One of the arsenical wallpapers in "Shadows".

It is one of only two known copies to exist in the state. If not for its historical importance, even the most fervent bibliophile might agree: the fewer copies in the world the better.

“Shadows from the Walls of Death” is dangerous not in the sense of a book containing radical ideas. Nor is it dangerous in the way a bomb-building manual might be. In fact, after the title page and preface, the following 86 pages, each one measuring about 22 by 30 inches, contain no printed words at all.

Michigan State University holds the other copy of “Shadows” in its Special Collections library division. The volume is sealed in a protective container, and each page is individually encapsulated.

Prospective “readers” of “Shadows” at the Buhr building must wear blue plastic protective gloves. During a visit to the Buhr some days ago, the book was wheeled out slowly on its individual cart. The marbled pattern on the cover showed through a protective thick-gauge plastic bag.

I held my breath as I gingerly eased open the cover, and while “reading” the pages I was careful to avoid any skin contact. “Shadows” is saturated with a deadly amount of arsenic.

UM alum Robert Kedzie created “Shadows from the Walls of Death.” After receiving his degree with the medical school’s first graduating class, in 1851, Kedzie established a medical practice in Kalamazoo and later Eaton County’s Vermontville. He left his practice, along with his wife and three sons, to serve as a Civil War surgeon with Michigan’s 12th Regiment. Kedzie was captured and imprisoned at Shiloh, but paroled.

In 1863 he returned to Michigan to chair Michigan Agricultural College’s (MSU’s) chemistry department. Some three decades later, Kedzie imported 1,700 pounds of beet seeds from Europe in a campaign to assess the suitability of Michigan soil for sugar beet production. The seed was sent to 400 Lower Peninsula farmers. Of those, 228 responded and mailed beets back to Lansing for analysis. They were found to contain 14% sugar. Michigan’s beet sugar industry was born.

Before donning the mantle of “Father of the Michigan Beet Sugar Industry,” Kedzie was elected to serve with the state’s board of health when it formed in 1873. He chaired the committee on “Poisons, Special Sources of Danger to Life and Health, &c.” Kedzie wasted no time in reporting his chief concern in an essay, “Poisonous Papers,” included in the Board of Health’s inaugural 1874 report.

He called attention to a problem raised by Massachusetts’ board of health in 1872 – the widespread use of wallpaper colored with arsenical pigment.

Another arsenical wallpaper from "Shadows."

The story of Napoleon poisoned by arsenical wallpaper while imprisoned on the island of St. Helena in 1815 is a familiar rumor. Largely forgotten, however, is that arsenical wallpaper was common and widely used in Michigan, Massachusetts, and elsewhere in the 19th-century United States. In 1887, the American Medical Association estimated that between 1879 and 1883, 54–65% of all wallpaper sold in the United States contained arsenic, a third of which at dangerous levels. Over time, the poisonous pigment could flake or be brushed off the wallpaper and float in the air as inhalable dust or settle on furniture in the home.

Kedzie cited several cases of wallpaper poisoning in his essay, including one from a family in Manchester in Washtenaw County.

The walls of one bed-room were covered with a paper the ground work of which was stone color with bands of bright green ornamented with gilt. The daughter, Emma, aged 9, occupied this room for several months. Soon after occupying the room her health began to fail, and she exhibited the following symptoms: Lameness, resembling rheumatism, darting pains in various portions of the body; languor in the morning, feverishness, pains in the head and about the frontal sinuses, sores in various parts of the body, faint spells, turning white about the mouth, and great loss of flesh. The best medical advice that could be procured was obtained, but no essential improvement followed. Whenever she left home for a few weeks her health improved; but she relapsed into her former condition on returning home.

Kedzie tested the paper and found it contained a high level of arsenic. Emma was removed from the room and regained her health.

An Economical Dye

Originally a byproduct of the European mining industry, arsenic offered mining companies a means of profiting from a waste product, and offered manufacturers a means of obtaining a cheap dye. Thousands of tons were annually imported to the United States. The substance produced lovely hues ranging from deep emerald to pale sea-green. Arsenic could also be mixed into other colors, giving them a soft, appealing pastel appearance.

The first application of arsenic as a pigment was as a paint dye. The pale green shade caught on as a “refined” color. American manufacturers began using arsenic to color a range of consumer goods. Children’s toys were painted with arsenical paint. Arsenic-dyed paper was used in greeting cards, stationery, candy boxes, concert tickets, posters, food container labels, mailing labels, pamphlets, playing cards, book-bindings, and envelopes –envelopes the sender had to lick.

“A professor at the Agricultural College,” wrote Kedzie in “Poisonous Papers,” “brought home a package of lead pencils around which was a broad band of beautiful green paper. His little children, attracted by the beautiful color of this paper, wanted it to play with, but he handed it to me for analysis, and I found it contained enough arsenic to poison all of them.” Kedzie went on to cite cases involving a baby’s toy box decorated with green paper, a U.S. Express Co. package with a green mailing label, and green store price tags, all of which tested positive for arsenic.

Arsenic Elsewhere

In 19th-century Michigan, arsenic served as a home rat poison and insecticide – even childrens’ stuffed animals were dusted with it by manufacturers to prevent infestation. Arsenic appeared in green lampshades, cosmetics, and copper cookware. It was used to color candy and glaze fudge. Cheesemakers sometimes threw a pinch or two into the cheesemaking vat in the hope of killing ptomaine.

Ypsilanti druggist Frank Smith sold Paris Green and wallpapers that like as not were impregnated with arsenic, as seen in this 1878 ad.

Arsenic was an ingredient in many patent medicines. As late as 1921 the American Medical Association was still finding arsenic in patent medicines that included Blue Bell Kidney Tablets, Botanic Blood Balm, Wildroot Dandruff Remedy, Dander-Off, Dr. Miles’ Restorative Nervine, La Franco Vitalizer No. 200, and others. Arsenic was also used in mainstream medicine as a treatment for syphilis.

Arsenic was extensively used in 19th-century Michigan agriculture as the ubiquitous insecticide “Paris Green.” It was dusted on tomatoes, potato foliage, cabbage, cucumbers, grapes, melons, and sprayed on fruit trees.

Arsenic-dyed cloth led to an 1860s fad for emerald-green tarlatan-fabric ball gowns. Luckily the trend was short-lived. The 1884 annual report from Massachusetts’ State Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity said, “Attention has very frequently been called to the presence of large amounts of arsenic in green tarlatan, which has given rise so many times to dangerous symptoms of poisoning when made into dresses and worn, so that it is very rare now to see a green tarlatan dress.” The report continued:

This fabric is still used, however, to a very dangerous extent, chiefly for the purposes of ornamentation, and may often be seen embellishing the walls and tables at church and society fairs, and in confectionery, toy and dry-goods stores. The writer has repeatedly seen this poisonous fabric used at church fairs and picnics as a covering for confectionery and food, to protect the latter from flies. As is well known, the arsenical pigment is so loosely applied to the cloth that a portion of it easily separates upon the slightest motion. Prof. Hoffmann after examining a large number of specimens estimated that twenty or thirty grains of the pigment would separate from a dress per hour, when worn in a ball-room.

Two to three grains (130-195 milligrams) could prove fatal if ingested.

Arsenic was also used to dye stockings, underwear, curtains, millinery decorations, artificial flowers, and cloth linings for bassinettes and cribs in a variety of colors. Green flannel boot linings impregnated with arsenic allegedly killed several California gravel miners in 1875. Arsenic poisoning is still a concern for modern-day reenactors who wish to wear authentic Victorian-era clothing.

Mysterious Poisonings

Skin ulcerations are one symptom of arsenic poisoning. Others include headache, abdominal pain, diarrhea, patches of skin discoloration, hair loss, coughing, convulsions, and neuropathy in the hands and feet.

In 19th-century Michigan, those symptoms pertained to a range of diseases. Arsenic poisoning was often diagnosed as conditions that included “general debility,” neuralgia, consumption (tuberculosis), cholera, rheumatism, gastritis, dysentery, or paralysis – all of which commonly appear as causes of death on old Michigan death certificates.

Sometimes the symptoms were not produced by a chronic condition caused by long-term exposure, but by acute conditions deliberately and maliciously created. Over the years, UM served as the state’s resource for toxicological examinations in arsenic poisoning cases.

In the summer of 1846, the Oakland Gazette reported suspicion surrounding the death of one Harriet Russell. Her remains were disinterred and her stomach and intestines sent to Ann Arbor for testing. Silas Douglas of the chemistry department tested the samples and found arsenic. Russell’s husband was taken into custody.

In the summer of 1861, the Grand Traverse Herald reported another suspicious death. Douglas analyzed the stomach contents of one Nicholas Frankinburger of Traverse City, finding a large quantity of arsenic. Douglas’ skills were employed again in 1865 in the notorious Battle Creek Haviland murder case in which Sarah Haviland was accused of poisoning three children. His findings led to her conviction.

In addition to Douglas, other UM toxicologists and pathologists served as analysts and expert witnesses in arsenic poisoning cases. As arsenic was a late 19th-century ingredient in embalming fluid, post-mortem embalming could hide ante-mortem poisoning attempts. In the spring of 1892 the wife of Matthew Millard, a leading businessman of Ionia County, took ill and died. Her husband, a onetime undertaker, embalmed her with injections of arsenic in her mouth and rectum and had her buried.

Pretty green stars conceal a lethal secret.

Due to suspicions of poisoning, Mrs. Millard was exhumed 105 days later and several tissue samples were analyzed. Mrs. Millard was re-buried, then re-exhumed again so that more samples could be taken. Arsenic was found in her internal organs.

The case went to court. The leading toxicological textbook of the day taught that arsenic could not spread to internal organs after death; therefore, said the prosecution, Mrs. Millard’s husband must have poisoned her. Robert Kedzie and UM toxicologist Victor Vaughn testified for the defense, saying that arsenic could indeed spread throughout the body after death; the presence of the poison in the internal organs did not necessarily indicate ante-mortem poisoning. To prove it, Vaughn duplicated the arsenic injection procedure on a corpse and buried it. When exhumed, it was found that the arsenic had spread to the internal organs. Millard was ultimately acquitted.

In the celebrated 1895 New York case of Mary Alice Fleming’s alleged matricide by clam chowder, Vaughn testified for the prosecution. “Dr. Vaughn is the discoverer of tyrotoxicon, the ptomaine poison found in stale milk, and enjoys a world-wide celebrity for original research in toxicology and physiological chemistry,” wrote the June 11, 1896 New York Times. The story went on to say that Vaughn testified about the types and classifications of poisons and described in detail the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. He agreed that it appeared that Mary Alice’s mother had apparently died of arsenic poisoning. Though the prosecution’s case was strong, popular sentiment of the time ran against the death penalty for a woman, and Mary Alice was acquitted.

Vaughn, along with UM pathologist Alfred Warthin also provided analyses in the 1909-1911 Sparling family poisonings in Ubly, near Bad Axe in Michigan’s Thumb area. The father, John Sparling and three of his four sons, Peter, Albert, and Scyrel, died from arsenic and strychnine poisoning in a case that involved alleged improprieties between the mother and a local doctor, Robert Macgregor. Macgregor encouraged her to take out life insurance policies on her family members. Vaughn and Warthin found evidence of arsenic poisoning, and Macgregor went to Jackson State Prison with a life sentence, though he was later pardoned by Governor Ferris.

Nearly four decades earlier, Robert Kedzie had delivered his own verdict: arsenical wallpapers must be eliminated from the state. In 1874 he collected numerous wallpaper samples from Detroit, Lansing, and Jackson stores, cut them into pages, and had them bound into 100 books which he distributed to libraries around Michigan.

The dainty and artistic wallpaper samples stand in contrast to a dire Biblical quotation on the title page of “Shadows of the Walls of Death”:

And behold, if the plague be in the walls of the house, with hollow strakes, greenish or reddish, … Then the priest shall go out of the house to the door of the house, and shut up the house seven days. … And he shall cause the house to be scraped within round about, and they shall pour out the dust that they scrape off without the city into an unclean place.

Kedzie’s public health campaign was reported to have poisoned one lady who examined the book, but it otherwise effectively publicized the dangers of living in a house papered in arsenic. Scraps of arsenical wallpaper may still be found here and there in historical homes, now merely an antique curiosity to be removed for safety’s sake. It is no longer a silent everyday threat disguised as beautiful patterns on the walls.

Mystery Artifact

Last month, Jim Rees and Poohbah correctly guessed that the object was a blowtorch (honorable mention goes to Irene Hieber for guessing that it was an acetylene torch – you were right about the torch part).

Mystery Object

This artifact is a recent acquisition to the author’s collection (translation: scavenged from a curbside pile of junk while walking the dogs) and I can’t wait to try it out!

On second thought, I think I can wait.

This month’s Mystery Artifact dates from an era of more leisurely communication. This tiny cylinder had a specific function, but what was it?

Where in the house could you find it?

What did it do?

Take your best guess and good luck!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti.” Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists like Laura Bien and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle (arsenic free!), please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

Wall Street resident Eliana Moya-Raggio, right, talks with architect Neil Martin after the April 26 meeting at the Kellogg Eye Center. The meeting focused on a University of Michigan parking structure to be built in that neighborhood. Moya-Raggio argued for the right of neighbors to be closely involved in the project's design. (Photos by the writer.)

On April 26, 2012 about 15 residents heard from UM representatives about plans for the $34 million structure, which university regents approved on April 19. The purpose of the meeting was to get input from neighbors that will inform the structure’s design. Roughly 2,000 people live in that general area.

They offered a lot of input, expressing concerns and giving specific suggestions related to noise pollution, traffic congestion, lighting and more. Ideas from residents included putting a green roof on the top of the structure, which will likely be at least 4-5 levels tall; placing the structure as far west on the site as possible, further away from residential buildings; making the structure pedestrian friendly; and encouraging the use of alternative transportation.

Tim Mortimer, president of the Riverside Park Place Condominium Association, criticized UM for a lack of leadership in its approach to parking. While UM officials like to refer to the university as the Harvard of the Midwest, he said, it’s actually more like the Southeast New Jersey Junior College of the Midwest, in terms of environmental sustainability and design. He urged the university to do more, and presented a letter from the condo association’s board that included 11 detailed suggestions for the project – ranging from architecture to entrance/exit configuration. [.pdf of Mortimer's letter]

Jim Kosteva, UM’s director of community relations, defended the university’s efforts in encouraging alternative transportation. And Tom Peterson, associate director of operations and support services for the UM Hospitals and Health Centers, provided details on a range of programs offered by UM in that regard – including vanpools, Zipcars, free bus service through MRide, and shuttle service from outlying parking lots.

