of the early ones there at the far left.
[00:09:53.27] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well just to show you what you see now, you see that. So it's not much of a place to look down on the city anymore. Remember, that's the street that it starts up off of Broadway and then works his way as a path now down to, is it Getty's where there's another piece of it? Fuller? Fuller, that's right. And there's some houses down there, but in between I guess you can still walk through there, but you can't drive through it. Anyway that's--. Remember this folks? If you go up on Will Street or Wilton's [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. That's where this picture was taken, I think, years ago, but I went up there and by golly, if you try to get through the underbrush to take a picture you would plummet 25 feet down onto the tracks so I gave it up.
[00:10:46.39] WYSTAN STEVENS: What you have here is a panorama of Argo Pond, the lower end of Argo Pond that's been such a subject of controversy the past year. This is the Argo Dam down here, the old version of it. And sweeping across the center of the picture here is the Toledo and Ann Arbor and North Michigan Railroad. That was an early name for what is now the Ann Arbor Railroad. It went into bankruptcy in the 1890s right after these pictures were taken. The name was changed during bankruptcy simply to the Ann Arbor Railroad. It's interesting that we have here examples of two of the early bridge structures on the railroad.
[00:11:37.55] This stuff over here is the original wooden rip-rap that supported the original trestle that was designed by Charles Ezra Greene, professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Michigan. That stood there for about 10 years starting at 1881. Then it was replaced in 1891 or '92 by this trestle that you see here in 1893, which was made of steel. But the owner of the railroad, a man named James F. Ashley, for whom Ashley Street in Ann Arbor was named, he was originally from Toledo, he'd been a congressman and was building the railroad on a shoestring. Although he realized that it was important and it was time to replace the wooden trestle with a steel one, he skimped on the recipe. He didn't use as much steel as his new engineer, Henry Riggs had recommended, with the disastrous result in January of 1904, the collapse of this trestle under an increasingly heavy load of freight. In 1904, of course, it had to be rebuilt, and that's the trestle that's still there now. It's been there for 106 years. Who knows how many months it has to go.
[00:13:10.25] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Wystan, was there a train on it when it collapsed?
[00:13:17.70] WYSTAN STEVENS: There was a train on it when it collapsed, yes. Once I was at a meeting of the Historical Society and the late Ray Spokes was present, and he recalled the collapse -- I guess we were showing pictures of old Ann Arbor then -- and he remembered as a lad going out in 1904 on the ice in January of 1904. He'd read or heard somewhere that there was one of those freight cars on the ice loaded with Beeman's Pepsin Gum. He went out there and somehow was able to sneak out, I don't know, several hundred pounds of Beeman's Pepsin Gum, which was soaking wet, of course. He took it up to his grandmother's house on High Street overlooking the river, and says he dried it in her oven over the weekend and then sold it at the Jone's School, two packs for a nickel or something like that. That was his first experience in capitalism.
[00:14:27.89] WYSTAN STEVENS: All right. There. Dr. Chase's steam print house. We're going down Main Street sort of from North to South starting with that trestle. This is at Miller.
[00:14:43.95] WYSTAN STEVENS: Bracketed Italianate.
[00:14:45.84] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, and a beautiful one with all of the cornice work on it, but that's gone, unfortunately.
[00:14:58.32] WYSTAN STEVENS: That was the building that Dr. Chase erected in segments. The original part was the part right at the left -- just the one-third there at the left on the corner. To publisher his newspaper called The Peninsular Career and Family Visitant, and one of about half a dozen weekly newspapers in Ann Arbor in the 1860s. So in 1868 he erected that part -- well, you got a '64 there, don't you. I guess it was '68 that the second part came. That was of the other two-thirds. He put out a book of recipes, which also included household remedies -- very important at a time when doctors were far from the far flung farms of the midwest, and one needed to do one's own doctoring and having Dr. Chase's book was an essential part of this. It became the national bestseller. Unfortunately, Dr. Chase was something of a hypochondriac, and he was making all this money, he had tripled the size of his building. In 1869 when it was finished he said let's have a party. He invited all the hoi polloi of Ann Arbor to come down and see his building and pay him his dues. Then announced that he was going to sell everything he owned and leave town and move to Minnesota. Minnesota being far more salubrious climate, I guess in his rather bewildered imagination. And he made a deal with a man named Rice Beal of Ann Arbor -- Beal Avenue commemorates the name of Rice Beal's son, Junius, who was a region of the university for many years. And then Beal agreed without a whole lot of arm-twisting to take the building off of Dr. Chase's hands and the newspaper, which was going great guns.
[00:17:16.17] Also, the book rights to all future publications of anything under the name of Dr. Chase, and the inventory in the building and a few other goodies. And Dr. Chase got some money -- we don't know how much, and a rundown hotel in a suburb of Minneapolis, which is so obscure I don't even remember the name of the town. He went off there to manage this hotel. Said later that it was a great experience. But he came back to Ann Arbor after only a year or two with his tail between his legs. He found out that his health was not that bad that he had to spend his time in Minnesota. At least one winter was enough to cure him. Then he came back to town and tried to start the business again. He tried to put a new book together, and he started a new newspaper with other investors. And Beal, said wait a minute, we had a deal, and he took Chase to court. The suit quickly went all the way up to the Supreme Court of Michigan and Dr. Chase lost. He had to give the rights to the second volume of recipes to Mr. Beal. He had to sell his interest in the newspaper or Beal would have been able to put it out of business and his fellow investors would have lost their shirts. So this was a grinding experience for Dr. Chase, but we still have this building. Unfortunately, sans the cornice, and sans that interesting archway.
[00:19:13.69] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I think it was Johnson, Johnson and Roy that first started fixing up this building and for awhile had their office in it, I recall, from the 1970s.
[00:19:26.80] WYSTAN STEVENS: And then Dobson McOmber Insurance was in there for quite awhile.
[00:19:32.16] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: So it's nice that we still have it at least, isn't it?
[00:19:35.53] WYSTAN STEVENS: Be nice if somebody would put the cornice back on. Hint, hint.
[00:19:40.23] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, right. This is one of my favorites. If this had still been here when I was in preservation stuff, I would had been marching next to that to save it. I think it's a great building, but I've never heard anything about who designed it. Clearly, somebody must have designed this thing.
[00:19:57.61] WYSTAN STEVENS: Or during a nightmare one night. Probably had too many Welsh Rarebits the night before.
[00:20:07.41] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I see it lasted till 1935, which means that I hadn't quite made it here yet. I was only six at that time.
[00:20:17.27] WYSTAN STEVENS: It was eight years before I was born so I won't take the blame either. It's called the Beal Block, we should mention that.
[00:20:25.39] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: The Beal Block?
[00:20:25.79] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, this was built by Rice Beal after he took over Dr. Chase's empire. He erected this building to rent to the Federal government for the Post Office. That was kind of handy because one of the clauses of his contract with Dr. Chase stipulated that all mail arriving in Ann Arbor addressed to Dr. Chase should be delivered to one Rice Beal. Dr. Chase found this extremely annoying when he came back to town. But it continued for awhile at least, and this is where the mail was delivered and where Mr. Beal came to pick up Dr. Chase's letters.
[00:21:13.44] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: It lasted as a Post Office for 27 seven years, apparently.
[00:21:17.12] WYSTAN STEVENS: It was an interesting building, but very crowded on the ground floor where the Post Office itself was located. Professional offices were rented upstairs. The students at the university used to love to come down here at night and all run into the building at one time, so that the towns people couldn't get near it to pick up their own mail. This was before home delivery for a few years. I think we finally did get -- Susan knows -- when did we get home delivery, 1887?
[00:21:45.51] SUSAN: [INAUDIBLE].
[00:21:51.60] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think this was erected in I thought 1883, but 1882 is close enough. And Beal--.
[00:22:01.42] TIM GRIMES: Someone has a comment on that.
[00:22:04.15] AUDIENCE: Well, actually I had a question whether it was common for bathrooms to be located in Post Offices in those days.
[00:22:15.40] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
[00:22:15.63] WYSTAN STEVENS: No. This was not a government building. The Post Office only rented the ground floor area for the Post Office activities. Bathrooms were strewn all over Main Street, and this was at a time before running water was necessarily piped into all the homes in town -- that didn't start until 1885 when we got our water company privately owned at that time.
[00:22:41.95] TIM GRIMES: One more question here--.
[00:22:42.81] WYSTAN STEVENS: People used to go downtown and take a bath. It was a service that was offered by various commercial enterprises.
[00:22:53.49] AUDIENCE: What's hanging over the street? That couldn't be electrical -- over on the left hand side.
[00:22:58.42] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, that's one of the original street lights. This picture is not from 1882, this was--.
[00:23:05.15] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: '93.
[00:23:05.69] WYSTAN STEVENS: That's right, '93, and that probably would be from the van Depoele Company that put in the first electrical lights.
[00:23:15.65] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well, there's been a lot of things on his corner. Unfortunately, I don't have any record of the various things that have been there, but now it has this, and I don't even know who the architect is for this.
[00:23:28.48] WYSTAN STEVENS: Well, you know we lost that building in 1935 because the Ann Arbor News, which was located right next door, wanted to expand. So they bought the building and tore it down. Then right after they demolished this wonderful [? crocketed ?] exuberant building, they changed their minds about building the new plant on that site and decided to go over to the corner of Division Street and Huron and demolish the old Presbyterian church and build on that site. So they were able to demolish two historic structures for the price of one, so to speak.
[00:24:12.53] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: And now they've been demolished.
[00:24:15.01] WYSTAN STEVENS: This was a vacant lot for five years before a Kroger store went in.
[00:24:21.02] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: If anybody knows who the architect for this is, they can tell me later and I'll put it in there sometime. It's a Washtenaw county building now, apparently. Well this is just a view down South along Main Street from Ann's Street. So the building that you see are on the West side of Main Street. I think it's a wonderful picture and you notice that typically of the 19th Century, our cities had a kind of scale about them, which unfortunately, today they've lost. You don't really have any West fronts anymore, unless you can say that this one down there is -- that's all that's left now.
[00:25:08.26] WYSTAN STEVENS: Someone was asking before the program started where the Whitney Theater used to be located, and it was that building on the corner there. In this picture it had a French second empire roof on it, but that was later torn off and two more stories were added there. The Playbill leaning against the post outside is for a play called Lost in New York.
[00:25:33.21] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: And that sat right there once in that parking lot area. We're going to turn around and look at the County Courthouse. I realized by the time I came here as a student in the fall of '49, they had already taken the tower off of this thing, and maybe that's why I didn't remember it.
[00:25:57.18] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think that's why people didn't value it as much when it finally was destroyed, that they allowed that to happen. Of course, that was a project, replacing this building with the so-called County building of the 1950s. That was a project pushed very strongly by the five-term mayor of Ann Arbor, William E. Brown, Junior. He was the father of Shary Brown of the Ann Arbor Art Association. At a meeting he's quoted as saying, "That building was erected in the 19th Century -- need I say more." That was his philosophy of get rid of it. This is the wonder that we have replacing it.
[00:26:46.25] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Not only did we lose the building, but we lost the sense of place because the lawn is gone, too. I think it's a really sad thing that happened.
[00:26:56.45] WYSTAN STEVENS: It was very economical. They built the new building around the old one so they could still keep using the old one until it was time to tear it down, and then that became the parking lot for the new structure. And just before it was demolished, all the records were passed through the windows from the old building to the new, from the County Clerk's Office and the Register of Deeds and so forth. Then it came time to say goodbye, and I've heard from Judge Ross Campbell years ago that Judge Breakey, our only Circuit Judge at the time, was talking with the County Clerk, Luella Smith in her office there on the ground floor of the new building. They both had the idea at the same instant to see what had happened to the Statue of Justice up there on the cornice, up on the parapet of the old building. They ran to the window just in time to see the wrecking ball strike her off of her perch. It wasn't even worth saving the Statue of Justice. Some people might say that's kind of symbolic about the situation with government locally, anyway.
[00:28:13.73] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: It may be that -- I think it was yesterday I came across a photograph -- I'll bet it was in Susan's book in Lost Ann Arbor, because it was a view of the new building wrapped around the old one looking down on it, so you saw the roof of the old building without its tower. I didn't have time to scan it and get it in here or I'd have included it. So this is a very sad part of our story. Let's go on to something--.
[00:28:41.66] WYSTAN STEVENS: Ralph Gerganoff, incidentally, was an architect who practiced in Ypsilanti, so this is Ypsilanti's revenge on Ann Arbor.
[00:28:52.86] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, dear. All right.
[00:28:54.43] WYSTAN STEVENS: He did some good work though.
[00:28:57.98] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: There's the Gregory House -- was it called the Gregory House before it became a Masonic Temple?
[00:29:04.03] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yes. That's another thing. You mentioned the Masonic Temple. That happened in 1885. The old hotel was the Gregory House and it was acquired by Beal, Junius Beal. Ric Beal was dead by that time -- he died in 1883. Junius Beal took this over -- he was a very active mason, and he converted the upper two floors to the Masonic Hall and various Masonic Lodge rooms. It's interesting to me that Beal is involved in the Dr. Chase building, this building, and the old Post Office. I'm sure he must have been one of the influential people of Ann Arbor who helped to sponsor this publication.
[00:29:56.28] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: He certainly ran all of North Main Street, didn't he?
[00:29:58.47] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yup. And were they then in the [? San Cebell ?] until they built the new ill-fated one that was destroyed some years ago.
[00:30:10.09] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yes, they were at this location until about 1924-25 when the--.
[00:30:16.65] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: That's another sad tale which is not included in this talk because they don't have a picture of that building in this book. We are avoiding other sad stories.
[00:30:26.02] WYSTAN STEVENS: You have a question over here?
[00:30:27.25] AUDIENCE: Am I correct in assuming that the Beals that you're speaking of have come down to the J.C. Beal Construction group who also own that building that had a big fire in Ypsilanti?
[00:30:42.79] WYSTAN STEVENS: No, I don't think that the present Beals are related -- certainly not very closely related. But it is interesting another, now that you mention it, to recall that this building that we're in now is on the site of the Beal home.
[00:30:59.27] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: The Beal house was dated at 1860, and that was the earliest building in this whole show that I could get a date for. So we'll get to it.
[00:31:08.47] WYSTAN STEVENS: This is the George Wahr's downtown bookstore. He later had a -- or I guess about the same time he also had a bookstore on State Street. But he's the guy who lived in the Greek Revival Temple that you showed the picture of earlier.
[00:31:23.79] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Which didn't make the cut.
[00:31:25.13] WYSTAN STEVENS: Actually, he acquired that house in 1893 at a tax sale on the Court House steps.
[00:31:33.23] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: At the moment the Ann Arbor Savings Bank seems to be in the corner of the building here. Well, it had a sad history, too. I hate to admit it, but when I was a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] student here in the early '50s, I thought that was a great idea. I'm embarrassed to say it till now. But to cover up all these ugly old buildings with aluminum siding, I thought that was really cool. I got educated though, it took a while. And, of course, they covered the whole thing up even putting -- notice the tall piece that goes over the pedament there. Well then it had a fire somewhere around '71 I think. And you can see for awhile the remnants of the old building behind it, but it was so badly damaged that they ended up creating what we call a site leak, there at the corner, for awhile, and then after that Hobbs and Black got busy and put this in there. I don't have the exact date but it's in the '80s or '90s somewhere. Anyway, that's the fate of that particular building.
[00:32:49.06] Now we're going down to some odds and ends of Main Street. Eberbach Hardware Company here first. Northeast corner of Main and Washington. This building also went through a series of changes. For some reason the buildings though that are down there with the [? Archers ?] seem to have survived.
[00:33:08.86] WYSTAN STEVENS: The Eberbach family was an old German family of Ann Arbor. Christian Eberbach was the pioneer. He, by coincidence, was the man who translated Dr. Chase's recipe book into the German language. It was also published in a Swedish edition. The Eberbach Hardware store was only on this side of the corner building. There was the State Savings Bank right on the corner. Then the hardware store wrapped around the bank and came out here, this was the Washington Street entrance of the hardware store.
[00:33:50.63] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, so it was quite extensive, wasn't it?
[00:33:52.97] WYSTAN STEVENS: And, of course, the Eberbach's had a principle business, which was the pharmaceuticals and the manufacture of precision scientific instruments, especially for the use in high school laboratories. That Eberbach building was erected later down the street on Liberty where the present Federal building is now.
[00:34:21.66] This corner State Savings Bank building was erected in 1908. There's one of the old open street cars -- I think those were called Brills. They were made by the Brill Manufacturing Company. The idea of having them open-sided like that in the summertime was for cooling. The winter street cars had a central aisle -- you'd get on at one end or the other and go down a central aisle to get at your seat. But these open street cars didn't have an aisle, they simply had benches right across the width of the car, and you'd -- as that woman is doing there -- you'd grab hold of one of the vertical posts and hoist yourself up on the running board and hope you got an opening where there was a place to sit.
[00:35:15.94] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: These were not for old people, were they, these street cars? What about us old folks? How did we get on?
[00:35:25.28] WYSTAN STEVENS: Maybe they had young boys who would hoist you there.
[00:35:29.56] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: This was already powered, wasn't it -- electric street car by this time, right?
[00:35:33.50] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think the AATA took a lesson from the problem they had with it.
[00:35:39.57] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Then they covered this -- they clearly put an addition on this corner building and covered it, because you can still see the window patterns here that are in this building.
[00:35:52.05] WYSTAN STEVENS: That was about 1957 I think.
[00:35:54.93] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, OK. I was sort of guessing at some of these dates because now David Osler has replaced the whole thing with Chase.
[00:36:08.50] WYSTAN STEVENS: And the nice thing about this is that it reflects two much more interesting buildings than that old State Savings Bank, which was not a fine example of architecture, I think we'll agree.
[00:36:24.33] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Now, this is looking North from Liberty and with the street car. The street looks unpaved though itself. It's only one line--.