But Peterson also presented the university’s case for needing more parking at the Wall Street location, pointing to employment growth at the nearby UM medical campus. Since 2009, employment at the UM medical school and hospital complex has grown from about 19,000 to nearly 21,000 employees. Even more staff will be added when a major renovation of the former Mott children’s hospital is completed, he said.

The Wall Street parking project was revived after the university pulled out of the proposed Fuller Road Station in February. The joint effort with the city of Ann Arbor would have included a 1,000-space parking structure and, some hoped, an eventual train depot. When asked about it at Thursday’s meeting, Kosteva said the university still shares the city’s vision for that Fuller Road site as a good location for intermodal transportation. When the city receives the federal support it needs for this project, he added, the university is prepared to be re-engaged about its potential role.

Kosteva was also asked about future plans for even more parking on Wall Street. He noted that the master plan for the medical center, including the Wall Street area, was approved by regents in 2005 and remains in place. The master plan anticipates adding 700,000 to 900,000 square feet of clinical and research space in the area, as well as two parking structures. That plan is guiding decision-making, he said. [.pdf of 2005 medical center master plan]

The bulk of the 90-minute meeting focused on design aspects of the Wall Street structure, in a discussion led by university planner Sue Gott. Several people pointed to the city’s Fourth & Washington parking structure as a model. Wall Street resident Elizabeth Colvin said she refers to it as the “Sue Gott parking structure,” because of Gott’s instrumental role in soliciting public input that helped shape the design. At the time, Gott worked for JJR and was a consultant on that project.

Gott, who grew up in Ann Arbor, replied by saying she knew UM had to deliver something that was worthy of this city, and something they can all be proud of.

Context: UM Health System Growth

Near the start of the April 26 meeting, Tom Peterson – associate director of operations and support services for the UM Hospitals and Health Centers – gave an overview of the health system to provide some context for the Wall Street parking project. “We’re in a growth mode,” he said.

In-patient beds have increased about 20% over the past five years, from 848 to 1,009. In addition to in-patient care, the university opened a medical observation unit in 2008 with 18 short-term, out-patient beds. In 2010, the hospital did something similar for its surgical observation unit, adding 13 beds.

In 2011, a major expansion of the emergency room added 27 treatment bays, Peterson reported. Over the past 8-10 years, the hospital has added 18 operating rooms and expanded its diagnostic imaging services. These are just a few of the obvious signs of growth, he said.

Tom Peterson, associate director of operations and support services for the UM Hospitals and Health Centers, talks to residents about the growth in employment and patient services at the UM medical complex, which is driving the need for more parking. In the background are Paul Green of the Broadway Neighborhood Association and Sabra Briere, Ward 1 city councilmember who lives on Broadway.

The next activity that will spur additional growth is the $163 million renovation of the former C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, which was approved by UM regents at their April 19, 2012 meeting. The new C. S. Mott Children’s and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital opened late last year. The renovation project, to be completed in two years, will add another 120 beds, mostly for neuroscience patients. Hundreds of employees will be hired for that facility, Peterson said.

In 2009, the UM medical school and hospital complex employed about 19,000 people. Today, there are nearly 21,000 employees. “That’s pretty significant employment growth,” Peterson said.

With that growth comes demand for parking, he said, but the university hasn’t simply been adding on-site parking. The UM has been promoting alternative transportation approaches, too, he said. About 570 employees use a vanpool program, for example, and the university hopes to expand that number. The MRide program began in 2004, allowing faculty, students and staff of the university to board AATA buses without paying a fare. The cost for the service is paid by UM to the AATA, and fiscal year 2011 was a record-setting year for the program, with 2.43 million rides taken.

In another partnership with AATA, the university is subsidizing express routes between Ann Arbor and Chelsea, and Ann Arbor and Canton. Peterson noted that he’s one of the people featured in AATA’s ad campaign, and he’s happy to support public transportation.

The university joined the Zipcar car-sharing program in 2006, and now over 3,000 people have signed up to use the system’s 21 cars in Ann Arbor.

UM’s GreenRide website was launched to help people find alternative transportation options, Peterson said. Through that, 23 new car pools and 19 vanpools have been started.

In addition, the university has also expanded its off-site parking, Peterson said. In 2010, following the acquisition of the former Pfizer facility – now called the North Campus Research Complex (NCRC) – about 300 spaces were added to the parking system. Last year, another 265 spaces were opened at an adjacent lot. That’s a temporary solution, however, because employment at NCRC is expected to grow, he said.

A UM lot on Glazier Way has been expanded by about 100 spaces. And the university added a medical express bus service between outlots and the medical campus, as well as a research link bus between NCRC and the biomedical engineering building to the medical campus.

Peterson concluded by saying that UM is trying to deal with the transportation issue in many ways. They have limited land, so they’re taking a blended approach. To some extent, it does include additional parking spaces. In 2006, the Ann Street lot was opened, adding about 525 spots. In 2007, about 450 spaces were added in a structure at the Cardiovascular Center, including about 200 spots for staff. But when the new Mott Children’s Hospital opened last year, UM converted about 300 former employee spaces for use by patients and visitors. There are multiple ways that the university is addressing its parking needs, he said.

Fuller Road Station: Still on the Table

Ray Detter, a community activist and chair of the city’s Downtown Area Citizens Advisory Council, noted that part of the university’s previous plan had focused on building the roughly 1,000-space Fuller Road Station. For many, Detter said, it had been a preferable alternative to building a parking structure on Wall Street. His understanding was that the project was suspended but not necessarily cancelled, and he asked for clarification of that.

Jim Kosteva replied by briefly recapping the history of Fuller Road Station, noting that the project had been “paused” this February. [See Chronicle coverage: "UM, Ann Arbor Halt Fuller Road Project"] The university had been trying to address the demand for parking prior to 2008 with its Wall Street parking project, Kosteva said, but suspended that effort when UM staff began talking with the city about the possible joint project on Fuller Road.

By way of additional background, university staff held a neighborhood meeting in December 2008 about the possibility of constructing an office building, parking structure and transit center on Wall Street, just down the street from UM’s Kellogg Eye Center. That  $48.6 million project, which had been approved by regents at their September 2008 meeting, was met with considerable resistance from neighbors.

But at another meeting in January 2009, city staff and some councilmembers met with Wall Street area residents and talked about the city’s relationship with the university, both on that parking project and more broadly. At the time, city planners said the university was proceeding on parallel tracks with both the Wall Street parking structure and possible interest in a Fuller Road transit station.

Then at a June 2009 meeting of the UM regents, Tim Slottow, the university’s chief financial officer, reported that UM’s purchase of the former Pfizer property resulted in enough additional parking spaces to meet their demands for the medical campus at that time. Slottow also indicated that he was encouraged by talks that the university was having with the city of Ann Arbor about a possible transit station on Fuller Road. Those two factors resulted in the university putting the Wall Street parking project on hold.

Jim Kosteva, UM's director of community relations.

Fuller Road Station moved ahead, and a memorandum of understanding between the university and city was signed in November 2009 that laid out the responsibilities for shared costs, a timetable for completion and other details. [.pdf of memorandum of understanding] The MOU called for the estimated $46.55 million project to be shared between UM and the city in proportion to the number of parking spaces available to each (78% and 22 % respectively), making the university’s share of the project an estimated $36.309 million. The target date for completing the parking structure piece of the project was June 15, 2012.

Regents formally authorized the project at their January 2010 meeting. A site plan was designed and received approval from the Ann Arbor city planning commission – on a 7-2 vote – in Sept. 21, 2010, but the plan was never moved forward to the city council for consideration.

At the April 26, 2012 neighborhood meeting, Kosteva told residents that it became clear that the city couldn’t meet its level of participation and timetable as outlined in the MOU, and in February the project was halted. However, he said, the university still shares the city’s vision for that Fuller Road site as a good location for intermodal transportation. UM officials are hopeful and supportive of the city’s efforts to gain the federal funding it needs to realize that vision, he said. When the city receives the federal support it needs for this project, he added, the university is prepared to be re-engaged about its potential role.

But given the needs of UM employees, Kosteva said, the university had to address those real demands for parking. That’s why regents were asked to authorize this Wall Street parking project, he concluded.

Future Plans for Wall Street: Even More Parking?

Jim Koli, owner of the Northside Grill on Broadway near the intersection with Wall Street, observed that there was previously a real neighborhood in that area. But over the years the property has been slowly bought up by UM and houses have been leveled, he said. At one point, he noted, there had been plans to build two parking structures on Wall Street. What was the university’s long-term intent? If more parking structures are built, it will add to the problems that have been mentioned. Koli wondered whether anyone could comment with some certainty about the plans of the “regental overlords.”

Jim Kosteva replied that the master plan for the medical center, including the Wall Street area, was approved by regents in 2005 and remains in place. It anticipated adding 700,000 to 900,000 square feet of clinical and research space in the area, as well as two parking structures. That plan is guiding decision-making, he said. [.pdf of 2005 medical center master plan]

Sabra Briere, a Ward 1 city councilmember who lives in that neighborhood, noted that the plan doesn’t specify the size of the parking structures. But she recalled that the last plan had included two 600-space structures, plus an office building.

Tim Mortimer, president of the Riverside Park Place Condominium Association, said he’d also seen the 2005 master plan, and he asked Kosteva if residents should expect a second structure in the future. That’s what the master plan reflects, Kosteva replied, adding that employment would be the driver for future parking needs.

Mortimer said there’s a general recognition that the leadership of UM hasn’t done a good job in educating its staff about the need for alternative transportation or off-site parking to minimize the impact on the neighborhood. UM leaders don’t have the courage to tell staff that if they don’t want to accommodate a sustainable, environmentally sensitive approach to transportation, they can work somewhere else.

Tim Mortimer, president of the Riverside Park Place Condominium Association's board of directors.

UM officials like to refer to the university as the Harvard of the Midwest, Mortimer noted. In terms of environmental sustainability and design, it’s actually more like the Southeast New Jersey Junior College of the Midwest,  he contended. The neighbors hope that someone can exert some kind of leadership that will result in less need for parking in the area.

Kosteva responded, saying that the alternatives outlined by Tom Peterson earlier in the meeting did demonstrate leadership. A wide variety of transportation alternatives are provided to employees, he said, and there is strong financial encouragement as well. While Kosteva said he appreciated that there’s room for improvement, the objective is to continue to support these alternatives. Kosteva said it was that kind of leadership that caused UM to get involved in Fuller Road Station, and the university continues to try to support that vision.

Another structure would be the worst of both worlds, Mortimer said. It would require people to drive in to the structure, then take a shuttle to get to their final destination.

Peterson told Mortimer that he heard and understood those concerns, but that he also hears from UM employees that there’s not enough parking. The hospital leadership has consistently told its employees to “get over it,” Peterson added – there will never be enough parking for every employee. The university needs a blended approach, he said.

Brenda Giers, who lives in the only remaining single-family home on Wall Street – owned by her brother-in-law, Harry Hawkins of West Hawk Industries – said she worried about what would happen to her home. She said she feels like she’s in the middle of nowhere, and is worried because she’s retired. If the university bought the house it would put her in a jam, she said.

Kosteva noted that development of the Wall Street area has been in the university’s master plan since 1988. Yet the university has never aggressively sought to acquire property, he said. When individual property owners approach UM indicating a willingness to sell, the university makes an offer, Kosteva said. As long as Giers’ brother-in-law doesn’t want to sell, he added, the university can’t buy that property.

Design Considerations

Sue Gott, university planner for UM, led the discussion to solicit input on the parking structure’s design. She began by noting that the regental authorization had been given just a week ago, at the regents’ April 19 meeting. The staff thought it would be best to meet with neighbors early in the process, she said, but the challenge is that there’s no design work to share yet.

A map of the Wall Street area, with the proposed parking structure – located between Wall Street and Maiden Lane – indicated in yellow. (Links to .pdf of full map.)

Gott displayed the graphic of the area that had been shown to the regents, and said she wanted to get input from the residents before they launch into the design. Doug Koepsell of the university architect’s office was on hand to record input from the evening, Gott said, and that input would inform the site’s design.

Gott told residents that she had reviewed her notes from the meeting in 2008, but noted that the project has changed since then. [Most notably, the current plan calls for one parking structure – the plan in 2008 included an office building, parking structure and transit center on Wall Street.]

One consideration is the importance of maintaining pedestrian circulation, she said. In the past, there had been a strong desire to have street trees, she noted, so one possibility is to have street trees as a buffer between the sidewalk and Maiden Lane. That might make sense along the Wall Street side, too, she said. There will likely be space at the east and west ends of the site that could be used for stormwater management, but also for green space that could be used by residents, she said. Perhaps people would like to have benches or some other kind of seating there. These are the kind of things they were hoping to get feedback on, she said.

Later in the meeting, the project’s architect – Neil Martin of the S/L/A/M Collaborative (Stecker Labau Arneill McManus) – described his initial thoughts on the structure.  He talked about inspirations from the neighborhood and the university, including the historic DTE building on Broadway, with its warm brick and mortar, and Hill Auditorium, designed by Albert Kahn. The thing that’s striking is the sense of craft that these buildings display, he said. He hopes to bring that sense of craft to the parking structure, too. In part it will involve selecting the right kind of brick, he said.

Martin also talked about the scale of the project, saying it was his mission to create a structure that doesn’t feel enormous and that is pedestrian friendly. It was important to design a building that doesn’t look like a parking structure, he said, and to make the rhythm of the building pleasing both from the perspective of people walking down from the bridge over the Huron River, as well as for people walking close to the structure.

Throughout the meeting there were a wide range of suggestions and issues raised by residents and addressed by Gott and Martin. The following report presents a summary of that discussion, organized by topic.

Design Considerations: Green Space

Randall Jacob, who lives on Jones Drive, asked about the status of a cluster of mature trees at the east end of the site. Gott replied that a tree assessment will be conducted to look at the types, health and quality of the trees there, but she couldn’t guarantee that all would be saved.

Tim Mortimer noted that to the east of that tree cluster is a small area of city parkland with a path running through it to primarily handle pedestrian flow, he said. It might be nice to have an adjacent green area between there and the parking structure for people to sit or play Frisbee or use for things other than a walkthrough, he said.

Looking down from a 7th floor meeting room in the Kellogg Eye Center, a view of the parking lot on Wall Street where the new 700-space parking structure will be built. In the right foreground is Wall Street. Parallel to Wall Street on the left is Maiden Lane. The white buildings are the Nielsen Square condominiums.