[00:36:37.70] WYSTAN STEVENS: It wasn't paved with brick until later in the 1890s.
[00:36:44.28] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: This is more or less the same place with Ann Arbor's tallest building having been built in '29. First National Bank.
[00:36:55.66] WYSTAN STEVENS: That wasn't really a good year for building new banks.
[00:37:00.63] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Maybe it was early in '29, about the time I was born, and then after that came the crash, you see, in the fall.
[00:37:10.89] Well, this is a group of buildings that I feel very proud of because I helped to save them. The city had bought them in the early '70s and was going to destroy them so that they could enlarge the parking lot that was behind them. It was at a time when Wystan and Frank and I had done a survey of the central part of Ann Arbor. We had then not only taken pictures of 700 different buildings I think it was, but been so audacious as to give them ratings to say -- I think we had four different levels of ratings. The top one -- these showed up on a map and the black ones were top priority, dark grey was second, light grey third, and then simply blank was fourth. I think it ended up that the higher building on the left came out to be a top one and the others were the second category. The city had a hearing about these buildings and we went with our survey in hand, which had just been published, and we said, look, you can't tear these buildings down -- they're in the top two levels here. And they said, yeah, so they are. I mean, of course, we had given them that level, but they'd never bothered to point that out. They just said OK. And I said all right, then you should sell these back to private owners and let them fix it up. And by golly they did. I still can hardly believe it.
[00:38:54.52] WYSTAN STEVENS: Of course, we also got the Sesqua Centennial celebration to put its headquarters in the Haarer building, which is now the site of the West Side bookstore, and J. Platt back there is the [? impresario ?] of that Ann Arbor institution.
[00:39:16.65] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes. Right, exactly. And the [? Arquers ?] had the upper floors, and I had -- they had on the two second and third floors they had wooden shutters inside. There were six windows and there were two shutters on each side of each window, so there was something like 24 panels of shutter. I bought these because they were not attached to the building so they were not part of the building, as far as tearing the building down. And I remember taking a deep breath and paying $100.00 for all these shutters. I remember calling up Mary and saying I've just spent $100.00 on wooden shutters, which if this building is destroyed are worthless. But fortunately, Dr. [? Arquer ?] found out that I had bought these from somewhere, maybe [? Ray ?] or Jay, but in any case, he got in touch with me and bought them all back I think for $110.00. I made a big profit. And by golly, they put them all up. And since he was a dentist he could even refashion some of the hinges and stuff and put them all up again. So that was another triumph. You know, I have this saying in preservation work -- preservation work is usually either defeats or truces because you can't depend on a victory. But this is about as close to a victory as we've come in this work, along with the fire station.
[00:40:44.49] WYSTAN STEVENS: And right after that the Ann Arbor Art Association got the Carriage Works building.
[00:40:50.58] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I think it's remarkable. It's just--. Do you have some more stuff on these buildings?
[00:40:55.41] WYSTAN STEVENS: Ryder's was in the middle, Ryder's Hobby Shop -- they moved out finally. They did do a bit of restoration work ultimately on the upper floor and shoveled out about two tons of pigeon dung. Pigeons have gotten in through broken windows at the back.
[00:41:13.44] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Do you have any background about the Haarer Walker people?
[00:41:17.19] WYSTAN STEVENS: Haarer originally, John Haarer was a photographer and his 19th Century photographs -- the cart [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and the cabinet photos show up occasionally for sale at the Treasure Mart and other places. Unfortunately, the people are unidentified. If you have old photos at home, go home now and identify them.
[00:41:43.15] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: You mean right now?
[00:41:45.24] WYSTAN STEVENS: Right now.
[00:41:45.87] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: After the show.
[00:41:48.21] WYSTAN STEVENS: OK. Then, of course, later the family switched to selling books there. There was a Haarer bookstore years before Jay Platt moved in. In recent years, as the men who owned the place got very old, there was an insurance office there, but it wasn't doing a whole lot of business. And remember Doug Query found a chest full of little metal canisters of Haarer's Wonder [? Sav ?] -- that apparently was something they sold on the side. Some of them were full. He sold those I think for $1.00 a piece to raise money for the Sesquicentennial celebration back in 1974.
[00:42:37.52] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: [? Right ?] back in, that's right.
[00:42:39.47] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think those are probably still available here and there. I see them now and then on eBay.
[00:42:46.18] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: This is sort of a few of the buildings. It's a source of great delight for me that they're still there, and I think we won't--. See, one of the arguments to the city was across the street from this on the North side you had these six -- was that the Shaber's block or the six ones on the other side--?
[00:43:07.57] WYSTAN STEVENS: That was Shaberly.
[00:43:08.97] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I said there you have those -- and I said for awhile here you have a real sense of a place. I said if you knock these buildings down, then who knows how long the other ones are going to last. Because this one block is quite good and secure.
[00:43:25.33] WYSTAN STEVENS: You see in the lower left hand picture, the blue building across the alley from the Haarer building -- that was where -- there was a print shop that printed all the U of M football tickets. So they had to paint the brick blue to show their loyalty.
[00:43:46.09] Frank?
[00:43:47.86] AUDIENCE: I don't know if you were involved, but the building, the upper right photo, the building which faces on Main Street, which has those -- those are false windows.
[00:43:59.09] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Up in here.
[00:43:59.92] AUDIENCE: Right. At one point there was a fitness club up there. I don't think it's there anymore. We had to negotiate with the fella from West Boomfield, a fellow by the name of Pete Vestavich -- I got to know him later in my university days. We had to arm wrestle down at City Council to talk him into just putting false windows in there instead of just bricking up the whole side of that building to put his -- so I feel good about those false windows, too.
[00:44:29.55] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Good for you. All right. OK. This is another happy story, I think. How about it [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
[00:44:40.73] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah. You and I were involved in saving this one, too -- putting out propaganda for the cause. I remember you even put a video together that you showed at City Council.
[00:44:52.12] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well, yeah. It was a one 3-minute super eight film taken -- driving from over at the East end of Huron. I think the 3-minute actually got me all the way down under the railroad bridge West of Main Street when it ran out. But it was enough to show you that if you drive along there, this was the only really interesting building you saw. And then, of course -- what's her name who lived down there on Fuller came in with her school kids. I'll think of her name. The names go first, by the way. She brought in a whole bevy of school kids with signs into this meeting of the council where we showed the movie, saying "Save our Fire house," and they climbed all over the desks and everything. I can't think of who it was.
[00:45:41.43] AUDIENCE: Was it Nan Hobby?
[00:45:42.63] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes, yes. Nan Hobby, thank you. And so we saved it, and I think that it came out pretty well, because Frye and Peters did a rather tasteful addition to it. I remember talking to the chief, at the time was named Schmidt, I think. I said I had in mind, chief, that you could take the upper level of this old building and put your office in it. Well, that upper level I think had been the dormitories for the firemen, and I think Chief Schmidt could not take himself beyond the smell of dirty socks and this atmosphere in that room -- an office in that place? [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. Because he didn't respond very much to it and he ended up getting a little -- fire [? week ?] office is on the far corner. But anyway, the building is there and that means that -- it's being used, of course, now as a hands-on museum, but it could some day have offices up there, and then they could put the small cars in the front. I still have that in my mind.
[00:46:45.24] WYSTAN STEVENS: Cynthia Yow is here in the second row today and she had the idea of putting the hands-on museum in the building.
[00:46:53.05] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I think it was a great idea.
[00:46:54.09] WYSTAN STEVENS: The first director of it.
[00:46:54.92] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I guess I'm thinking of some time when the collection gets so enormous they have to have a new building, and then we can put the chief up there in the second floor. At least it's still there. See, it was painted once, as you see, and I remember that Dick Frye talked about -- it wasn't clear whether they were going to take the paint off or not, so he tried to pick a brick color that would go with either, painted or unpainted. But then they took the paint off. It looks really fine today, I think. It's a handsome building.
[00:47:28.24] WYSTAN STEVENS: Can you back up to the big picture? A lot of people don't realize that there's some symbolism up here in these window arches. The helmet that was the badge of authority for the supervisor of the fire department to issue orders at fires. This was back when we had a volunteer fire department still. There's also, I think, some -- I don't see it here, but some cross-speaking trumpets. Those were used to issue orders at the fires, at the fire scene. Civilians were expected to pitch in and pass the bucket so long in the bucket brigade.
[00:48:12.35] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I guess you all realize that these towers were not just ornament, but they were used for a couple of things. One is they dried hoses in them by hanging them down the middle of it. And the other is they used them for climbing ladder practice. And this one is very Italianate. The top of this is a bit like Florence or Sienna's old City Hall, and so it's a very, very fine example of this kind of Italianade Revival. It's beautiful.
[00:48:44.49] Now, we're moving slightly Eastward. We're working our way over towards State Street.
[00:48:51.88] WYSTAN STEVENS: Looking North here at the corner of Washington Street, looking up Southforth Avenue, North--.
[00:49:00.51] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Is it an avenue actually?
[00:49:01.65] AUDIENCE: Yes.
[00:49:02.48] WYSTAN STEVENS: Fourth Avenue, yup. You're thinking of the old West side.
[00:49:07.04] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I'll think it for next time.
[00:49:09.09] WYSTAN STEVENS: There's a cow up there on the weather vane.
[00:49:14.04] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: A cow?
[00:49:14.86] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah. It got restored. Somebody found another cow a few years ago and it's up there--.
[00:49:24.64] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Let's go on and see if we see it. This is the--.
[00:49:27.92] WYSTAN STEVENS: It was gone at this time.
[00:49:30.26] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: This is the first restoration, shall we say.
[00:49:34.06] WYSTAN STEVENS: There was a hippee place there called The Dragon Inn -- that's why it got all the vibrant LSD color scheme.
[00:49:43.13] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But there was also in there an Army surplus store, wasn't there?
[00:49:46.48] WYSTAN STEVENS: That came right afterward.
[00:49:47.69] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Afterwards, all right. Well now it's not looking too bad, at least a year or two ago.
[00:49:53.57] WYSTAN STEVENS: In the 1960s it was a fairly respectable joint called Martin's Gems and Minerals, that you could go in there and get your rocks off.
[00:50:05.57] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well, I think this is another nice piece of work. It ended up as a nice job. Also, this is also a--.
[00:50:15.16] WYSTAN STEVENS: In the background there one block North, you see the tower of the fire house?
[00:50:20.53] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes, right there. This has been a very useful photograph because I think I'm right that this photograph was used to restore the cornice to the corner building, right? Probably. Because--.
[00:50:36.12] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, I imagine so.
[00:50:38.38] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: --Because the 1868 building lost its cornice for many years, as you see here.
[00:50:44.45] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, that's right. The Wineman block, the left-hand portion was press metal, which I think was a product of the Detroit Cornice and Slate Company.
[00:50:58.78] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes.
[00:50:59.74] WYSTAN STEVENS: We also had a another press metal psod one block West on the corner of Fourth Avenue. This is the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington.
[00:51:10.94] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But that one's gone, right?
[00:51:13.00] WYSTAN STEVENS: That one's gone, yeah. There are still some press metal psods on State Street from 1890.
[00:51:19.54] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh. Why haven't we talked about this before?
[00:51:23.27] WYSTAN STEVENS: Well, I was waiting until you were old enough.
[00:51:30.22] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: All right. That will do.
[00:51:35.65] WYSTAN STEVENS: I wasn't aware that it was a secret.
[00:51:37.71] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well, to me it was, apparently. There is another sad story, isn't it?
[00:51:42.73] WYSTAN STEVENS: That's the one the Ann Arbor News tore down when they built in 1935. The Presbyterians didn't want the building anymore. They built their new building on Washington Avenue in 1935.
[00:52:00.45] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: So this happened to it.
[00:52:02.34] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yup. That's an Albert Kahn building. Unfortunately, it's been mutilated a bit on the outside when they got rid of the original fenestration.
[00:52:14.90] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: For a while I thought it was by Walter Anicka, why did I think that?
[00:52:18.35] WYSTAN STEVENS: I don't know.
[00:52:20.01] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But I've corrected it since the last time we met.
[00:52:22.57] WYSTAN STEVENS: I used to be in grade school with his daughter, Walter Anicka's daughter, Virginia. Burns Park School. A little while ago.
[00:52:33.13] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Look into this some more. OK, well this is another sad story. I shouldn't be editorializing, but I don't understand why Ann Arbor can't have a daily paper. I think it's a scandal.
[00:52:46.69] [APPLAUSE]
[00:52:51.26] Thank you.
[00:52:51.88] WYSTAN STEVENS: Advertising is the problem. They weren't getting enough advertising to support it. I'm sure everybody in town would be glad to subscribe if it were still around.
[00:53:02.60] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Now here we are right on this site.
[00:53:06.66] WYSTAN STEVENS: It should have an apostrophe after the l.
[00:53:09.96] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh. Good, OK. Sorry. You know it's too bad I can't repair these right here.
[00:53:17.73] WYSTAN STEVENS: You need a different clicker.
[00:53:19.18] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But I think 1860 I think was the year for this house. And I said earlier, I think this is the earliest date that we see any building identified. I think that maybe these people putting the book together said that other stuff was simply out-of-date. We want modern Ann Arbor, they said in 1893, right?
[00:53:43.20] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yup. Beal's I guess granddaughter decided to tear it down. Her mother was still living at the time -- we're talking about Julius Beal's granddaughter. And she said that the family couldn't bare the idea of anyone else living in their house. It was kind of a family shrine and that's why that isn't there anymore and we have the library here instead.
[00:54:08.18] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: So we may be standing over the very foundations right this very moment.
[00:54:12.99] WYSTAN STEVENS: Pretty much, yeah.
[00:54:16.00] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Somewhere back in there.
[00:54:17.29] WYSTAN STEVENS: Actually we're down in the basement of that house.
[00:54:20.57] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Was it on the corner or sort of back--. In other words--.
[00:54:24.78] WYSTAN STEVENS: If you look at the picture there, it looks awfully close to Williams Street.
[00:54:28.62] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: In other words, it was somewhere in here probably, right.
[00:54:30.82] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah.
[00:54:35.14] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, right, this is fun. It turns out that their picture of St. Thomas, the apostle is not of the church because the church was built later than the book, but of the school. I finally found a picture that showed that it's on, I think Elizabeth Street that runs parallel to the State, right -- North-South Street.
[00:54:56.70] WYSTAN STEVENS: Isn't there a z in Elizabeth?
[00:54:59.17] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Pardon?
[00:54:59.64] WYSTAN STEVENS: Ized.
[00:55:01.52] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Is there a z or an s? Is it ized?
[00:55:04.54] AUDIENCE: It's the German spelling.
[00:55:07.00] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: With a zed, right? OK. Sorry about that. This thing is fraught with mistakes.
[00:55:14.37] WYSTAN STEVENS: We have to do this show more often. I gotta keep track of you. I think you're changing the captions from year to year. We haven't done this show since a year ago.
[00:55:27.99] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: That's right. They'll be sorry they ever filmed this.
[00:55:32.57] Anyway, there's another picture, see, that I discovered, and by golly, this is on [? Statie ?], but there's the school, you see. So it was on the West side of Elizabeth Street, apparently. Next to maybe that was that the parish house there, perhaps or something? And then another building across from it, part of the school. So my picture here is looking up -- if he would have been around there, I suppose.
[00:55:58.44] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, I think the school was down behind the church.
[00:56:02.32] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes, to the right, in other words, off of it to the right, yes. It's a wonderful church but it's too new for our show.
[00:56:11.59] WYSTAN STEVENS: Actually, the school was where the present school is.
[00:56:15.82] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: And here's another one of their marvelous pictures taken -- they have a few of them like this where you can't see anything of the building.
[00:56:24.06] WYSTAN STEVENS: Well, they should have taken that one in January.
[00:56:27.27] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right. You know if they were doing 64 books they had to stay on the move.
[00:56:31.84] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think they were taking pictures from month to month. Because a lot of these are seasonal as you go along through the year.
[00:56:40.44] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: And then you have to house your horses somewhere, right?
[00:56:43.53] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think you should recaption all of these pictures with the month that they appeared. It might be significant.
[00:56:53.38] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, but we know that the pictures were taken that month?
[00:56:59.70] WYSTAN STEVENS: I'll tell you what we do know.
[00:57:00.97] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: All right, what do we know?
[00:57:02.60] WYSTAN STEVENS: This block of Katherine Street didn't exist in 1893. The street goes right along there now. Of course, it goes the other way, one-way street.
[00:57:13.81] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well, we do have pictures of it without the tree. There's one I took many years ago--.
[00:57:19.44] WYSTAN STEVENS: There's the street.
[00:57:21.64] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: By the way, I put this question -- you know they've been working on the front of that for months, they're done now. But what were they doing?
[00:57:30.31] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
[00:57:33.08] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: The roof? But they seem to cover the whole entrance way with stuff. Anyway, it's a beautiful building.
[00:57:44.50] WYSTAN STEVENS: The tower was added in 19--. Oh, you got that there. 1903. A gift from Dr. Alonzo Palmer's widow, Love Root Palmer, in her will, completing the original plan that, at least according to all heresay I've heard, that the church wanted a tower originally but they couldn't afford it, so they waited until she died and added it then.
[00:58:16.35] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But do you suppose that Gordon Lloyd had designed the church with this tower as part of the design?
[00:58:22.49] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think that may be the case. I'm not sure. I've never seen a picture of the original design.
[00:58:28.81] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Because this was going on in Europe, too, in 1880. The City of Cologne completed their cathedral, which had not been under construction since the 16th Century. And then 1890, the City of Om, completed the tower of their munster from original drawings also, and that had been sitting since 1553 without anything going on. And so this is all part of this completion of gothic edifaces, right?
[00:58:56.19] WYSTAN STEVENS: I climbed to the very pinacle of the Om tower in 1956. Something I could never do again. The tallest cathedral tower in Europe.