Gott replied that this was useful feedback, and that the UM staff also will be talking to staff at the city – including parks planner Amy Kuras – about what kinds of features might contribute to the neighborhood experience.

City councilmember Sabra Briere said she hoped the designers would think of a creative use for the top of the structure, so that it doesn’t become a major heat source. She observed that some cities have made parking structures with green roofs, but that hasn’t happened in Ann Arbor. Gott replied that UM’s parking structure at the Cardiovascular Center has a green roof.

A green roof would address several issues, Jim Koli observed. It would help with stormwater management, make it visually more pleasing, and eliminate the need to plow. He suggested asking people at UM’s School of Natural Resources and Environment for advice.

One resident requested a good mix of evergreens and shade trees, noting that shade trees “turn into sticks” for six months each year. Gott said evergreens are used selectively, because of security concerns – such trees can become hiding places.

Eliana Moya-Raggio suggested that instead of having green areas on each end of the structure, the building could be pushed to the west and have a larger green space on the east end, closer to the majority of residents. Gott said they’d look at placing the structure as far west as possible.

Christine Crockett, president of the Old Fourth Ward Association, urged UM to use flowering trees in the landscaping. “Bloomerang” lilacs, for example, will flower throughout the season and are salt resistant, she said. Crockett hoped the landscaping wouldn’t just be stark, green and boring. “I hope you let your color sense get carried away,” she said.

Design Considerations: Pedestrians

Tim Mortimer urged the design to allow for pedestrian paths and crosswalks all the way from the Nielsen Square condos across Maiden Lane, Wall Street, Canal Street and into Riverside Park. He indicated that if they had to choose, the residents of Nielsen Square would likely prefer a tree buffer on the north side of the parking structure, rather than a sidewalk. Gott said the design would aim for both, but she noted that Maiden Lane is relatively narrow, so that might be a factor.

Elizabeth Colvin pointed out that there’s quite a bit of pedestrian traffic on both sides of Maiden Lane. A resident of Long Shore Drive observed that many people walk their dogs along that stretch, heading to Island Park. It would be great if there were green areas for dogs to take “breaks,” she said – and a trash can would be nice, too.

Design Considerations: Noise

Sabra Briere, who lives on Broadway and represents Ward 1 residents on city council, said she’s heard concerns from residents about noise pollution from a new parking structure. Lighting systems make a constant noise, as do air circulation systems. It would add yet another “major hum” to a neighborhood that already has a lot of other major hums, she said. Briere hoped that designers would think about mitigating that kind of noise, as well as the noise from the cars themselves.

Later in the meeting, Briere observed that in the past, there has been a difference between the city’s ordinances and the university’s expectations for construction projects on UM property. She asked that UM not schedule the arrival of trucks or the start of construction before 7 a.m. under any circumstances, and that the work be concluded at a reasonable time at night. It’s important for residents to have the ability to enjoy the outdoors in their neighborhoods, she said.

Kittie Morelock, who lives on Wall Street, noted that speed bumps within the structure also cause noise when vehicles hit them, and she asked that speed bumps not be included. She also said that snow removal on the surface lots was already loud, with the beeping of trucks as they back up. Sometimes the work takes place between 2-6 a.m., and is very disruptive. Any way to mitigate that noise – especially at the top of the structure – would be good for the community of 2,000 people who live in the area, she said.

Design Considerations: Traffic, Congestion

Several comments focused on the already-congested Maiden Lane traffic, and the impact that bringing in an additional 500 vehicles will have.

Sue Gott reported that a traffic study will be conducted before the structure is built. They’ll look at the number of employees that will be working in Wall Street buildings, as well as how many will be walking to the hospital or taking a shuttle. Not all of the traffic will be new, she noted – although the structure is planned for 700 spaces, it’s a net increase of 500 spaces.

Ward 1 city councilmember Sabra Briere was knitting socks. Behind her to the left is Jim Koli, owner of Northside Grill, with his son Josh. Behind Briere to the right is Doug Koepsell of the university architect's office.

Tim Mortimer suggested placing entrances and egresses toward the west side of the structure, away from the more residential areas. He also wondered if it would be possible to accommodate shuttles within the parking site, rather than having them idling on the street. Gott said they could look into that, although they’re hoping to keep the footprint tight so that it doesn’t become a huge, long structure. It’s a balancing act, she said.

Ken Koral noted that Wall Street is primarily used by UM employees, while Maiden Lane is the real traffic corridor, leading directly to the bridge over the Huron River. He suggested it might be better to put the entrances and egresses to the structure on the Wall Street side, with possibly a new traffic light at Broadway and Wall Street.

Elizabeth Colvin, who lives in the Nielsen Square condos facing Maiden Lane, said there are already a lot of vehicles that idle on that street, including school buses and AATA buses. It’s very stop-and-go, she said, and she hoped that the design would keep that issue in mind.

Mortimer suggested shooting a video from the vantage point of the meeting room they were in – on the 7th floor of the Kellogg Eye Center, overlooking the parking lot. They could learn a lot about traffic flow from that, he said.

Jim Koli pointed out that four years ago when this project was initially being discussed, it was noted that Wall Street is wider than Maiden Lane because the original bridge across the Huron River was at Wall Street. The bridge was later moved to Maiden Lane, bringing more traffic to that narrower street. Now, 500 additional cars might be dumped onto Maiden Lane, he said. Perhaps putting an entrance/exit from the structure onto Wall Street, on the side closest to the bridge, would help ease the traffic onto Maiden Lane, he suggested.

Mortimer noted that there are residents on that east end who wouldn’t be happy about that strategy. Kosteva suggested then perhaps the entrance could be at the west end of the structure, away from residences and closer to the Kellogg Eye Center.

Design Considerations: Lighting

Brenda Giers, who lives in a single-family home on Wall Street, stressed the need for adequate street lights. Gott replied that designers are sensitive to lighting issues, including concerns about light spilling into the neighborhood from cars at the structure. There are also safety and security concerns about the need for adequate lighting within the structure. There could be motion-sensitive controls in the structure that would dim the lighting if no one is there, she said, but that would turn brighter when cars or people move through.

The design will also be sensitive to the need for pedestrian lighting outside the structure so that people will feel safe, Gott said, while trying to keep light contained on the site.

Design Considerations: Height

Paul Green of the Broadway Neighborhood Association asked what the range of levels might be for the structure – how tall would it be? There was some reluctance to speculate. The architect, Neil Martin, said they hadn’t figured it out yet, but it would likely be in the range of 4-5 stories. Sue Gott added that it will depend in part on the footprint. If they keep the structure on a smaller footprint, it would need to be taller.

Design Considerations: Public Art

Ray Detter noted that there’s been a lot of discussion in Ann Arbor about public art. He felt that generally, the university does a better job at this than the city, so he hoped it would be an element of the parking structure.

Sue Gott said that the designers had wondered whether Detter would like to include some historic markers regarding Lower Town. [Detter spearheaded the Downtown Ann Arbor Historical Street Exhibit Program, which includes permanent sidewalk exhibits at more than a dozen sites in downtown Ann Arbor and on the UM campus.]

Detter said the area had an interesting history, and he indicated a willingness to explore adding markers there. Gott said now would be the time to start talking about that, so the university could possibly provide a backdrop for that.

Design Considerations: Letter from Riverside Park Place

Tim Mortimer read aloud a two-page letter from the Riverside Park Place Condominium Association – he’s president of the association’s board. The letter made 11 specific design suggestions to mitigate the structure’s negative impact on the neighborhood:

1. Incorporate an architecturally detailed facade that minimizes the building’s apparent identity, hides its structural skeleton, and gives it an attractive appearance. Design the building to provide a net positive contribution to the streetscape. (Possible means include: careful selection of materials; visual articulations; reducing horizontal lines as the dominant theme in the facade.)

2. Afford special consideration to the experience of pedestrians walking along the structure’s perimeter. If at all possible: Avoid completely blank walls at the street level; make sidewalks sufficiently wide to accommodate two-way traffic comfortably; include pedestrian comfort as a criterion for building setback. Incorporate devices that animate the street frontage and provide visual interest.

3. Arrange vehicular entrances and access control points to permit sufficient stacking of arriving vehicles within the structure to avoid back-ups into the street during peak arrival times.

4. Locate the vehicular entrances and exits to utilize the existing Maiden Lane/Nielsen Court intersection to the maximum extent feasible to minimize the impact of traffic on adjoining residential uses and to minimize vehicle idling time.

5. Accommodate shuttle bus service at the west end of the structure, and manage the service to minimize bus idling on site.

6. Minimize the structure’s total size relative to its desired capacity by incorporating smaller stall spaces for a substantial portion of the parking capacity.

7. Design the structure to be LEED certified at least to the Gold level.

8. Design and select lighting to minimize glare and other impacts on homes in the area. (Example: High pressure sodium lighting is very harsh.) Minimize the light shining laterally away from the structure and off the top of the structure towards local homes.

9. Include a roof or screening on the top floor to minimize the eyesore of open parking when viewed from taller buildings in the area (both residential and Kellogg).

10. Minimize noise projected by infrastructural elements (transformers, light ballasts, fans, etc.) through optimal selection, placing, mounting and muffling of components.

11. Locate the structure as far as possible to the west to enable the open land east of the structure and adjacent to a small, existing area of city parkland to be as large as possible.

Neil Martin of S/L/A/M, the project’s architect, told Mortimer that the notes were helpful and that he agreed with many of the suggestions.

Design Considerations: General Design Features

Several residents pointed to the city’s Fourth and Washington parking structure as a successful design, that doesn’t look like a typical parking garage. Elizabeth Colvin said she called it the “Sue Gott parking structure,” and that it’s generally considered the gold standard of structures in Ann Arbor. It’s pleasant to look at, Colvin said, and doesn’t seem like a parking structure. The Wall Street structure wouldn’t need to look exactly like that, Colvin said, but it’s an example of design that works. [In the 1990s, Gott worked for the architecture and urban planning firm JJR and was hired by the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority – which managed the Fourth & Washington project – to help solicit public input. The design itself was done by the Ann Arbor architecture firm Mitchell & Mouat.]

University planner Sue Gott talks to Ken Koral, a resident of the nearby Broadway neighborhood, about the proposed parking structure on Wall Street. They are overlooking the current surface lot from a meeting room on the 7th floor of UM's Kellogg Eye Center.

Sabra Briere echoed those comments, saying that some people want to park at Fourth & Washington even though other structures might be closer to their destination. They like the way it feels to enter that structure, even though there are complaints about the tight turns between levels, she said. The stairwells are clean, and it’s not viewed as a hostile environment – compared to other structures like Ann Ashley or Fourth & William. Even people who generally hate parking structures don’t hate the one at Fourth & Washington, Briere said.

Kittie Morelock described it as a calm, quiet presence. Colvin noted that a design of that kind would result in allies for the Wall Street structure. Tim Mortimer joked that they shouldn’t make it too attractive, because they wouldn’t want to entice more people to use it.

Gott responded by saying that Fourth & Washington’s design resulted from the kind of community discussion that she wanted to have with residents for the Wall Street project, too. It was a discussion that was specific about aspirations for the building. There are many subtle cues in the Fourth & Washington structure that contribute to how people experience it, she said.

Gott recalled that Christine Crockett, at a previous meeting years ago, had used the term “humanity” to describe a design concept, and that word had resonated with her. Gott talked about how others in the room were influencing her approach too. She said she goes back years with Ken Koral, who lives on Broadway and has attended neighborhood meetings for other projects, advocating for the university to honor the experiences of neighbors. And Ray Detter “is like my conscience,” Gott said – she knows she has to deliver something that’s worthy of Ann Arbor.

Residents want to see something great happen on Wall Street, Gott said, and that’s why she and others involved in the project want to listen and work with them. There are obviously limitations, she added – they have to work within their budget. But the university wants to do something that’s great. Neil Martin was chosen as the architect on the team because they want to do a design that’s contextual to the neighborhood, appropriate, and something that they can all be proud of, she said.

Koral referred to Martin’s desire to incorporate aspects of existing buildings, and noted that there’s a hodge-podge of design in the neighborhood. He said it sounded like Martin was set on using brick, but there might be other materials that would better integrate. Fourth & Washington, which has a brick exterior, is a good design for its location, Koral said, but might not be the best choice for Wall Street. Mortimer noted that some of the nearby buildings, like the Riverside Park Place condominiums, aren’t exactly models of good design to emulate.

Eliana Moya-Raggio, a resident of Wall Street.

Paul Green observed that since many of the questions related to how the structure would look, residents should simply take a photo of a structure that they like, and send it to the designers. “It’s easy to do,” he said.

Tom Peterson pointed to a parking structure on the campus of Michigan State University, on Grand River Avenue, that does a good job of integrating the older architecture on that campus.

Eliana Moya-Raggio noted that parking structures are inherently dead spaces, so anything that can be done to enliven the building would be welcome. Because the university is not building on campus, but is building in a neighborhood, they need to listen to residents and incorporate feedback as much as possible. “I think it’s our right,” she said.

Short-Term Parking Plans

Sabra Briere raised a question that she characterized as a short-term issue. When construction on the site begins, 200 parking spaces will be temporarily displaced. Already she routinely gets complaints from people who live nearby because some UM employees park all day at Island Park, along Traver Road, or in the free spaces near the Amtrak station. She wondered where the people will park who currently use the Wall Street surface lot.

Steve Dolen, executive director of UM parking and transportation services, said that when new patient parking is completed next to the Kellogg Eye Center, that will open up more spaces at a nearby lot for employees. They are also planning to use shuttles to north campus, and encourage alternative modes of transportation. He told Briere that this was the first time he’d heard about employees parking at Island Park or along Traver Road.

Tom Peterson noted that there is still excess parking capacity at the North Campus Research Complex (NCRC) – the former Pfizer site. About 200 spaces are unused there, and some people from the Wall Street lot will likely migrate there.

Briere observed that because parking in the neighborhood is free and no residential parking permits are required, employees tend to like that option. She regularly sees people wearing scrubs walking toward the UM medical center, and when she asks them, they are very comfortable telling her where they park. The fact that UM employees park all day at city parks is not something she views with pleasure, Briere said.

Jim Koli added that since the city added parking meters along Wall Street, some of the more “frugal” UM employees have taken to parking in the neighborhood where there are no meters.

Next Steps

Elizabeth Colvin asked for a timetable on this project, and whether there would be additional meetings. Sue Gott replied that it’s too soon to know the schedule, but they’ll be working quickly because the demand for parking is great. She said Jim Kosteva will be a point person for neighbors. Kosteva encouraged people to contact him and he would add their names to an email list for notifications about the project. [Kosteva's email is jkosteva@umich.edu.]