[00:59:08.94] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes. I think Mary and I climbed it in '57. By golly, all right.
[00:59:14.18] WYSTAN STEVENS: Did you see my initials? I scratched them at every level.
[00:59:18.82] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I'll look next time.
[00:59:20.06] WYSTAN STEVENS: All right.
[00:59:24.89] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Here's another happy, happy story, Wystan.
[00:59:29.32] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, Hobart. It was designed for the Episcopal students at the university, and therefore, it was sponsored not just by the local Episcopal congregation, but theoretically by the entire state. And one of the people who really helped to raise funds for this project was Bishop Hobart -- Bishop Harris, rather, and it was for the Hobart league of the Episcopal student organization. And Harris died right after the funds were gathered, and so they said hey, let's name it after him. So it's been Harris Hall ever since then. I think it was called Hobart Hall only for about a year.
[01:00:16.78] TIM GRIMES: Hang on just a moment, we got a question right over here.
[01:00:23.11] AUDIENCE: Thank you. I note that you have noted the School of Music was there until 1946 and then moved to the new building. But I recall a building where the Maynard Street entrance is to the old Jacobson's that was -- you could hear the strains of the School of Music coming the basement.
[01:00:49.89] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah. I don't know why you call it School of Music here, Kingsbury. The School of Music at the university did also use this building. They rented it, but it wasn't their building.
[01:01:03.41] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: All right. Did they have the building that was across the left--?
[01:01:09.68] WYSTAN STEVENS: The School of Music was on Maynard Street until the Burton tower at least was opened in 1936.
[01:01:18.11] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:01:21.12] WYSTAN STEVENS: The band was in here--.
[01:01:22.60] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, the band was in there, all right, I'll fix that.
[01:01:23.73] WYSTAN STEVENS: --Including the marching band. William Revelli had his office in there. And in the summer of, gosh, I don't know, 1955 or so, I and a bunch of kids were recruited to learn how to play clarinet under his supervision. He came in there scowling once a week and -- he had a terrifying glint in his eye. Of course, I couldn't read music. I don't know what I was doing in there in the first place. I didn't last very long.
[01:01:55.16] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: All right. But the building his lasted.
[01:01:56.93] WYSTAN STEVENS: I couldn't keep my reed wet.
[01:02:00.58] TIM GRIMES: Question here?
[01:02:02.05] AUDIENCE: Yeah. I just wanted to comment. I think at this very moment the School of Music, opposite the library entrance on the third floor up there, at the new School of Music, has a display of the history with photographs of the school -- I hope it's still there.
[01:02:20.07] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Listen, we'll have to go over these so the next time we do this, it'll be right. It went from trees to no trees to having trees again. And this one's pinned down by the fact that they're building the inn there.
[01:02:38.92] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:02:39.35] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Anyway, it's looking grand now.
[01:02:43.07] WYSTAN STEVENS: You know the Campus Inn was built in the 1960s.
[01:02:47.09] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: OK, here we come the Sackett Hall in the old church. Is this Sackett Hall here?
[01:02:55.97] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, the house on the corner. That was the residence of Ezra C. Seaman, s-e-a-m-a-n, who was the founder and the leader of the Ann Arbor Scientific Association. They even put out an annual report at least once. And he also wrote books -- very weighty learned tomes, which you can Google -- you can read them on Google books nowadays. But he wasn't connected with the university. He was apparently independently wealthy and just pursued his intellectual habits. When he died, that house went to his daughter whose name was Sackett -- I've forgotten what her first name was -- but that's how it became Sackett Hall instead of Seaman Hall. Then right behind it, Senator James McMillan of Michigan gave the funds to erect McMillan Hall, which was for the U of M students of the Presbyterian persuasion. And that was combined -- there was a kind of a breezeway between the two buildings.
[01:04:05.49] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: You mean right here, this one.
[01:04:06.61] AUDIENCE: Where is it?
[01:04:08.65] AUDIENCE: What street?
[01:04:09.16] WYSTAN STEVENS: Oh, I'm sorry. This is State Street looking South at the corner of Huron Street. The spire there is of the Methodist church. Eventually, when the Presbyterians decided to leave their place where the Ann Arbor News is now in 1935, they moved over to Washington Avenue and they wanted to raise money for that project so they sold Sackett Hall and McMillan Hall to the Methodists. And that really got a lot of Presbyterians in this State excited that they would sell Presbyterian buildings to Methodists? And luckily the old Methodist church was torn down in 1940, because the brick wall facing Washington Street was about to buckle, apparently. So they got rid of it and it got very handy to have those other buildings, which they could use -- tear those down, too, of course, but they could use the land for the new Methodist church.
[01:05:15.28] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I think I knew some time when -- who the architect, but I can't remember.
[01:05:20.81] AUDIENCE: Brian [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
[01:05:22.97] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Brian [? Canton. ?] All right. Oh, the same -- all right, thank you. It'll be up there next time. And here's another -- a very fine photograph of Ann Arbor High School.
[01:05:42.04] WYSTAN STEVENS: I'm not sure the town library was in there at that time and that was the later high school. This one burned down on the last day of 1904. The original portion at the right was built in 1856, and the left portion in 1889 with a stone tower, but, of course, the trees won't let you see the tower. The whole thing burned down on the last day of 1904. That's the same year that the Ann Arbor railroad trestle collapsed on Argo Pond. It's also the same year that the flouring mill on Broadway exploded and burned to the ground.
[01:06:22.56] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: That's a good year.
[01:06:24.92] WYSTAN STEVENS: An interesting year. May you live in interesting times.
[01:06:30.60] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Unfortunately, I don't seem to have taken the slide of the front of the old Ann Arbor High School. Maybe, but I can't find it.
[01:06:37.44] WYSTAN STEVENS: The Frieze building?
[01:06:39.03] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, the Frieze building. So, what we've got to show you, unfortunately, is just this, this knew Robert AM Stern thing. This I took a year ago, and I just went out on, as you see, three days ago and took this. I'm not sure it's better than that one, but there it is.
[01:07:00.07] WYSTAN STEVENS: Considering your great enthusiasm for the architecture of Robert AM Stern, I don't think it makes much difference.
[01:07:10.94] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: OK. Let's go on.
[01:07:14.67] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, here's the other bookstore for George Wahr or Var on State Street. It wasn't always in that archway. It later got moved down to where the Red Hawk is now. But in 1893 it was located in the archway of that rather handsome building. The odd thing about that building to me is the way that the buttresses here came out into the public right of way, and they're not there anymore. I've always wondered whether they got shaved off and flattened for modernization purposes in the 1920s, or whether the city said look, you can't do that, it violates the zoning code. Because I can imagine blind people or drunks bumping into them.
[01:08:12.75] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: And tripping over them.
[01:08:13.75] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, doing a bit of damage to their face and so forth.
[01:08:16.66] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Otherwise it's a wonderful building.
[01:08:19.51] WYSTAN STEVENS: You see how it's been flattened there now, and I think that happened probably in the 1920s and it looks like it might be Pewabic tile that was placed there. For a long time on both sides were Marty's Menswear -- a lot of people remember that.
[01:08:35.40] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Wystan, it often troubled me that they redid the top. Notice this is all brick -- this is not some applied corners, this is brick. But for some reason they took it apart and did this to it. Maybe it needed some pointing.
[01:08:50.52] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, if it weren't pointed properly, it could be the bricks came loose and started to fall on people.
[01:08:55.95] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But there's something else interesting about it. Notice these wonderful windows, these bay windows enclosed in these arches. Well when I was teaching architectural history, I discovered that Frank Lloyd Wright, I remembered years after that, that he had designed a house in River Force in which he had done the same kind of windows up on the roof. You see they're in an arch and they're also bay windows. To find out who copied whom, I found the date, and lo and behold, Frank Lloyd Wright must have copied it from this building, right?
[01:09:32.57] Another question back here or comment? I think it's a great design and I'm glad to see it's still there.
[01:09:42.38] AUDIENCE: That last picture looking South on State Street featured, I believe, the buildings that have ten fronts that you referred to earlier.
[01:09:51.18] WYSTAN STEVENS: Oh, yes.
[01:09:53.32] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, you mean these down in here.
[01:09:55.19] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yup. The university block and the office block.
[01:09:58.56] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh.
[01:09:59.48] WYSTAN STEVENS: You see the six store fronts there in a row just North of the brick one?
[01:10:05.03] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: South of them.
[01:10:05.79] WYSTAN STEVENS: Now, as you see, a lot of them or several of them have been lost. I think there are still three left. The first one was lost in 1935 during a terrible fire at the McLennan-Neelam's grocery store.
[01:10:21.64] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I think it's great they're still there, and maybe other benefactors will come back and--.
[01:10:26.49] WYSTAN STEVENS: It might be worth pointing out that those buildings were not built altogether. The buildings existed there before the press metal psods were put on to kind of unify them. And it was done on 1890, but the buildings are of various ages.
[01:10:49.86] AUDIENCE: When was the arcade put in?
[01:10:54.20] WYSTAN STEVENS: 1916.
[01:10:56.68] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, during the First World War, right.
[01:11:00.30] WYSTAN STEVENS: Except that we weren't in that war yet.
[01:11:04.26] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I think maybe the photographer for this didn't like Gordon Lloyd, because he was covering up his buildings. But we do have pictures of it without the trees.
[01:11:16.76] WYSTAN STEVENS: A centennial building. Finished in 1876. That year was expected to give special cache to any project from a patriotic standpoint at least. Maybe not an architectural one.
[01:11:34.87] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Another one. University Hall.
[01:11:38.92] WYSTAN STEVENS: With the original tower. They had a problem with that tower the same as the County of Washtenaw had with the tower of the old county courthouse. It apparently was regarded as too heavy to be supported any longer by the structure below it. So they took the old tower off, I think it was cast iron or something like that, and replaced it with a wooden one much lower in 1896.
[01:12:05.52] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I wonder if this Genison is the same one who kept a marvelous scrapbook of the building of the state capitol in Lansing. Because I did research when I gave a report on the capitol some years ago with Dick Frank to try to save the capitol, which we did, first. This was very, very useful. It's in the State archives in Lansing, and I'm sure his name was Genison who had kept this book, and I wonder if it's maybe the same person.
[01:12:35.69] WYSTAN STEVENS: If you go in the basement of Angel Hall today, you can see the cornerstone of this building with Genison's name on it. Do you have a picture of that?
[01:12:46.79] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Sorry. Not yet, not yet. Tomorrow.
[01:12:54.11] WYSTAN STEVENS: You'll do what you Khan, right.
[01:12:56.09] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: What I Khan, right. So, then Albert Kahn took this and wiped it across the front.
[01:13:03.49] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, he built Angel Hall about 10 feet in front of University Hall -- the ultimate insult to an architectural forebear.
[01:13:14.50] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: That's right, there's a picture of that. I should find that and scan it and get it in there where you're looking along the back of Angel Hall and you see the two of them almost touching each other.
[01:13:25.38] WYSTAN STEVENS: I'm surprised the students didn't swing them from one to the other on ropes or something.
[01:13:31.51] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right across the street is this beautiful building by Spier and Rohn. Newberry Hall.
[01:13:37.80] AUDIENCE: Where did the stone come from for that building?
[01:13:43.35] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think I've heard that there's Indiana Blue Stone there and somebody else's limestone.
[01:13:50.91] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Was it built by the Student Christian Association, Wystan?
[01:13:56.76] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah. They had reading room on the ground floor, on the upper floor was a big auditorium with a huge stained glass window by Tiffany, which has also been restored. You know they had trouble raising the funds to build this. They had it partly completed and couldn't finish it with what they had on hand. So they had an exhibition in 1891 of antiques donated or lent rather by Ann Arbor householders. Those items were placed on display in the finished portion of Newberry Hall and the public came in and gave donations or bought tickets to see all the goodies, and that helped them raise money to finish the -- I don't know what part wasn't done yet. There are reports of this in the newspapers of 1891. One of the items, the central item on display at that time, is an artifact that now belongs to the Washtenaw County Historical Society, it's Lucy Chapin's piano. This was apparently the first public exhibition of that piano was in Newberry Hall in 1891. It was made in 1815 in New York. It was the first piano West of Detroit in Michigan territory. It's now out at the Stern's collection of musical instruments. But I don't think they have it displayed currently.
[01:15:32.97] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, this is a beautiful building, it's wonderful this has survived, too. Here's another story with not such a happy ending. Lebaron Jenney came here in 1876, and for one year we had an architectural program. And I think it was under the Department of Mines or something like that, but they only gave him money for one year, and then after that year they didn't give him any more, so he went back to Chicago and invented the skyscraper, which is a different talk. But he had done the University Museum while he was here.
[01:16:10.87] WYSTAN STEVENS: And he apparently commuted week to week from Chicago to Ann Arbor to meet hi classes. Two of his pupils live right across the street from this building, actually. Why am I blanking on their name? Pond and Pond.
[01:16:31.95] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: The Pond brothers, yes.
[01:16:32.87] WYSTAN STEVENS: The Pond brothers who designed the Michigan Union on the side of their boyhood home, and the Michigan League for Women kind of balanced the scales. Michigan Union was strictly for men at first.
[01:16:43.96] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: In other words, they lived there--.
[01:16:44.82] WYSTAN STEVENS: They practiced in Chicago. They followed their mentor to Chicago after learning the trade from him in 1879.
[01:16:53.14] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Then Robert AM Stern followed them. Because his stuff is kind of warmed over Pond brothers.
[01:16:59.19] WYSTAN STEVENS: Does he doff his hat to them?
[01:17:01.54] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Maybe.
[01:17:01.84] WYSTAN STEVENS: Oh, you mean the stuff--.
[01:17:03.54] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, the stuff he's doing.
[01:17:06.65] WYSTAN STEVENS: What he's doing to Ann Arbor.
[01:17:08.68] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, right.
[01:17:09.43] TIM GRIMES: We have a question right over here.
[01:17:11.88] AUDIENCE: I just wonder where was it? Where was this building?
[01:17:15.02] WYSTAN STEVENS: Sorry. This is the University Museum, later known as the Romance Language Building and it was on the site of the present new addition to the University Museum of Art.
[01:17:26.38] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Is this about -- right, this was destroyed in 1957?
[01:17:30.85] WYSTAN STEVENS: '57, I'm pretty sure.
[01:17:34.53] AUDIENCE: Are you going to tell about the [? deek ?] [? shant, ?] and the fact that it had an elevator in it, which was one of Lebaron Jenney's innovations and which was so important in building skyscrapers?
[01:17:48.46] WYSTAN STEVENS: Oh, that's a good idea. Why don't you tell people about that, Mary.
[01:17:53.88] TIM GRIMES: I'll just give the mic to you.
[01:17:56.55] AUDIENCE: They know more about it than I do.
[01:17:57.60] WYSTAN STEVENS: This is my sister, Mary Hathaway. We have another sister named Grace Termott who lives near Minneapolis and who had an office in this building before it was torn down when she worked as a secretary in the Romance Language Department.
[01:18:16.94] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But unfortunately, the people who put this book together didn't like the [? deek ?] [? shant, ?] I don't understand why. Because that even fell within the second half of the century. They should have included it, but they didn't. So, see, we're constricted by this. We're going to have to do another talk some day that does all the other stuff.
[01:18:35.32] WYSTAN STEVENS: We have to trace the history of the politics of this book.
[01:18:39.11] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right.
[01:18:39.58] WYSTAN STEVENS: Why certain buildings were included and not others? Why certain churches, for example, and not others?
[01:18:46.44] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well, that's sort of what's there now, folks. It stood right in there, right, where the--?
[01:18:50.53] WYSTAN STEVENS: Right where the big rectangle is.
[01:18:55.42] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: OK. Sort of around the corner now. This Van Brunt, by the way, was one of important architects for the 1893 fair. In fact, he was brought in by [? Burnham ?] and [? Root ?] who were the first people to start designing the fair, to act as consultant group, and Van Brunt ended up designing one of the big buildings for the fair. I can't remember which, but one of the huge ones that was on this central lagoon. But, as you see, before that he did our library. And for a long time I knew that when they destroyed this library to build the new one, that they had saved the stacks, but this was the only picture I'd ever seen, and that is not the stacks but it must be a reading room there.
[01:19:44.17] WYSTAN STEVENS: That's the reading room.
[01:19:45.19] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Which is facing North I think, right?
[01:19:48.72] WYSTAN STEVENS: The [? apse ?] was entered from either side -- this is one of the entrances and on I'm sure whether this was the women's entrance or the men's. But there were separate entrances. Women sat on one side of the reading room, men on the other.
[01:20:04.37] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Really.
[01:20:05.83] WYSTAN STEVENS: And up above the reading room was the Art Gallery. Wrapped around the Art Gallery was something called the Whispering Gallery. It was just a corridor, and people would bring anyone newly arrived in town up here and stand at one end of this curved gallery and whisper a message and it could be heard by somebody at the other end.
[01:20:30.24] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Before cell phones.
[01:20:30.78] WYSTAN STEVENS: This was one of the great huge attractions of Ann Arbor before the Michigan Theatre.
[01:20:36.82] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, and before the invention of the cell phone. By golly. All right. Well, see, I came across this other picture and then realized that those are the stacks that they saved there.
[01:20:50.22] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yup.
[01:20:50.33] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Perfect. It all fits together now, but it only took me about 75 years to find this other picture. I think it was a great building. We lost some really nice buildings, because that must have been--.
[01:21:02.79] WYSTAN STEVENS: The stacks that you see there were later extended back, too.
[01:21:07.96] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, I mean these.
[01:21:09.46] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yup. At least the lower portion of it.
[01:21:12.56] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Then, of course, once again, Kahn puts a building that wipes it all out. This has a wonderful space in it, too, his library. As you may know, Bentley now is getting all of the Kahn archives.
[01:21:31.55] WYSTAN STEVENS: You know what happened to the towers of the old library?
[01:21:37.52] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: What?