Eliana Moya-Raggio asked when residents can expect to be included in the process. Gott promised that there would be more meetings, as soon as they determine the design schedule. Meetings with neighbors would typically occur through the design and construction process, Gott said.

At the end of the meeting, Tim Mortimer – president of the Riverside Park Place Condominium Association board – thanked the university staff for meeting with residents as soon as possible. Based on Gott’s leadership and the description offered by the architect Neil Martin, Mortimer said “I’m very optimistic.”

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A 1914 ad for the Livingston County Holstein-Friesian Association shows a cow with familiar markings.

Ypsilanti has never lacked for beauties, as any conductor on the onetime Packard Road interurban could have told you. Hordes of University of Michigan boys crowded the streetcars on weekends en route to their belles at Ypsilanti’s Normal teacher training school (which became Eastern Michigan University).

On the way, the young men unknowingly passed the home, at Packard and Golfside, of another belle more famous than any Normal girl. She was quiet and stocky, yet viewed as beautiful.

She had numerous relatives at the insane asylum at Pontiac, which in her case was regarded as a prestigious lineage. Thousands statewide knew her name. Many owned her children.

Pontiac De Nijlander was the state’s epitome of cow excellence in an era characterized, in the agricultural sphere, by what could be called Michigan’s turn-of-the-century “Holstein fever.”

A typical big-bodied black-and-white-splotched Holstein, Pontiac De Nijlander lived at Ypsiland. The 180-acre farm extended from Packard to Ellsworth, bordered on its east side by Golfside Road and owned by brothers Norris and Herbert Cole. Norris eventually bought his brother’s share and became sole proprietor of the farm, whose principal business was breeding top-quality Holstein bulls and cows.

Of Dutch origin, the breed had established its supremacy at an 1887 “battle of the breeds” in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Four hundred cows from the four top dairy breeds – Guernsey, Jersey, Ayrshire, and Holstein –competed to see which breed was the best producer of milk and butter.

Ypsiland Farms proudly declared itself as "home of Pontiac De Nijlander" in this wordy 1914 ad from the Michigan Dairy Farmer."

The Jersey Cattle Club was confident that their breed would win the butter contest. They commissioned an elegant silver cup for the winner, engraved with the image of a stately Jersey cow. In a surprise upset, the cup was won by Clothilde, a now-legendary Holstein.  Today the Jersey cup resides in the Holstein Association USA headquarters in Brattleboro, Vermont.

“Previous to this public test and victory,” wrote Frederick Houghton in an 1911 edition of the Holstein-Friesian Register, “whenever the Holsteins were spoken of as butter cows a sarcastic smile would illuminate the faces of the breeders of what had been termed the butter breeds. Not so now.”

The large, high-yielding breed spread to Michigan and breeders’ clubs formed on the county, regional, and state level. Before purebred breeds arrived in the state, most farms had a few head of “grade,” or ordinary, non-purebred cattle. High yields convinced many to switch to purebred, registered Holsteins.

A photo from the 1914 Holstein-Friesian Register highlights the business end of the famed 35-pound Ypsilanti cow, Pontiac De Nijlander.

Michigan breeders sought cows from the most prestigious Holstein family lines, such as the Clothilde line. That line began with the silver-cup-winning cow, who had been imported from the Netherlands in 1880.

The Aaggie line originated from a Dutch cow imported in 1879. The De Kol line began with another Dutch cow imported in 1885. Other famous lines included the Glista, Johanna, Korndyke, Netherland, Pauline Paul, Pietertje, and Segis.

A cow’s or bull’s name generally reflected (and still reflects, with modern-day breeders) her or his birth-farm and maternal and paternal lineage. One bull named Ypsiland Korndyke De Kol Pietertje – born at Ypsiland around 1907 and later sold to a Howell dairyman – likely had the blood of the Korndyke, De Kol, and Pietertje lines.

Somewhat arcane, the art of cattle nomenclature occasionally stumped even cattlemen, as illustrated in a vignette from the May 15, 1915 edition of Brownell’s Dairy Farmer magazine, formerly The Michigan Dairy Farmer:

A group of the “old guard,” at the recent Howell sale, were discussing the names of various Holstein sires, among which was that of the sire owned by a prominent Livingston County breeder. The last word of the name of this sire is “Mobel.” All doubt as to the origin of this word was set aside by H. W. Norton, Jr. “The word ‘Mobel,’” he said, ‘is spelled in that manner because it is the masculine of ‘Mabel.’”

“Well, I never knew that before,” said a young breeder, as the veterans made frantic efforts to keep their faces straight.

Michigan had its own prominent Holstein lines developed within the state. One of the best was the Pontiac line, bred at the Pontiac State Hospital, formerly called the Eastern Michigan Asylum for the Insane.

This full-page ad for the Pontiac State Hospital herd shows a barn decorated with the nameplates of past champion cattle. At lower left is Pontiac De Nijlander's father, Pontiac Apollo. From the August 1, 1914 Michigan Dairy Farmer.

At the time, many Michigan state and county institutions owned registered Holstein herds. The milk was welcome and breeding programs were profitable: the Pontiac asylum’s initial purchase of cattle worth $1,500 increased in value to $60,000 eighteen years later [about $1.5 million today].

Branch County’s Coldwater State Public School for Needy and Dependent Children had a herd that included the registered bull Commodore Pietertje De Kol Aakrum. The herd supplied all of the daily milk needed for the staff and 270 or so children. Wayne County’s poorhouse and asylum, Eloise, developed a purebred herd of 107 animals. The Traverse City State Hospital’s cow Traverse Colantha Walker broke milk-producing records in her lifetime. The Michigan Farm Colony for Epileptics in Tuscola County, the Michigan Home and Training School in Lapeer County, the state reform school in Ionia County, and the Michigan School for the Deaf in Flint all maintained good-quality Holstein herds.

Cows and bulls from the Pontiac line were sold at high prices to breeders around the state. One bull purchased by the Cole brothers in Ypsilanti, The Pontiacs King, became one of several sires of Ypsiland’s herd. Investing in good-quality animals paid off; by 1915, Ypsiland had bred and sold 36 bulls to cattlemen in Bay City, Lansing, Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Howell, and other Michigan locations.

Ypsiland owner Norris Cole had stature in the local Holstein community. When the Washtenaw Holstein Association formed in December of 1915, he was elected to an office, as noted in an account of the group’s inaugural meeting in the January 1, 1916 edition of Brownell’s Dairy Farmer:

The election of officers was next to order. [Veteran Willis breeder] Harvey S. Day was urged to become president but firmly refused. William B. Hatch was proposed, [but refused]. Norris A. Cole was also nominated. He attempted to decline, but the breeders were becoming tired of this custom and Mr. Cole was forced to take the office . . . Harvey S. Day was nominated and elected vice president before he could rise to his feet to decline.

Part of Norris’ local eminence at the meeting was due to one of his cows who had recently smashed a state record for butter production. Born on March 10, 1908 at the Pontiac asylum and purchased by the Cole brothers a year later, Pontiac De Nijlander was the daughter of Pontiac Apollo and the granddaughter of the legendary bull Hengerveld De Kol.

A standard measure of the day was the “7-day test,” a week during which a given cow’s output was measured. Pontiac De Nijlander outstripped all other Michigan cows by producing 35.43 pounds of butter, a number that Norris immediately featured in his ongoing Brownell’s Dairy Farmer advertisements for Ypsiland. Until that point, a 30-pound cow had been considered exceptional.

Breeders who bought cattle related to Pontiac De Nijlander often proudly advertised their stock. This is her son, who was purchased by Flint breeder J. E. Burroughs.

Other breeders took note and were quick to point out their own cattle’s relationship to Pontiac De Nijlander in their advertisements in 1914 editions of Brownell’s Dairy Farmer. Bay City breeder W. A. Wilder extolled his heifers who were bred to a bull whose aunt was Pontiac De Nijlander. Redford breeder Martin McLaulin pointed out that his cow Pontiac Hazel was an aunt of Pontiac De Nijlander. Flint breeder J. E. Burroughs said that the famed Ypsiland cow was the mother of his herd’s sire. Perry breeder C. R. Wilkinson stated that his bull had Pontiac De Nijlander as a grandmother. Azalia breeder Fred Bachman said that the mother of his prize bull was a “3/4 sister to the great cow, Pontiac De Nijlander.”

Pontiac De Nijlander’s achievements were eclipsed over time as dairy cattle breeding continued to improve. During the Depression, individual cows were producing an annual average of 4,379 pounds of milk, a figure that climbed to 5,512 by 1955, 8,080 by 1965, 10,360 by 1975, and 18,204 by the year 2000.

One recent champion, Wisconsin’s Ever Green View My 1326 ET, produced 72,120 pounds of milk in a year, or 23 gallons per day, aided by bovine growth hormone.

Over time the profile of dairy farms changed as well. In 1940, the nation’s 4.6 million dairy farms (farms that just happened to have a cow or two were included) had an average herd size of 5 cows. By 1970, the nation’s 647,860 dairy farms each held roughly 19 cows. By 1990, 192,000 farms each held an average of 55 cows, climbing to 88 in 2000. Today at large dairies, the number is often several hundred, even thousand, head of cattle. Holsteins are by far the dominant breed in modern American dairy farming, with Michigan the nation’s eighth largest dairy producer.

A subdivision now occupies the site where Pontiac De Nijlander once nibbled grass alongside Golfside Road. Though she is long gone, her DNA lives on in modern Holsteins. And the “Pontiac” line name still occasionally surfaces in the names of prize-winning Holsteins.

From asylum to accolades, one Ypsilanti cow broke the records of her day and won fame for Washtenaw County.

Mystery Artifact

Last month’s Mystery Artifact related directly to the story of Michigan sturgeon. As cmadler guessed, it is a “pound net,” once widely used on the Great Lakes.

Mystery Artifact (image links to higher resolution file.)

Pound nets were set with the long straight section pointing perpendicularly towards shore. Fish swimming parallel to the shoreline encountered the barrier and instinctively turned and swam along it, which led them to the nested chambers of the pound net, leading to the final small compartment. Fisherman simply hauled up and emptied this fish-filled compartment into their boats.

This time we return to land in order to examine this strange artifact. What might this object be? Take your best guess and good luck!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti.” Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

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Twenty thousand dinosaurs live in the river system bordering Detroit. They’re rugged descendants of the few who survived one of Michigan’s worst ecological disasters, against which one University of Michigan  professor battled – in vain. His efforts were crushed by Michigan’s short-lived yet feverish caviar industry.

The snaggletooth scutes along the lake sturgeon are visible on this depiction of the lake sturgeon (public-domain image).

Among the most primitive of fish, sturgeon first appeared when the Earth had just one continent. Millenia later the lake sturgeon thickly populated the Great Lakes and was fished by native peoples.

A young adventurer of noble French birth described the fish in his 1703 bestseller whose English title is “New Voyages to North America.” Baron de Lahontan’s book detailed the experiences gleaned from a decade of travel in New France, the onetime colony that encompassed most of present-day eastern Canada and the U.S. He wrote of Lake Erie, “[I]t abounds with sturgeon and whitefish, but trout are very scarce in it as well as the other fish that we take in the Lakes of Hurons and [Michigan].”

Sturgeon remained common over a century later, as noted by James Lanman in his 1839 book “History of Michigan.”

These lakes abound also with fish, some of the most delicious kinds. Among these are the Sturgeon, the Mackinaw Trout, the Mosquenonge [muskellunge], the white fish, and others of smaller size peculiar to fresh water. The Sturgeon advances up the stream from the lakes during the early part of spring to spawn, and are caught there in large quantities by the Indians.

In the first half of the 19th century, Michigan settlers were beginning to catch sturgeon too, to their irritation. In trying to net the prized whitefish, fishermen in lakes Michigan, Erie, and Ontario viewed sturgeon as unwelcome bycatch, too fatty and rank to eat. Six to nine feet long or longer, the fish bore five rows of pointed scutes, or toothlike scales along its body that ripped holes in fishing nets. Fishermen killed sturgeon and dumped or buried their carcasses on shore. In Ontario at Amherstburg, the oily fish were stacked like firewood and left to dry. The mummified bodies were burned to heat the boilers of wood-burning steamboats on the Detroit River.

Sturgeon as Bycatch

In 1873 the state took note of the rapidly-growing Michigan fishing industry as a whole and created the Michigan Fish Commission.

Its first president, 55-year-old New York-born George Jerome, had previously worked around the Midwest as a lawyer, real estate agent, newspaper editor, chairman of a state Republican committee, and tax assessor before building a comfortable home in Niles, Michigan. Jerome was a gentleman of “peculiar charm and magnetism of his individuality,” read one later remembrance. “He impressed everyone with his overflowing good humor and jollity, while his genial wit, fund of anecdote, and skill as a story teller, made him one of the most companionable of men.”

Jerome was also a man of action. Upon hearing that the creation of a state board of fish commissioners was pending, Jerome sped to Lansing to support the measure. His considerable efforts were rewarded with a position on the board. Soon after he became its superintendent.

Jerome wrote the Commission’s inaugural 1873-74 report. More literary than bureaucratic, the work championed artificial fish breeding. “It is as distinctively an art as is glass or iron manufacture,” he wrote, “ . . . [n]ot, perhaps, one of the ‘liberal’ or ‘fine’ arts, yet the century may not close ere the adjectives ‘liberal’ and ‘fine,’ shall not inaptly qualify our rising and cherished art.”

Jerome reflected that increasing demand in the 1870s was straining the Michigan fish supply. “Indeed, this is the fish problem,” wrote Jerome, “nothing more, nothing less. And to the solution of this problem, the veteran band of fish culturists, with the appliances at hand, and with a will and courage equal to every conceivable emergency, have gone to work, resolved not to lay down their tools till every promise of theirs is redeemed and every prophecy fulfilled.”

One goal of the “pisciculturist,” wrote Jerome, was to artificially breed valuable whitefish, trout, grayling and black bass, and stock them in waterways to replace fish he regarded as “too worthless to dwell on,” including suckers, catfish, and sturgeon. But the worth of the sturgeon was about to change.

Sturgeon Fortunes Change

In the 1860s it was found that smoking the fish reduced its oiliness and made it tasty. Often sold as halibut, smoked sturgeon became popular. Other sturgeon products emerged. The swim bladder was processed into isinglass, a gelatine used in applications that included beer-brewing. Sturgeon hide was made into leather. Sturgeon oil, refined, was sold to watchmakers and sewing-machine dealers. Sturgeon oil also found its way, according to a single secondary source, into many Michigan lighthouses, where it burned with a brighter, less smoky flame than the whale oil then in use.