[01:21:37.85] WYSTAN STEVENS: The most beloved building on campus. Some of the structure underneath was removed gingerly, and then it was braced, shored up, with timbers, and these were ignited and the tower collapsed. There is a sequence of three famous photographs showing the tower collapsing. You gotta get that in here before we do the show again.
[01:22:04.43] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Where are the photographs, Wynstan?
[01:22:05.64] WYSTAN STEVENS: I'm sure the Bentley has them.
[01:22:07.18] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: All right. This is another kind of sad story.
[01:22:17.36] WYSTAN STEVENS: Where's the first -- oh, this is the 1893 thing?
[01:22:20.05] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, right.
[01:22:22.63] WYSTAN STEVENS: Well, I don't know, I kind of like it myself.
[01:22:25.15] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, I do too. In fact, I like very much this top of -- in fact, I found too recently to make a copy to put in here, but there's a German memorial somewhere along the rhine or something--.
[01:22:36.37] WYSTAN STEVENS: I thought I'd seen postcards or something like that.
[01:22:38.20] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: It has a tower very much like that. It has a cylindrica piece set within these four corners, but much bigger than this but the same idea.
[01:22:46.83] WYSTAN STEVENS: The drum tower.
[01:22:47.67] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: And for some reason they built the building you see in '63 out of the tower in '93, and then took it off again in '98.
[01:22:56.03] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yup. This is probably the best picture we have of that very brief evanescence that five year interval where it looked like that. But apparently, people thought it was so ugly -- these were Victorians. I mean how do Victorians know what an ugly building looks like? But they hated it so much that after it was only up there for five years that tower got knocked off again, and the building was redesigned. My dad had his office in Haven Hall after it was no longer the Law Building.
[01:23:32.63] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Maybe they were Germans and they said you have no business copying our famous monument to Bismarck or Wilhelm or whoever. You must, raus, raus, they must be gone. You are stealing our design. Maybe that's it. We have to look into this, don't we?
[01:23:48.07] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah. I think there's a story there. If not we can make one up.
[01:23:52.78] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Exactly. Right. Well, these new buildings are not in the same place the old one was. This was up at the Northwest corner wasn't [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
[01:24:01.82] WYSTAN STEVENS: There's nothing there. Nothing got built there after the fire. The biggest fire in Ann Arbor's history was the burning of Haven Hall, June 6, 1950. That was the Law Building torched by an arsonist.
[01:24:18.08] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Not me, I was here but I didn't do it.
[01:24:19.94] WYSTAN STEVENS: I was here. I actually saw that fire.
[01:24:23.32] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: You saw the fire itself?
[01:24:24.70] WYSTAN STEVENS: My dad came home and got me and my little sister and took us down to watch the fire. My oldest sister was already watching there, I think she was in high school at the time. Mary, where were you?
[01:24:35.30] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:24:37.14] WYSTAN STEVENS: You saw it too, huh?
[01:24:41.10] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Was it at night?
[01:24:42.96] WYSTAN STEVENS: No, it was in the afternoon.
[01:24:45.40] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I must have been asleep in my Jefferson--.
[01:24:48.14] WYSTAN STEVENS: There was one point where an entire wall of bricks came crashing down with a huge thundering rumbling roar, and everybody started to applaud. It was like when a train goes by the gandy dancer when people are eating.
[01:25:04.21] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But those people applauding were not the same people who lost their life's work in that building.
[01:25:08.61] WYSTAN STEVENS: No. These were students who just liked a big noise. We were standing in the yard of the Congregational church.
[01:25:15.78] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well, this is the engineering laboratory, which I think--.
[01:25:21.88] WYSTAN STEVENS: You don't have a picture of Haven Hall after the one that burned?
[01:25:26.59] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I'll dig some out.
[01:25:27.99] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, get busy here.
[01:25:31.21] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Didn't this have an auditorium in at, this building. A wooden semi-circular auditorium? I think so.
[01:25:38.07] WYSTAN STEVENS: No, I think you're thinking of the West Physics building.
[01:25:40.85] AUDIENCE: I have a comment. I took pictures of the Haven Hall fire. If you'd like them, I'd email them to you.
[01:25:52.64] WYSTAN STEVENS: Oh, my gosh, yes.
[01:25:53.26] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Please contact us after this is over, if you haven't left in disgust before we're done.
[01:25:59.92] AUDIENCE: Never.
[01:26:03.94] TIM GRIMES: Another question here.
[01:26:05.32] AUDIENCE: Where is this building located? Are any of these labeled where they are?
[01:26:15.16] WYSTAN STEVENS: This is where the ugly is now.
[01:26:16.98] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes. This will be repaired. She'll come to the next show.
[01:26:21.91] WYSTAN STEVENS: The not so ugly ugly now.
[01:26:23.43] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: It's right was there. Isn't it, right, where that was?
[01:26:29.24] WYSTAN STEVENS: If we could move these slides a little quicker, we'd answer your question before you need to ask them.
[01:26:36.28] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Maybe. Anyway. OK. Well, this was -- quickly, at the Northeast corner of the great square. At the Northeast corner of the sort of secondary diag, you could call it, which has been broken up by this new museum. And this, of course, was just the Waterman. This is, I think, before they put the addition on it. Right?
[01:27:05.41] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, but the addition went on the North side there on the North University Avenue side, and that was Barber Gymnasium for Women. Incidentally, when Waterman was first erected, the architect had installed in this great entablature, an enscription in Greek. And the Regions decided no, we didn't allow that. We want English. Tear it off. They had to take the entire slabs of stone off and put in one that simply said Waterman Gymnasium. And they didn't leave any indication in the Region's minutes of what that Greek enscription said. But apparently it was so disgusting that they couldn't leave it there.
[01:27:53.76] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Really. Oh, you mean something was put over on them by some Greek stone worker, right?
[01:27:59.66] WYSTAN STEVENS: I'm sure it was some kind of classical thing. But they said it said something about so he who runs may read it. They wanted it clearer, because not all the students were classically oriented in those days.
[01:28:16.32] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: And they didn't keep the old stones either, right?
[01:28:18.67] WYSTAN STEVENS: And I've never seen a picture of that Greek enscription. It would be nice to find one.
[01:28:25.67] AUDIENCE: Wasn't there a zoo, as I recall outside of Waterman?
[01:28:29.38] WYSTAN STEVENS: No, the zoo was outside where the University Museum is now, where they built the parking lot--.
[01:28:35.76] AUDIENCE: My mistake.
[01:28:36.76] WYSTAN STEVENS: --In the 1960s.
[01:28:39.58] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: See, but Harley, Ellington and Day did something, I think, very nicely. They extended the diag northeast through this building. So that's works very nice at least. But otherwise--.
[01:28:57.57] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah. We had a big cause celeb in 1977 trying to save the gymnasium. For I went to the regents meeting with a slide show showing all the ornate oak woodwork inside, and as soon as I was done with my tearful presentation, my great emotional soliliquay, they turned the lights back on and Robin Fleming said well, you see all that woodwork, that's why we have to tear it down. It's a big fire hazard.
[01:29:33.38] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right. Tell us about the -- you were talking about these buildings, we saw them in the first slide, you think, right?
[01:29:41.83] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, these are the same buildings that you saw from the other side of the river. I don't know which is which here, but they ended up with about five buildings in a row.
[01:29:54.46] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Weren't they more or less, or that building was down the street a bit?
[01:29:59.54] WYSTAN STEVENS: No, they were on Catherine Street.
[01:30:01.09] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Isn't that Catherine that goes off to the left? That's the--.
[01:30:06.42] WYSTAN STEVENS: Is that Catherine there?
[01:30:08.09] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: We're on this--.
[01:30:12.95] WYSTAN STEVENS: That says Medical Center Drive.
[01:30:15.58] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, but that's going off to the right. The next one is Catherine, I think, going to the left, right?
[01:30:20.41] WYSTAN STEVENS: No, that's Ann Street.
[01:30:22.89] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Ann Street. Oh, all right.
[01:30:25.02] WYSTAN STEVENS: This is the brand new building that replaced the old University Hospital.
[01:30:29.35] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I gotta take some more pictures.
[01:30:30.55] WYSTAN STEVENS: No, Catherine Street is where the Tubman Medical Library is now. Right across from Angelo's. They had five original hospital buildings there.
[01:30:44.34] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But then there's that other building that's sort of stuck in there, sort of overcome by this pedestrian bridge that's in front of it. This orange brick.
[01:30:55.35] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yeah, Victor Vaughn dormitory.
[01:30:59.00] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: But then to the right of that is where these would have been, right? OK. This is all going to be much better--.
[01:31:04.83] WYSTAN STEVENS: I think the Victor Vaughn dormitory replaced one of those hospital buildings that burned.
[01:31:10.86] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: This building, the Church of Christ has a wonderful history, which Whystan probably knows. How did it happen to get moved?
[01:31:21.47] WYSTAN STEVENS: It was erected in 1890-91, and here we see it a couple years later. At the corner of South University Avenue and Haven, I believe.
[01:31:37.85] AUDIENCE: State.