A news tidbit in the April 19, 1887 Ypsilanti Commercial urged people to go and see the 150-pound sturgeons at Bradley's meat market.

Despite Jerome’s lofty aims, budget restraints, a lack of manpower, and a then-rudimentary grasp of fish ecology ensured that the Commission never kept pace with, much less regulated, the Michigan fish industry. Read as a whole, the late 19th-century Commission reports merely document, aside from some fish-stocking experiments, a growing disaster the bureau was helpless to prevent.

Perhaps Jerome foresaw this calamity. He retired after his first term, and the state promptly slashed the Commission’s budget from $7,000 to $5,000 [from $133,000 to $95,000 in today’s dollars].

Just a few years later, the 1877-78 Commission report warned, “there is one most alarming fact, that confronts us and must be confessed. It is this: these Great Lakes … the common food store-houses of the people, are being plundered, robbed, impoverished.”

The Caviar Threat

Around this time, an additional threat appeared. In the 1860s, the Schacht brothers in Sandusky had begun producing caviar from Lake Erie sturgeon. The profitable practice spread to Michigan, likely led by other immigrants from homelands with a tradition of caviar production.

S. Von Haller's ad in the March 1886 issue of the Normal News advertised smoked sturgeon. (Image links to higher resolution file.)

Up to a third of an adult female sturgeon’s body weight can be roe – a harvest of 70 pounds from one fish was not uncommon. Formerly the roe from Michigan sturgeon was sold as cheap fish bait, hog slop, or soil fertilizer. In the mid-1880s the Michigan caviar industry exploded and prices began to soar. A 135-pound keg of caviar that cost $12 in 1885 [$287 today] climbed to $40 in 1894 [$1,000] and $100 in 1900 [$2,600].

Makers tried to keep their manufacturing process secret, though it was simple – the roe was gently rubbed through a screen to free it from surrounding membrane, then salted and packed. “[Local resident] Mr. Haas has a peculiar process for curing the caviar, which he keeps a secret” reported the Sept. 26, 1890 Benton Harbor Weekly Palladium, “and he seems to be making money …”

Newspapers in distant states took notice of Michigan caviar. “Among the many industries peculiar to Detroit,” read a Jan. 5, 1886 article in the New London, Connecticut newspaper The Day, “not the least important is the traffic in the sturgeon and its products. The sturgeon is the whale of the lakes, weighing ordinarily from 40 to 100 pounds, but often reaching 150 or more.”

There were now five factories in Detroit, said the article, devoted exclusively to smoking sturgeon filets, and several major Detroit fish dealers who made and exported caviar to Germany and Russia. One dealer said that his annual export was 60,000 pounds. A Detroit Free Press article said of sturgeon caught at the mouth of the Detroit river, “The caviar is sent to Berlin where it is sold at enormous prices to wealthy Germans … They say that the caviar from Detroit river sturgeons is the best and that it is reserved for the German nobility.”

Around the same time, the Galveston News published an article that suggests a Detroit caviar urban legend:

There is a Russian who keeps a hotel in Detroit, and he is fond of caviar. As he always insisted that the caviar sold there would not compare with what could be had in Russia, he finally wrote over to Russia and asked his friends to send him a can of the caviar that was most popular at that time in St. Petersburgh. After a long interval the caviar arrived. On taking off the wrappings he saw on the label of the can that it was put up by a canning company in Detroit, and was warranted to be made of the best roe of Lake St. Clair sturgeon.

Fisheries in other Great Lakes states were also rapidly producing caviar. “Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin rival all Muscovy and Scandinavia in the production of caviar, that for the most part is exported to Europe,” said an August 1886 Scientific American article.

Lower-grade caviar was consumed domestically, to the extent that the open-faced “caviar sandwich” became a standard item available at lunch counters, taverns, and train station restaurants. The December 1908 issue of “The Spatula,” a druggists’ magazine, suggested possible food items to druggists thinking of adding a soda fountain counter to their shop. They included a ham sandwich for 5 cents [$1.20], oyster stew for 20 cents [$4.80], a chicken salad sandwich for 20 cents, and a caviar sandwich for 20 cents.

The caviar sandwich even became a meme to describe the appearance of crowds. Ohio-born politician-author Edward Townsend in his circa 1895 short story “No One in Town” wrote, “The children there would astound you, my dear, by their number. They were spread over the sidewalk as thick as sturgeon eggs over a caviar sandwich.” Indiana-born Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist and author John McCutcheon in his 1920-1921 novel “The Restless Age” wrote of a crowded theater, “looks like a bird’s-eye view of a caviar sandwich. If they expect to crowd any more in here they’ll have to let out a tuck in the opera-house.”

Demand was causing a crisis. The Michigan Fish Commission reported in 1888 that “in our own state today one of the most valuable of commercial fish is the worthless sturgeon of a few years ago, and so assiduously is it sought for that the supply will become exhausted in a very short time unless the fish-culturist comes to the rescue.”

Scientific Response

It was too severe a crisis, however, to be solved with a few bottles of fertilized eggs. Missing and desperately needed was a better, more holistic understanding of aquatic ecology. Professor Jacob Reighard helped the University of Michigan become one of two leading universities pioneering this emerging science.

Reighard initially worked with the Fish Commission at a small makeshift laboratory near New Baltimore on Lake St. Clair, studying whitefish and sturgeon. “Concerning even the most important of the food fishes of the Great Lakes our knowledge is very meager,” Reighard wrote. “[W]e do not know enough of the spawning habits and spawning places of the sturgeon of the Great Lakes to be able to procure the eggs for artificial propagation. The sturgeon is rapidly disappearing.”

Reighard did not know that sturgeon are extraordinarily long-lived and late to mature sexually. Males can live for 55 years, with females living 80 to 150 years. Females do not usually become sexually mature until they are in their mid-20s. Once sexually mature, both sexes are fertile only once every few years afterwards. As a result, during any given spawning season, only 10 to 20 per cent of the entire adult population is sexually active, one reason why sturgeon numbers fell so quickly once intensive fishing began.

Reighard needed a better research station. He was instrumental in the creation of a permanent research facility, UM’s present-day Biological Station on Douglas Lake in Cheboygan County. Reighard became, and remains, nationally known for his insights and work regarding aquatic ecology.

Tragically, by the time the Biological Station was built in 1909, Michigan sturgeon populations and the sturgeon industry had largely collapsed.

“Some years ago, sturgeon were abundant in the waters of our state,” noted the 1895-96 Michigan Fish Commission report, “but since 1891 the decrease in each year’s catch has been rapid, with slight hopes of their restoration . . . [i]n 1891 the sturgeon catch was 831,606 pounds, going down each subsequent year to 1897, amounting in that year to 184,881.” In an October 1908 Popular Science Monthly article titled “The Passing of the Sturgeon,” Walter Sheldon Tower wrote, “Lake St. Clair, which alone gave nearly a million pounds in 1880 has not produced more than 10,000 pounds in recent years, while the catch in Lakes Michigan and Erie has fallen to about one sixtieth of its former proportions.” By 1929, the state enforced a total ban on harvesting any sturgeon whatsoever, for fear of complete extinction.

However, you can fish for them today.

Sturgeon Today

Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers are home to Michigan’s largest population of lake sturgeon. When recreational divers just a few years ago reported seeing sturgeon spawning under the Blue Water Bridge, the DNR investigated. Scattered anecdotal reports over the years of sturgeon sightings had been made, but no one dreamed that a large and breeding sturgeon population had been living in the water system for years.

Catch-and-release hook-and-line fishing with a sturgeon permit is legal in Michigan. Harvest is possible at only three Michigan locations: The St. Clair and Detroit river system, Otsego Lake in Otsego County, and Black Lake in Cheboygan County. Each place has its own specific season. Earlier this February, nearly 200 anglers gathered at Black Lake. Its season was only a few hours long, with a total harvest of only two fish allowed. The St. Clair harvest season is July 16 to September 30, and with a permit the annual limit per angler is one sturgeon.

Strict seasons and limits and tough penalties for poachers are not the only protectors of modern sturgeons. In the fall of 2010, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality water resources district supervisor and Grosse Pointe resident Andy Hartz helped found the St. Clair and Detroit River chapter of Sturgeons for Tomorrow. The non-profit conservation group is open to all, with a yearly membership fee of $20. It now has about 45 members, and helps fisheries managers in the ongoing rehabilitation of local lake sturgeon populations. Many members enjoy fishing for sturgeon, with the vast majority practicing catch-and-release.

“It’s such a neat fish,” says Hartz. “And they live for so long that it’s the only fish that three generations of a family can catch. You can catch it, and then years later your son can catch it – the same individual fish – and then your grandson can catch it.”

With luck and careful management, that will remain true as populations of the venerable sturgeon continue to recover from their indiscriminate exploitation over a century ago.

Grateful thanks to Andy Hartz for contemporary sturgeon population data.

Mystery Artifact

Last month’s column presented a new acquisition of the Ypsilanti Historical Museum.

Mystery Object (image links to higher resolution file)

As Irene Hieber, Eleanor Pollack, Jim Rees, TJ, and Bear all guessed, this is a dictation machine, made by the Edison company.

I was about to add that you could say it’s an early tape recorder before realizing that that comparison unfortunately dates me. A recording device, let’s say.

This column’s mystery artifact is a device in use in Michigan for much of the 19th century. Reviled by some and overused by others, it had a major impact.

What might it be?

Take your best guess and good luck!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti.” Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists like Laura Bien and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

Nellie Smith* heard someone coming up the stairs and sat up in bed. She could see her breath in the late-winter afternoon light. Perhaps he had left something behind. She glanced around the room. There was nothing on the table, the chair, or the stove with the broken leg propped on a brick.

Knocks sounded. Nellie stood, shook out her ragged nightgown, and opened the door an inch. The friendly gaze of a middle-aged woman in a trim winter coat and long dark skirts met Nellie’s cautious look.

Harriet Gilbert as she looked around the time she was first elected Ypsilanti Home Association president in 1875, an office she held for over 30 years.

Lizzie Swaine introduced herself, apologized for the intrusion, and said there’d been word of a little difficulty at this Washington Street address. It felt cold here, she said – did Nellie have any fuel in the house? No, said Nellie, nor food either. Lizzie asked a few more questions, reassured her that help was coming, thanked her for her time, and left. Likely the women’s interaction was similar to this imagined scene.

What is a matter of record is that some days later Lizzie joined twelve other women for the May 1896 Ypsilanti Home Association meeting at Lovina Briggs’ Huron Street home. As Lizzie described Nellie’s plight, she may have noticed some raised eyebrows. The ladies discussed the case. Later, Association secretary Cleantha Dickinson paraphrased the talk in the 1896 meeting minutes logbook.

“Mrs. Swaine came to present the case of Mrs. Smith,” she wrote, “whom she found without a fire and about to be turned out of her rooms because she could not pay her rent.”

She continued, “Investigation among the ladies proved that the woman had a father and brother in comfortable circumstances who would not help the woman unless she behaved herself … it was found that she had been under arrest for keeping a disorderly house,” a euphemism referring at that time to prostitution.

She concluded, “The ladies decided they could not help her while she persisted in wrong doing.” Luckily, Nellie was an exception – the group helped most of those cases that came before it. 

Long before federal or state social welfare agencies, the Ypsilanti Home Association was a homegrown ladies’ charity group founded in 1857 as an auxiliary of New York’s American Female Guardian Society, which operated a “Home for the Friendless.” Any woman could join the YHA for five cents [a little over a dollar in today’s money]. Schoolgirls could also join, and were exempted from the fee if they sewed one garment to give to the “Home.” The first donation box mailed to New York contained a variety of handmade clothing and bedding, and some beans.

Initially held in members’ homes and later in various Ypsi churches, the afternoon meetings began with a Bible reading and prayer, followed by roll call and member reports of needy cases. Two women from each of Ypsilanti’s then-five wards composed the executive committee, which undertook home visits and had the authority to distribute donations.

In addition to donations sent to New York, the ladies also assisted the poor in Ypsilanti. In 1863 the group chose a closer-to-home beneficiary, the “Detroit Home of the Friendless.” Seventeen years later, the YHA decided that the Detroit group was self-sufficient. Thereafter the Association’s energies turned exclusively to the Ypsi poor.

Over the decades, the YHA’s help took many forms. Shoes were purchased for a child who could not attend school barefoot in the winter. The ladies made numerous bedsheets and comforters. The group took charge of distributing Thanksgiving food donated to Ypsi churches. One meeting was held with the ladies sitting around a rectangular quilt frame, sewing as they listened.

The YHA distributed firewood, winter coats, furniture, and jars of homemade jam. They graciously thanked area farmers for donations of vegetables. They accepted 126 loaves of bread from a city-wide baking contest. During the Civil War, the YHA sent items to the Soldier’s Aid Society. They even paid for a length of sidewalk in front of the home of a man who couldn’t afford the city-assessed cost.

They asked the city council to supply a better grade of coal for the municipal free allotment to the poor, unsuccessfully. On another occasion, they approached the council again, this time with a formal petition requesting that the city’s scrap wood, offered to the poor as fuel, be sawed into stove lengths instead of four foot long chunks, to save the recipients the cost of taking it to a sawmill. They succeeded.

It seems a small victory, but the ladies of the YHA were exercising their collective social power in one of the few ways then viewed as appropriate for women. They had no vote, limited rights, and access to only a very few types of female employment regarded as acceptable. Given these societal constraints, the YHA offered Ypsi women a means of effecting change in their community and gaining authority and influence within the vehicle of Christian charity.

In an era that drew a sharp distinction between privation caused by misfortune versus questionable morals, the ladies of the Association withheld their charity on occasion, as in Nellie’s case. In the fall and winter of 1888-89, they refused help to the Moffett family, Jane Wesson, and a Mrs. Gordon, for unrecorded reasons. At the February 1892 meeting “the ladies made a vigorous protest against assisting a family where the father of the family was able to work.” The member who had given aid was Lura Parsons, who again met with disapproval at the March 1894 meeting. Lura reported that she had given money to a recent arrival from northern Michigan. The other ladies declared “the man was wholly unreliable and unworthy of assistance. Mrs. Parsons was [demoted] to only assist in case of hunger or sickness.”

This friction was rare in the group’s decades of good works, at least judging by the surviving minutes. The majority of meetings were productive and upbeat. One acclaimed president elected in 1875, Harriet Gilbert, retained the office for over three decades.

Harriet Gilbert as she appeared in 1910 at age 80, a few weeks before her death.

The YHA won community respect early in its long tenure. Within a year of its founding, schoolchildren, Normal (Eastern Michigan University) students, merchants, farmers, and residents began to channel donations of goods and money to the YHA.

Recognition also came through visits by such distinguished guest speakers as local and Detroit ministers. In July of 1864, even Sojourner Truth gave a talk to the group. The visit was a stop on her train trip from her Grand Rapids home to the White House, where the former slave met Abraham Lincoln. Her direct, impassioned manner of speaking may have been a bit overpowering to the YHA ladies. “Judging from observation,” noted the meeting minutes, “some present thought ‘distance’ would have lent ‘enchantment to the view.’”

Later, after years of experience, the group seemed to regard the local poor with a proprietary attitude. When one family’s home burned down in the fall of 1907, neighbors showered the family with money, furniture, and clothes. This irked the YHA. In the October 9, 1907 Ypsilanti Daily Press, an open letter from the association urged the community to “end the indiscriminate giving, especially of money … [instead, to the YHA’s executive committee] may be sent either a notice of contributions … or the things themselves.” It didn’t help that the family’s father had a vague but troubling connection to a recent Huron River drowning.

Active during the Depression, the YHA played a major role all over town in helping with or coordinating such projects as preserving food or making clothes. The group was shocked when in 1935 President Roosevelt introduced new legislation, including the Social Security program, that would federalize social welfare programs, to be administered top-down by the states.

The State of Michigan demanded that the YHA submit papers to Lansing proving that the group had been disbanded. The YHA debated what to do, and a read between the lines suggests that their initial response seems to have been polite yet strategic stalling.

By the April 1935 meeting the group could stall no longer. “In regard to our dissolution papers,” reads the title to one section of the 1935 logbook, “A motion was made by Mrs. Weber and seconded by Miss Minor that a personal talk with the Secretary of State might be more effective than correspondence. She moved that we drive over to Lansing and settle matters.”

And they did. Like many other local charities, the YHA worked out an agreement whereby they could continue their charity work, even as federal funds flowed in. The group lasted until just after World War II, when the YHA reduced its meetings to only two a year. It apparently disbanded in 1946.

For nearly a century the YHA had spearheaded charity work in Ypsilanti. The thousands they helped had good meals, warm clothes, and a bit of relief and hope thanks to the association’s enduring efforts.

*Surnames of charity recipients have been changed.

Mystery Artifact

In the previous column, cmadler correctly guessed that the object in question was a nutcracker.

Mystery artifact.

It really doesn’t work very well, though, which may be why only one person recognized its purported function.

Those little plier-like crackers are far better.

At any rate.

This column’s mystery artifact is a recent acquisition by the Ypsilanti Historical Museum. I stumbled upon it while nosing through the back storage area in the Archives where I volunteer.

It’s a gorgeous old machine … and yet such an enigmatic one! What was it and what was it used for? Take your best guess!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti.” Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists like Laura Bien and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

When represented as a pie chart, it's not as clear whether 1% is the top or the bottom. (Chart by The Chronicle)

Also addressing the audience was Ward 1 city councilmember Sabra Briere. Though The Chronicle did not attend the event, with Briere’s permission, we’re publishing the draft of her speech. We think it deserves a wider reading – as the calendar turns to the traditional season of giving, and as police in more than one city appear to be in a mood to move against Occupy demonstrators.

The official motto of the dinner was: “Building the Future on the Foundations of the Past” 

Tonight I’m filling in for the mayor of Ann Arbor, John Hieftje, and for the mayor pro tem, Marcia Higgins. It’s an honor to play your mayor this evening.

I’d like first to remind everyone that tonight we’re not just breaking bread together. We’re celebrating Ann Arbor’s NAACP day, the first Saturday in November. Each year we hold the dinner on this night to remind us of our need to work together.

There are several people in the audience tonight who currently hold office, who have held office in the past, or who would like to hold office in the near future.

If you are a current elected official, please stand. Those who’ve been elected in the past, please join them. And those who are running for office, could you stand too? Let’s applaud their willingness to serve.

I prepared a few remarks, and promise not to speak at length. Tonight’s topic indicates that we are building our future on the foundations of the past.

I take my texts from the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The function of education … is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. … Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. [MLK "The Purpose of Education," 1948]

I think I’ve learned the value of an education, especially as the world continues to change. It’s one thing to learn how to use a computer; it’s a completely different thing to learn how to think, to ask questions, and to constantly learn. During my brief life I’ve found the computer a constant challenge, but one I was able to tackle. But learning how to evaluate the information I receive, how to question authority – even in myself – and how to be ethically honest has been more demanding.

Sometimes we forget what the purpose of an education really is. It isn’t to get a job. Few of us will work for only one employer in our lifetimes. It isn’t to be employable, either. Many of the skills needed on the job aren’t the ones the educational system taught us. Those skills – being prompt, being responsible, being reliable, taking pride in what we are doing – those skills we learn in life.

But a good education teaches us those things – in the classroom or out of it – that allow us to think intensively and critically. We learn that we are always ignorant, and always striving to know more and be more.

Rarely do we find people who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think. [MLK "Strength to Love," 1963]

Education – the kind that leads to hard, solid thinking – isn’t something we are handed. We need to work at it, acquire it from our teachers, and recognize that “teacher” includes parent, pastor, neighbor and friend. If we get our vision of the world handed to us, if we never learn to question the quality of information we receive, then others control our thoughts and actions.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. [MLK "Strength to Love," 1963]

It’s that willingness to be sincere in our ignorance and intentional in our stupidity – and we are all stupid from time to time – that allows others to control our thoughts and our actions. Each piece of wisdom we are given must be questioned, tested, and folded into our own world view. That’s because wisdom cannot be given – it must be earned. And our failure to become wise encourages us all to make decisions based on our ignorance and our biases.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. [MLK "Strength to Love," 1963]

We each face a lot of pressure to conform. Our keynote speaker tonight demonstrated in his youth the value of resisting conformity. That value – that nothing would change unless our world vision was challenged – often goes unconsidered or underappreciated.

Tonight there are folks all across our nation, sleeping out in parks and public spaces because they are protesting. They are protesting an economic system that is failing them – and us. The Occupy movement should make us all rethink our vision of America – our vision that hard work is rewarded, that each generation will be better off than the one before, that progress is defined as better technology.

I suspect that everyone in this room is part of the 99%.

According to The Economist, the data showing the difference between the top 1% and the rest of us is dramatic and feeds into two existing prejudices:

First, that a system that works well for the very richest has delivered returns on labor that are disappointing for everyone else. Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill. Of course it is a little more complicated than that. But this downturn ought to test the normally warm feelings in America of the 99% towards the 1%. [The Economist, Oct. 26, 2011 "The 99 Percent"]

Is it testing your warm feelings?

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?” [MLK "Conquering Self-Centeredness," 1957]

Finally, I need to remind us all that, if we are the 99%, there are still others who are the bottom 1%.

While the top 1% has seen its income grow significantly in the last 20 years, and the rest of us have seen our incomes stagnate year over year, the bottom 1% has seen an actual decrease.

As we approach the traditional giving season, please think of those who are forced to live without – and of those on the streets, reminding us of our duty to each other.

The Chronicle could not survive without regular voluntary subscriptions. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

That part of town is perhaps best known for the local landmark Washtenaw Dairy, located less than a block away from the proposed development. At Friday’s meeting, donuts from the shop were offered as refreshment, next to a wall of drawings and maps of the project. Washtenaw Dairy owner Doug Raab was among the 50 or so residents who attended.

This architectural rendering of the 618 S. Main project was posted on a wall at the Nov. 11 neighborhood meeting about the project. This view is from the perspective facing northeast, from the intersection of Ashley and Mosley streets. (Photos by the writer.)

The building – a six-story structure, with additional apartments on a penthouse level – will consist of about 180 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments, with rents likely in the $950 to $1,400 range. Two levels of underground parking are planned, with about 140 spaces. The project targets young professionals in their mid-20s to mid-30s, developer Dan Ketelaar told the group on Friday – people who are interested in an urban lifestyle, within walking distance of the downtown and University of Michigan campus.

Ketelaar hopes the project will transform that section of Main Street and perhaps encourage the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority to make improvements in that area, as it’s doing now along Fifth and Division.

Because the project as designed is about 80 feet at its highest point – 20 feet taller than what zoning would allow – it will be submitted to the city as a “planned project.” Planned projects allow for some flexibility in height or setbacks, in exchange for public benefits. They don’t allow as much flexibility, however, as a planned unit development (PUD). Ketelaar cited a large courtyard along Ashley as a benefit to the neighborhood. Another benefit he cited was the provision on site of double the amount of required parking.

Parking was among several concerns mentioned by residents during a Q&A on Friday with Ketelaar and his project team, which includes a landscape architect who also helped design the new plaza and rain garden in front of city hall. Several residents said parking and traffic are already an issue in that neighborhood.

City councilmember Mike Anglin – who represents Ward 5, where the project is located – urged Ketelaar to work toward narrowing Main Street south of Packard from four to two lanes, to slow speeds along that stretch. Ketelaar had mentioned the idea of improving that part of Main Street earlier in the meeting. He said he could suggest narrowing the road, but noted that it’s up to the city to make that decision.

Other issues discussed at the meeting include the need to integrate the development with the neighborhood, the project’s financing, and details of the building’s design. Environmental issues covered at the meeting included: the site’s brownfield status; stormwater management; and relation to the floodplain.

This is the second project to go through the city’s new design review process. The first project to be reviewed in this way – The Varsity Ann Arbor – had been approved by city council the previous night. The design review board will meet at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 16 at the former Fox Tent & Awning building at 618 S. Main. That meeting, which is open to the public, will be followed by another community forum on Tuesday, Nov. 22 from 5-7 p.m. at the same location. Ketelaar has previously met with local business owners and members of the Old West Side Association board to discuss the project.

The project is expected to be formally submitted to the city later this month. After review by the city planning staff, it will be considered by the planning commission, which will make a recommendation to the city council. Construction could begin in the fall of 2012.

618 S. Main: Background & Presentation

Dan Ketelaar began by noting that the site sits on about an acre of land – roughly 44,000 square feet – bounded by Main Street and Ashley to the east and west, respectively, and by Mosley to the south. The property’s northern edge falls midblock, south of the Happy’s Pizza lot on Main and Affordable Vet Services on Ashley. Single-family houses line Ashley Street across from the site; all other sides face commercial property – South Main Market is across the street on Main.

The neighborhood meeting was held in the building of the former Fox Tent & Awning, which closed in late 2010. Other buildings on the site house Ivory Photo, Deluxe Drapery and Overture Audio. These commercial buildings – which were constructed in the 1930s – would be demolished to make way for the project.

Dan Ketelaar, president of Urban Group Development Co., the developer of the 618 S. Main project.

Ketelaar said his team began working on the project in March, looking for examples of the style they wanted to reflect. He pointed to photos posted on the wall of the room – images of Bach Elementary School, the old Argus building, Liberty Lofts – that evoke the character he says he wants to bring to this project. The buildings he cited are older, with brick facades. Liberty Lofts, at First and Liberty, is a former manufacturing plant that was converted to condos a few years ago.

The site is zoned D2, a designation for areas that transition between the densest zoning allowed (D1) and residential areas. For this site, D2 zoning allows for a maximum 400% FAR (floor-area ratio). FAR, a measure of density, is the ratio of the square footage of a building divided by the size of the lot. A one-story structure built lot-line-to-lot-line with no setbacks corresponds to an FAR of 100%. A similar structure built two-stories tall would result in an FAR of 200%.

With a 400% FAR, a building could be constructed up to 60 feet tall with 170,000 square feet of floor space, and still meet the zoning requirements.

Ketelaar noted that the site is in the southern part of the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority district, and he hoped his development would encourage the DDA to improve the Main Street section south of Packard – perhaps in a similar way to the DDA’s current Fifth and Division streetscape project.

He also contrasted his vision with that of Ashley Mews, a condo development up the street at Main and Packard. Ketelaar described that building as a “hardscape,” saying he’d like his project to have a “soft streetscape” by comparison. He pointed to photos of a residential urban development in Portland, Oregon, which converted old railroad cars into housing, with a stepped-back front entry of greenery. Ketelaar also hopes to evoke the ambiance of Portland’s Hotel Modera, which features outdoor gathering spaces with fire pits and other amenities. [Ketelaar's daughter lives in Portland.]

Mike Siegel of VOA Associates – the Chicago-based architecture firm that’s working on this project – reviewed previous designs that had been considered by Ketelaar for the site. The team had begun by conceptually envisioning what a building would look like as permitted by zoning. When he described it as a glass block that’s 60 stories tall, he was quickly corrected to 60 feet. “It’s been a long week,” he quipped.

The team initially considered putting in two buildings, with a narrow courtyard in the center. The structure facing Main Street would have been apartments, while the building on Ashley would have included townhouses and duplexes. Both would have been six stories tall. However, “we didn’t feel it was very sensitive to the neighborhood,” Siegel said.

A second version was designed, with a smaller building on Ashley. But that version didn’t create enough density to cover the cost of construction, Ketelaar said. He noted that it’s true with any business – if you’re making donuts, but you sell the donuts for less than it costs you to make them, you won’t stay in business very long. “It’s a reality of business,” he said, “and that’s what we all need to deal with.”

Residents and representatives of the developer look at drawings for a proposed six-story apartment building on 618 S. Main during a Nov. 11 neighborhood meeting, held in the sewing room of the former Fox Tent & Awning building.

Siegel said the development team worked with Ann Arbor’s planning staff and came up with the design they’re proposing. The intent is to soften the edge facing the neighborhood on Ashley, which is lined with single-family homes. The main massing of the structure faces Main and Mosley, with a large courtyard area off of Ashley.

The development team also knew that the project needed more than the minimum amount of required parking, Siegel said, “or the neighbors are going to scream.”

Ketelaar noted that the site requires only about 70 parking spaces. They could have designed a surface parking lot, like Liberty Lofts, but “that didn’t seem right,” he said. Their current proposal calls for building two parking levels underground, with between 130-140 parking spaces.

One issue is that the water table in this area is high, he said. They hit saturated soil about 10-12 feet below ground. So while one level of parking will be completely underground, the second level will be about halfway above ground – and that drives up the height of the building, he said.