[01:31:39.30] WYSTAN STEVENS: State? No, it wasn't on State. State was the Psi Epsilon fraternity house. It was a little farther East on South U, and I think it was at the corner of Haven Street. Anyway, it looked like this with the apse as it is and the tower at this side of the apse. And then it got moved when they wanted the land for the law school building. The university bought the land and paid for moving the -- dismantling it, actually, and rebuilding it in reverse on the corner of [? Tappen ?] and Hill Street.
[01:32:24.16] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I think that's great.
[01:32:25.03] WYSTAN STEVENS: Now we have the tower at the other side of the apse. I think it was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt. An enormous project.
[01:32:33.10] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: We don't have an architect for this building, if anybody knows -- let me know when we're done. We're getting close here. See, these buildings were probably considered remoderned by that book people that read the book.
[01:32:47.48] WYSTAN STEVENS: I must say I love this old house -- it later became a fraternity house. It looks like a great summer resort place. It should be up on Mackin Island--.
[01:32:59.25] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: It is beautiful.
[01:33:01.21] WYSTAN STEVENS: --And it got modified I think after a fire in the 1920s or '30s, and then, of course, it fell into decline as a fraternity house, and I think the fraternity couldn't afford it anymore and they moved out and people broke in there and started a fire. Then we got Jerry Ford's monument.
[01:33:28.34] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes.
[01:33:29.27] WYSTAN STEVENS: The Ford School of Public Policy. But you gotta get a picture of the interim building, too.
[01:33:36.07] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes, I should. Here we're getting this warmed-over Pond brothers, as you now see on the other building--.
[01:33:43.70] WYSTAN STEVENS: This is the same guy who did the North Quad.
[01:33:48.37] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right. This empire, this Eberbach house. Oh, Christian, you were talking about Christian weren't you?
[01:33:57.27] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yes. Christian Eberbach owned the Eberbach Hardware store. His son actually was operating it in 1893. Christian Eberbach died in 1901. He died in this house, which is on Woodlawn. Woodlawn actually was the name of the house when it was built, and Woodlawn Avenue that's there now was simply the driveway to this magnificent estate, which backed up to the County fair grounds. Christian Eberbach died there in 1901 in September, and his physician took pity on the man suffering the agonies of cancer, and he said I wish that there were some way that I could take your pain onto me. Eberbach replied quickly, Dr. I wouldn't wish this pain on anyone. And then he thought a moment and said, except that rascal Czolgosz. And he was referring to the man who had assassinated President Mckinley only a week or two earlier. I think it made -- well, I'm not sure when Czolgosz was hanged, but it wasn't very long after Christian Eberbach died there in 1901.
[01:35:16.56] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Wystan, you're a wonder. We're getting close to the end, folks.
[01:35:21.81] WYSTAN STEVENS: I just read the old newspapers, they're full of wonderful gossip.
[01:35:25.57] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: This is what the Michigan Center--.
[01:35:27.12] WYSTAN STEVENS: There's no newspaper now, I might as well read the old ones, right?
[01:35:33.77] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: You know this building, the main building was there, and then the baggage room -- I guess this was the baggage room, and then the other building was the -- express something -- express building, am I right?
[01:35:47.57] WYSTAN STEVENS: Yup. The Railway Express Agency, REA.
[01:35:51.66] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: You know, I got in a big argument with the preservation people back when Chuck Muer bought this. They didn't want him to do anything with it. But in order to make it really viable he needed a bigger kitchen and some more space. So, we split up into, what I called purists and traders, and I was one of the traders, because I felt you can't keep every building as a museum. But I think that I helped improve it. For example, Chuck was going to make a solid wall along this where he filled in that canopy with a few little windows in it. I said, Chuck, why don't you just make the whole thing glass so you can see the trains by. So he did that, and I think that that improved it.
[01:36:42.99] AUDIENCE: Kingsbury.
[01:36:43.22] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: It made it lighter than it would have been. Yes?
[01:36:46.16] AUDIENCE: I remember that conversation well. Chuck Muer had the idea, well, the old wood siding on the railroad cars were going to imitate that--.
[01:36:55.92] WYSTAN STEVENS: Gordon [? Batton. ?]
[01:36:57.04] AUDIENCE: And I think you and Rick Newman talked him out of that idea--.
[01:37:02.60] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yet I think we actually--.
[01:37:03.48] AUDIENCE: --For the betterment of the building.
[01:37:04.17] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I think we actually improved this side, too, because he originally wanted to build this here all out of the same stone. And I think Chuck, it's never going to -- on the rendering that his architect had done, it looked all the same. But I said it's not gonna look the same. I said why don't you put something else in like metal, and I said it'll save you a lot of money, too. And so he did it. I think this is much better than it would have been had he made this all out of the same stone. I think it means that this building is more independent of this addition than it would have been. So I think all in all it's not bad.
[01:37:41.39] WYSTAN STEVENS: Back up to your previous slide. I have to chide you here -- Mewer is spelled m-u-e-r.
[01:37:48.75] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Really? Oh, right.
[01:37:50.64] AUDIENCE: Why couldn't they build it with stone to match the old stone? Didn't that come right out of Barton Pond?
[01:37:57.78] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, well maybe it would have.
[01:37:59.14] AUDIENCE: Isn't that Barton Pond was a stone quarry before the dam, right?
[01:38:02.84] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yeah, maybe they could have.
[01:38:06.13] WYSTAN STEVENS: We should mention also that Chuck Muer died a few years after this great controversy in a very romantic fashion -- he just disappeared during a hurricane in the Bermuda Triangle.
[01:38:19.94] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: I'll bet he didn't think it was romantic those last few minutes.
[01:38:22.75] WYSTAN STEVENS: No, I don't suppose. He sailed off one day.
[01:38:28.11] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Well, that appropriately brings us to almost the last stop here, Forest Hill Cemetery gate. This has always been a very favorite building of mine.
[01:38:39.60] WYSTAN STEVENS: This was before the office building at the left was doubled in size. KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh, that's right. As you see in the last two here -- but otherwise it stood up very well. And now, of course -- I have a couple of pictures from the book, which I've reproduced here. And Wystan--.
[01:39:02.52] WYSTAN STEVENS: The angel up there is on the grave of Johnny Bird who was 13 years old on June 10, 1887 when he got up early in the morning to see the circus train come to town and unload. He and his buddies were going to meet at dawn down on Depot Street where the train came to a stop. And apparently it was moving so slowly that he actually had his hand on one of the cars and was maybe looking inside to see the animals. The newspaper reports weren't that specific, but it did mention rather graphically that Johnny tripped and fell. He didn't notice the pile of ashes beside the tracks as he was walking along beside the train, and he tripped and fell and one of his legs landed on the rail and was run over by several successive cars, and in the journalistic terminology of 1887, it was mashed to a jelly. That must have made his mother feel real good to read those words in the paper. She was so ill at the time that she wasn't even able to attend his funeral a day or so later. A very tragic affair with his little friends carrying the tiny casket out here to the grave, which is right near the front entrance of the cemetery.
[01:40:29.08] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: This is much farther eastward in the cemetery. It was very hard finding this one, but I finally did. Because the juxtaposition of these three monuments was unmistakable once you found it.
[01:40:43.90] WYSTAN STEVENS: And there's no telling why this monument got in there because it's nothing special, except that probably they paid for the insertion of the photograph.
[01:40:54.11] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Now the next to the last slide, there is Wystan giving his famous talks. I don't know what year that's from but there you are. And I've pointed this out -- this area right here is just inside the gate. This is where Mary and I are going sometime, not soon I hope. But right in here, and so after that you've got to start your tours right here and tell how you were inspired by your old and now deceased friend, Kingsbury. And then everybody will take off their hats.
[01:41:25.93] WYSTAN STEVENS: I want an elaborate monument there with video and all the trimmings.
[01:41:29.08] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Right, exactly. So, there we are.
[01:41:43.55] WYSTAN STEVENS: Incidentally, that last picture shows King and Copenhagen.
[01:41:47.29] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Yes.
[01:41:47.52] WYSTAN STEVENS: The man gets around.
[01:41:49.80] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: On my 80th birthday in May 27 of last year. And that's Wystan in October, as you can tell.
[01:41:55.71] Yes. Susan.
[01:41:57.61] AUDIENCE: I just wanted to comment that the bricks from the First Presbyterian Church when it was demolished were reused for the Greek Orthodox Church that's now half demolished on North Main Street.
[01:42:09.63] WYSTAN STEVENS: Oh, that's right.
[01:42:10.92] AUDIENCE: So the bricks in that church are from the 1860s.
[01:42:15.73] WYSTAN STEVENS: And some of those bricks stand in a house on Forest Avenue between Well Street and Granger.
[01:42:24.29] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Oh. How interesting.
[01:42:26.99] WYSTAN STEVENS: And probably other places, too.
[01:42:29.53] KINGSBURY MARZHOLF: Thank you so much for coming to this, and I'm sure if you have questions and want autographs, that Wystan and I will be available.
[01:42:39.97] [MUSIC]

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February 21, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Length: 1:43:00

Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)

Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library

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