At the tallest point – the top of the elevator shaft – the building is about 80 feet high, as currently designed. That’s about 20 feet taller than the D2 zoning would allow. So the development will be submitted as a “planned project,” a designation that allows for flexibility in height and setback requirements, in exchange for public benefits.

A “planned project” allows modifications of the area, height, and placement requirements related to permanent open space preservation, if the project would result in “the preservation of natural features, additional open space, greater building or parking setback, energy conserving design, preservation of historic or architectural features, expansion of the supply of affordable housing for lower income households or a beneficial arrangement of buildings.” However, all other zoning code requirements must still be met – including the permitted uses, maximum density, and maximum floor area.

Ketelaar pointed to the additional parking and greenspace in the courtyard as among the public benefits of the project.

Shannan Gibb-Randall – a landscape architect with Insite Design Studio, the Ann Arbor firm that also built the new rain garden in front of city hall – described the landscaping and other exterior features of the project. On the Main Street side, the 9-foot width between the street and the property line seemed too narrow, so the building will be set back an additional 5 feet from the property line, she said. Gibb-Randall also cited the Portland railroad car project as a model, with the intent to create layers of greenscape and richness to soften the front of the building. Balconies will also create a recess on the side facing Main Street, she said.

Ideally, the city and DDA would eventually allow parking along that stretch of Main Street, she said, which would help to calm the traffic. Vehicles tend to pick up speed along that part of Main Street, she noted, as the road widens to four lanes south of Packard.

For stormwater management, the project will use surface infiltration rather than underground detention, Gibb-Randall said. Large planters and porous pavement are among the strategies they’ll use – much like the design of the plaza and rain garden in front of city hall, she said.

Siegel concluded the presentation by noting that the project will use sustainable building techniques and aim for LEED Silver certification.

618 S. Main: Questions from Residents

The meeting was attended by about 50 people, including nearby neighbors as well as people who are active in development issues citywide. Among others, they included Ray Detter of the Downtown Citizens Advisory Council; former planning commissioner Eppie Potts; Christine Crockett, president of the Old Fourth Ward Association; Alan Haber, who’s spearheading an effort to create a community commons on top of the South Fifth Avenue underground parking structure; Ann Arbor Ward 5 councilmember Mike Anglin; and Barbara Murphy, vice president of the Old West Side Association.

For this report, questions and responses are summarized and organized thematically.

618 S. Main: Questions from Residents – Traffic, Parking

A woman identified herself as the owner of a house on Ashley, between Madison and Jefferson, that was built in the 1800s. Often, there’s no parking along Ashley now, she said, and traffic is heavy. She said she can’t imagine what it will be like with this new development. It will likely be worse, she noted, “and I don’t want that.”

Ketelaar said he didn’t think they could solve that problem – any development would have the same issues. Siegel noted the project will have about 140 parking spaces, double the number of required parking spaces. The development team also plans to have some vehicles on site from the Zipcar car-sharing service, as well as bike storage areas to encourage the use of alternative transportation.

Mike Siegel of VOA Associates, a Chicago architecture firm, points to a detail in the courtyard of the proposed 618 S. Main apartment complex.

In response to another concern raised about parking, Ketelaar said that the site is part of downtown, and the project is intended to attract young professionals in their mid-20s to mid-30s. About three-quarters of the apartments will be studios or one-bedroom units, he said. The apartments will be attractive to people who work in the growing high-tech sector, he said, like Barracuda Networks, which earlier this year announced plans to add several hundred employees here. These young professionals are active, he said, and the reason they live downtown is so that they can walk.

One resident said the 25-35 age range might be low – the apartments would also appeal to people in their 40s or older, she said. Ketelaar agreed, observing that people his age often had the same kind of desires, in terms of urban living, that young professionals had.

Another resident pointed out that the area is in a transition. The reality is that there’s no grocery within walking distance, for example, so most tenants would use their cars for that kind of trip. Someone asked whether the Ashley Mews condo development was fully occupied – that complex didn’t seem to have much impact on parking. It is full, Ketelaar said, and each unit has its own parking space within the structure.

Siegel noted that if a “by-right” project were built on the 618 S. Main site, it could have about 200 units and 70 parking spaces, which would be allowed based on the D2 zoning. The project that they’re proposing would have fewer units – about 180 – but double the parking (about 140 spaces).

Another resident noted that he lived on South Main and walked in that area frequently. From Jefferson to Hoover, parking in the neighborhood is already full, he said, adding that he didn’t there would be much difference in parking caused by the new development.

Siegel asked whether neighborhood parking permits might be a solution. A resident noted that in some areas of the neighborhood, residential parking permits are already required.

One resident asked whether the DDA is helping finance parking for the project. No, Ketelaar said, but he hoped the DDA would consider making improvements along Main Street south of Packard, including possibly adding onstreet parking to that stretch.

In response to a concern about the visibility of the first-level parking, Ketelaar said it will be enclosed so that passers-by wouldn’t be able to see it. There might be some kind of greenery screen used as well. The two parking levels won’t be connected – one will have an entrance off of Ashley, with the other accessed from Main Street. There will be some guest parking available, possibly as surface spots in the courtyard area.

618 S. Main: Questions from Residents – Building Structure

A resident asked how tall the building would be, and why it would be allowed to go higher than 60 feet. The proposal calls for six stories plus a penthouse level: The first three stories would form a “street wall,” with three additional stories above that set back a few feet. A penthouse level on the roof would be set back even further, allowing the units there to have verandas.

Ketelaar explained that a “planned project” designation allows for variances in height or setback. This project will ask for a height variance, he said. The public benefits that the project offers in exchange for that variance include a 17,000-square-foot courtyard and additional parking. He allowed that not everyone might agree that these are public benefits, but he thinks they are.

He also noted plans to install solar panels on the roof, to reduce the building’s energy costs. When asked whether the use of large windows throughout the building will contribute to energy loss, Siegel said the building will use insulated, high-performance windows, possibly tinted. Residents will be able to open the windows, he said.

One resident asked whether the mechanicals on the roof would be enclosed – does LEED certification address sound requirements? No, but the city’s building and zoning codes do, Ketelaar said. Siegel added that the mechanical systems will be surrounded by walls, but open on top.

In response to a query about more details regarding the units, Siegel said there will be three sizes for two of the apartment types – studio and one-bedroom units – and five different sizes for the two-bedroom units. Rents will likely range from $950 to $1,400 per month.

Another resident asked where the garbage and recycling would be located. There will be an area for trash and recycling on each floor, Siegel explained. Building staff will then empty the trash and recycling into a dumpster and containers on the north side of the building. The developer is negotiating an easement with the property owner on that north side to allow for trash and recycling trucks to make pickups from Ashley.

In response to another question, Siegel said the public entrance to the building will be off of Ashley Street. Residents will have another entrance off of Main.

How committed are the designers to the use of brick masonry? a resident asked. A decision on materials hasn’t been made yet, Ketelaar said. Siegel added that they’re very committed to using brick with steel detailing on the first three stories. He indicated a range of other architectural detailing that he hopes to include, including cornices at the street level and other ornamental touches.

618 S. Main: Questions from Residents – Neighborhood

One resident said he’d like to see the first floor be retail, adding that it would be “great for the neighborhood.” Ketelaar said he’d thought about it, but couldn’t figure out what might work.

Ketelaar said that when he first came to town in the late 1960s, there were a lot of businesses to serve downtown residents, such as drug stores and groceries. Though there aren’t that many now, he acknowledged, the idea is that with growth of developments to bring more residents, the services will follow.

Doug Raab, owner of Washtenaw Dairy, talks with Ann Arbor city councilmember Mike Anglin at the neighborhood meeting for the 618 S. Main apartment project. Washtenaw Dairy is located a block away from the proposed development.

A resident asked whether Ketelaar had considered putting his building on the empty lot where the Glen Ann project had been proposed. Glen Ann was a 9-story residential project that another developer had proposed and that the city approved, but it was never built. The vacant parcel is at the corner of Glen and Catherine streets, across town near the University of Michigan medical center.

Ketelaar said he hadn’t considered that. The 618 S. Main property is in a unique location, he added, close to downtown and the UM campus.

The same resident noted that neighbors are concerned about the impact of the development on the neighborhood, in part because apartment dwellers aren’t as invested in the neighborhood as condo owners, who would be less inclined to trash the neighborhood.

Ketelaar noted that condos aren’t selling now, and that apartments appeal both to young professionals as well as to older people like him, who have the same interests in finding places to live where you can walk downtown, and that require far less maintenance than a house. One of his goals is to create a community, he said – that’s why they’re designing the courtyard space with seating, a small pool (though not one for swimming), and an indoor common living room on the first level, where people can hang out.

When asked about public access, Gibb-Randall clarified that the courtyard isn’t a public park. It’s intended for use by residents. Ketelaar described it as the equivalent of someone’s back yard.

A resident noted that the neighborhood already is a community. How will residents of the development interact with the existing neighborhood? They’ll become part of it, Ketelaar replied. Just because people are new to the area doesn’t mean they’ll be bad, he said.

When asked about putting in a coffee shop as a way to help integrate the neighborhood, Ketelaar said he was concerned about competing with the existing coffee shop – presumably referencing Washtenaw Dairy, located less than a block away at Madison and Ashley. Doug Raab, an owner of Washtenaw Dairy, was sitting across from Ketelaar at Friday’s meeting. One of the residents responded by saying that with 200 more people in the neighborhood, they could use more than one coffee shop.

Ketelaar was asked about other projects he’s been involved with, and what the impact was like on the neighborhoods for those. He said he hasn’t done a lot of development in Ann Arbor recently. He had been a principal in the 601 S. Forest project, but was bought out. That residential development is being constructed now and was controversial when it went through the city’s approval process – Ketelaar noted that some people who had been vocal about that project were also at the current meeting. He also cited Ridgewood condos, on West Liberty east of Stadium, as another project he’d developed.

618 S. Main: Questions from Residents – Environmental Issues

In response to a question about the floodplain, Ketelaar said the site isn’t located in the floodplain – it’s a few hundred feet from the edge of the floodplain, which is to the south, he said. One resident commented that in the flood of 1968, waters covered that area, and that while new federal floodplain maps will be released in April 2012, he wasn’t convinced they’ll be accurate. Bob Wanty of Washtenaw Engineering, who is also working on this project, said they have to use the maps that are available.

Alan Haber, top center, asks a question while Julie Weatherbee raises her hand with another query. Dan Ketelaar, developer of the 618 S. Main project, is seated at the far left. Behind him is Shannan Gibb-Randall, a landscape architect for the project.

A resident asked how the stormwater system will work, given the building’s large footprint on the site, and the fact that there will be two levels of underground parking. Gibb-Randall said they plan to “max out” the courtyard in terms of greenspace to absorb the water. When asked if this approach will work in the winter, Gibb-Randall said yes. Her firm has done over 70 rain gardens in Ann Arbor, she said, and while there is a limited palette of plants that can handle the seasonal changes, it’s possible to do. She described how when plants put down roots, about a third of those roots eventually die – creating channels underground that allow water to flow through. She plans to use as many native plants as possible.

Mike Anglin – one of two Ann Arbor city councilmembers representing Ward 5, where this project is located – asked Ketelaar about the project’s brownfield status. The site is considered a brownfield because it includes an underground fuel tank. The site across the street – Armen Cleaners, at the northwest corner of Mosley and Ashley – is also a brownfield, and there are monitoring wells in the area because of contamination there.

The 618 S. Main project is developing a brownfield plan, which will be submitted to the city along with the site plan. Ketelaar said they’ll apply for tax increment financing (TIF) to help remediate the site, but he wasn’t sure what amount they’d seek at this point. Anglin said it would be useful for the community to have results from any environmental testing that’s done on the site. Ketelaar noted that those tests would be submitted as part of the brownfield plan.

The city had approved brownfield credits for 601 S. Forest in 2008, when Ketelaar was still involved in that project.

618 S. Main: Questions from Residents – Financing

In response to a query about taxes, Ketelaar said that the owners of Fox Tent & Awning were paying about $18,000 in taxes each year, because they had owned the property since the 1930s. After the new development is built, he said the taxes will increase to over $500,000 annually.

Ketelaar was asked if he is confident he can build the development, from a financial perspective. He explained that typically, a project like this is 65% debt financed, with 35% equity. In this case, he said, the project is eligible for financing from the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), through a 40-year loan – that will be part of the financing package. He noted that even now, many banks aren’t lending.

Next Steps

When asked what would happen if the city didn’t approve a planned project for the site, Siegel replied that they would still want to develop a site that will improve the community. If all goes according to plan and the planned project is approved, construction could begin in the fall of 2012. However, Siegel added, sometimes it’s hard to predict what Ann Arbor’s city council will do or how long the process will take. It was a line that drew laughs from many of the residents, but Ketelaar called out to councilmember Mike Anglin, “Mike, you weren’t laughing!”

[Anglin perhaps found no humor in the situation because of recent developments in the saga of a project on South Fifth Avenue. Demolition of seven homes occurred earlier in the week as the start of City Place, a by-right residential project that many people see as inferior to another project – Heritage Row – previously proposed as a planned unit development on that same site. Anglin was one of four councilmembers who voted against Heritage Row. Most recently, he attempted to forestall City Place from moving ahead by proposing a second time to form a historic district study committee for that area, but did not get enough support from other councilmembers. For additional background, see Chronicle coverage: "Chapter Added to Fifth Ave. Historic Saga"]

Following Ketelaar’s quip, Anglin said he wanted to encourage Ketelaar to think about working to make Main Street a two-lane road along the section south of Packard. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be just one lane in each direction, Anglin said, and it would help the community for Ketelaar to make that happen.

Ketelaar responded by noting that “all we can do is suggest it.” [Changes to city roads would involve the city government and, for trunk lines, the Michigan Dept. of Transportation.] He said he’d had a brief conversation about it with Susan Pollay, executive director of the DDA, but that the DDA and city council would make any decision regarding Main Street traffic lanes.

Anglin asked whether at least the group could leave the meeting that night with the idea that a traffic study will be done. Ketelaar replied that a traffic study will be done as part of the required site plan submission. He also said he’d be happy to talk with Anglin about making a presentation on this issue to the DDA.

Describing the meeting as wonderful, Ray Detter noted that this is the second project that will go through the city’s new design review process. The first project to be reviewed in this way – The Varsity Ann Arbor – had just been approved by city council the previous night, he observed.

The city of Ann Arbor adopted design guidelines in February 2011. New developments must be evaluated by the design review board, but compliance with the board’s feedback is voluntary.

Detter urged people to attend the design review board meeting at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 16 in the same location, at 618 S. Main. That meeting will be followed by another community forum on Tuesday, Nov. 22 from 5-7 p.m. Ketelaar has previously met with some local business owners and members of the Old West Side Association board to discuss the project.

The project is expected to be formally submitted to the city later this month. After review by the city planning staff, it will be considered by the planning commission, which will make a recommendation to city council.

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Normal College’s formidable Dean of Women, Bessie Leach Priddy, knew about the growing problem. If things continued along the current course, the entire college could be disgraced. Boards of Education across the state might refuse to hire the graduating young teachers. The institution’s reputation could suffer. The situation was intolerable and it was time to act – forcefully.

The local paper uncovered the expulsions and gave the story a front-page, above-the-fold placement.

So forcefully, it turned out, that in the fallout from the result, no less a paper than the New York Times said in so many words that the Ypsi school was staffed by meddlesome, old-fashioned fuddy-duddies.

Some weeks prior in the spring of 1922, Dean Priddy had met with college president Charles McKenny, who shared her concern. After discussion, the two decided to immediately expel 17 female students and place 13 more on probation for the spring term. Dean Priddy and President McKenny drafted a letter explaining their action and sent it to the matrons of the boarding houses around town where female students lived before the era of dorms.

The 17 prospective teachers packed their things, said goodbyes, and had their trunks delivered to the train depot. The whistle blew. Their career at the Normal was over.

And all for smoking cigarettes.

Dean Priddy resumed her duties and President McKenny left town to attend an educational conference. The matter had been settled with hushed discretion.

Until the local paper caught the story.

Dean of Women Bessie Leach Priddy kept a sharp eye on female Normal College students.

“17 GIRL SMOKERS ARE OUSTED FROM NORMAL,” blared a huge headline on the front page of the April 12, 1922 edition of the Daily Ypsilantian-Press. The paper printed most of the letter that President McKenny and Dean Priddy had sent to the boarding houses. It revealed that the expelled female students had committed other infractions in addition to smoking.

The official reasons for the dismissals according to the letter were “undesirable attitude toward work, inability to do the work, class absences … dishonesty in work, in school work, and in financial matters, and smoking.”

“Regarding smoking,” continued the letter, “[t]he college does not enter into the discussion of the question of whether it is any worse for a woman to smoke than it is for a man.” The same was true, it said, for coming in at 2 in the morning or getting drunk. The college, claimed the letter, held male and female students to exactly the same standards.

No male students, however, had been dismissed.

The next day, the New York Times published its take on the Ypsi story. “The members of the Faculty … say that misdemeanors are harmful because they result in poor class work. But many made it plain that they believed bobbed hair, cigarettes, and strolling in gardens under the moon did not fall short of being actually sinful …”

Students felt treated like children, said the story. “‘We are old enough to look out for our own morals,’ is a common expression these days among both men and women students.”

Normal College president Charles McKenny thought himself progressive on the issue of women's hairstyles.

The Times story stung. “The claim that girls are discredited because of bobbed hair has no foundation,” President McKenny insisted in a special statement printed in the following issue of the Normal College News. “Some of the best students on the campus have bobbed hair, and … in an address quoted far and wide in Michigan, [I have] said that bobbed hair was no indication of perverse moral character.”

That bold declaration, from a gentleman born before the Civil War, must have caused much eye-rolling among his 45 female faculty members, just over half of whom had the stylish new cut.

But it hadn’t just been a skipped class or two that had flustered McKenny and the Dean of Women and led to the expulsions. It was the liberated behavior of some of the Jazz Era women students.

Buried further in the boarding house letter, McKenny’s other concerns come to light. What worried him and the Dean, aside from playing hooky, was what he called “social indiscretion.”

Some female students couldn’t handle the freedom of college life, said the letter. Additional reasons the women had been dismissed included “attentions from many and sometimes strange men, allowing undue familiarities from men who were casual acquaintances – sometimes from several men in one term,” and “constant week night dates with evasion of [boarding house] closing hours [10 p.m. according to a citywide rule].”

Another expulsion offense McKenny listed was “auto riding without permission, and sometimes by street pickup.” Yet another was “walking in parks and gardens by night” (moonlight canoe rides were popular too), not to mention “gaining access to rooming houses by way of windows.”

However, times, hemlines, and hairstyles were changing. The day soon came when female students did not have to secure permission for an auto ride, or face dismissal for a nocturnal stroll, a stolen kiss, or a cigarette.
 
 

Mystery Artifact

Last column’s reader-submitted Mystery Artifact was a true stumper – perhaps in part as it comes from overseas.

Mystery Artifact

Its owner describes it thus: “It’s a traditional Japanese paper folding fan, except that it’s made of cast iron. A disguised weapon a samurai would sneak around with if he had to relinquish his swords!” Yikes! Thank you to the reader who shared his remarkable and fascinating artifact.

[Editor's note: For readers who didn't notice the 3D version of the mystery artifact from last time, it's under that link. Readers who lack the red/blue specs required to view it properly might earn some of these magical cardboard/plastic eyeglasses from The Chronicle's limited stash by guessing a mystery artifact correctly, or sending in an image of a mystery artifact (3D or otherwise), and asking for a pair.]

Sticking with a cast-iron theme this week, let’s take a look at this odd object. Like the iron fan, it has an unexpected function; what might it be? Good luck!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti,” which was released Oct. 6, 2011. Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support the publication of regular columnists like Laura Bien. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

William Lister in his fraternal-order finery, circa 1904.

Overnight, he’d become the most hated man in Ypsilanti. A series of editorials in the Ypsilanti Daily Press condemned his actions and character. The paper even published a jeering cartoon, among large headlines detailing his disgrace.

William Lister wasn’t a murderer, rapist, or adulterer. With his wire-rimmed glasses and prim expression he resembled a rural schoolmaster or Sunday School teacher, both of which he had been. But his steady gaze hinted at a steely character with greater ambitions, which was also true. In the fall of 1907, William tangled with one of the most powerful groups in town, risking his reputation and his lucrative government job on a matter of principle.

William Noble Lister was born in a log cabin in Iosco township in Livingston County on the last day of 1868. His cabinetmaker father drowned when William was two. William’s mother Frances remarried and the family moved to Ypsilanti in the spring of 1882.

In 1887 William graduated from Ypsilanti High School. For a year, he taught in a rural school in Livingston County’s Unadilla. He returned to Ypsilanti to obtain his teaching degree from the Normal teacher training college. After another stint as a teacher in the western Upper Peninsula, William became Saline school superintendent from 1891 to 1895 – a first step to greater things.

In 1895, William operated a Saline drugstore with Benjamin Sheeder. Near the end of his four years at Lister and Sheeder’s, William became the Washtenaw county commissioner of schools. One of his reforms for Washtenaw schools was adopted statewide, and under his leadership the number of county school libraries increased from six to 108.

William also gained prominence in Saline’s local group of Masons, winning its highest office, “Worshipful Master.” He represented the lodge at state Masonic conventions. He also became a member of the Ypsilanti Masons, the Knights of Pythias, and the Maccabees. This wide web of connections, and William’s interest in Republican politics, would in time serve him well.

Despite his success as school commissioner, William chose to reenter business life in 1903, becoming president of Ypsilanti’s Reed Furniture Co. Producing a variety of popular wicker furniture shipped across the country, the company was a growing concern.

Though the Reed Furniture Company promised to be profitable, in about a year William sold – or was persuaded to sell – his interest in the company. The Ypsilanti workers, who had been earning roughly $1.60 a day [about $38 today], were fired and the factory was moved to Ionia. Inmates of the Ionia State House of Correction now made the furniture, working over 9 hours a day for 50 cents.

Reed worker trade groups protested. “Reed goods manufacturers in Michigan, following the example set by the Michigan Broommaker’s Union, are preparing to oppose the use of convicts in the State penal institutions there,” said an article in the December 27, 1906 Wooden and Willowware Trade Review. The contract with the Ypsilanti Reed Furniture Company should be dissolved, said the article, as it violated state law.

Their protest was fruitless.

The new Reed Furniture Company owner was Fred Warren Green. A graduate of the Ypsilanti Normal School and the University of Michigan law school, Green served as Ypsilanti city attorney. His political ambitions led him to become mayor of Ionia in 1913, treasurer of the state Republican party in 1915 and a decade later, state governor.

William in a postal delivery cart, circa 1905.

In the spring of 1904, William was appointed Ypsilanti postmaster by Michigan Republican congressman Charles Townsend, originally of Jackson. At the time, although regular clerks in the post offices across the state got their jobs by taking civil service exams, the position of postmaster was appointed by the political party then in power. It was regarded as a plum job with easy indoor work and a fat federal salary, and was often fiercely fought over.

Grumbling about William’s appointment was heard in Ypsilanti from local Republicans who regarded him as an upstart, not someone who’d earned the privilege of postmaster after years of service to the party, much less someone who’d lived in town for very long or invested much into the city. “The proposed appointment . . . is a big surprise to people of [Ypsilanti],” said one Washtenaw paper, “and it is said to be the result of a [hunt] on the part of a few politicians managed by Committeeman Prettyman of Ann Arbor . . . Mr. Townsend has been made to think that Mr. Lister was the whole cheese at Ypsilanti.” Prettyman would himself become Ann Arbor postmaster two years later.

“The people of Ypsilanti are well pleased with the announcement by Congressman Townsend,” said one Ann Arbor newspaper. “This choice evidently meets the approval of all . . .”

In 1907, resentment in Ypsi boiled over.

A home-grown editorial cartoon satirizing Lister in the November 20, 1907 Ypsilanti Daily Press.

That fall, the Ypsilanti Masons were raising money for a new lodge, their Michigan Avenue quarters having become too small. After rejecting one spot on Washington Street, they chose a North Huron Street lot. It was expensive, so the fraternal order decided to hold a huge fundraising event – a three-day bazaar featuring entertainment, food, and donated goods for sale.

Comprising local merchants and businessmen, the group was influential in town. Hundreds of donations came in from storekeepers and private citizens. One shipment of 250 cigars even arrived from Detroit. A local widow donated a golden watch that her departed husband, a onetime Mason, had given her. Her gracious letter was printed in the paper.

The bazaar kicked off on Nov. 7. Huge crowds thronged the event housed in the onetime Light Guard Hall on Michigan Avenue above the present-day Mix boutique. The hall was filled with booths selling everything from clothing to guns. Baas and clucks emanated from the livestock room, and Madame Cheiro read palms. Tickets were sold for a prize drawing. Each night musical programs were presented and the Order of the Eastern Star, the Masons’ women’s auxiliary, prepared large banquets, one chicken pie supper serving over 200 people.

The Nov. 11 Ypsilanti Daily Press printed a list of the prizes attendees had won over the course of the bazaar. F. Kibler won a diamond ring, Tracy Towner snagged the buffalo robe, and Mrs. Mary Wilson won the heaviest prize, a ton of coal. An accompanying story praised the Masons for their good work. The group had netted $1,500 [$35,000 today], reported the paper, with more than $300 from the culinary efforts of the Order of the Eastern Star.

The newspapers were printed and bundled. Those headed for rural subscribers were addressed and brought to the post office on North Huron at 5:30 p.m. The post office stood across the street from the North Huron lot that the Masons wanted. Similarly, the postmaster and the Masons were about to face off against each other in battle.

William refused to deliver the papers.

Two days later a Nov. 13 headline in the Ypsilanti Daily Press blared, “Postmaster Lister Administers Insult to Phoenix Lodge.” None of the rural subscribers had received their Nov. 11 edition of the Press. “Lister’s action, when it became known today, was roundly scorned by prominent local businessmen. They styled it the smallest, meanest, and most contemptible piece of work they ever heard of.”

The problem had been the Nov. 11 article listing the prize winners. The innocuous news that Mrs. George Gaw had won a ham, William Ellis a pair of trousers, and Will Duratt an “owl cushion” had not passed muster with the postmaster. He had no animus towards owl cushions. The problem lay in the prize drawing being too similar to a game of chance.

According to the Comstock Act, no obscene material could be delivered via U.S. mail. The act prohibited the mailing of items relating to contraception, abortion, or other topics deemed immoral or lewd – including gambling. Even private sealed letters came under the purview of the Act, all the more a front-page newspaper story describing a “gambling” event at a Masonic fair.

“Who is this Lister?” bellowed the Nov. 13 Press. “W. N. Lister, a rank outsider, a man who but recently floated into town; a man who didn’t have a dollar invested here; who was a citizen of Ypsilanti scarcely in name, had contrived to get himself appointed to the office,” said the article. “Republicans who had labored here for 20 years for the good of the town and the party; who had given of their time and money, were passed over for this fellow.” William’s political connections, the article said, were the only reason for his appointment.

The newspaper launched a smear campaign that depicted William as the smug holder of an undeserved sinecure. The Nov. 15 paper published tearful accusations from one Widow Barnes, who alleged that William had driven her husband Charles, the former deputy postmaster, to an early death. William had kept the office too cold, the paper quoted her as saying, causing her husband to catch pneumonia and be confined to his home. After demands from William that Charles return to work at once, he died in the post office at his desk.

There is some evidence that William was a demanding boss. He opened the post office six days a week at 6:30 a.m. and kept it open until 7 at night. He even opened it for an hour on Sunday mornings instead of giving his staff of 8 clerks and 22 mail carriers a day off.

The Nov. 20 Press published an editorial cartoon depicting William as devouring his “first term [as postmaster] pie” while chortling, “I’ve got this job for life!” In December, the Press continued the campaign. A story in the Dec. 2 paper, “How Mr. Lister Discriminates,” claimed that a Detroit paper contained a description of a “Yankee Circus in Egypt” to be put on by Detroit Masons. The event was nigh identical to the Ypsilanti bazaar, said the article, yet William allowed this item to cross his desk unhampered. Unfair!

“The postmastership is the softest snap in Ypsilanti,” continued the article. “The salary is $2,600 a year [about $60,000 today]. When Lister completes his four-year term, he will have drawn more than $10,000 [$231,000 today] – a fortune to most citizens” – especially in 1907, considering that year’s financial panic. The paper urged citizens to contact Congressman Townsend urging him to rescind his appointment – or at least not renew William’s term for another four years.

There were plenty of “Reasons Why Masons Are Sore,” said a Dec. 16 story in the Press. A former Ypsi resident living in Washington D.C. had sent the Press a Washington newspaper detailing a Masonic prize giveaway. “It is very interesting to members of Phoenix lodge,” said the article, “that a paper published in Washington, under the very eyes of the postmaster general, could circulate its papers, when the [Press] was held up here by ‘Grand Mogul’ Lister.”

The paper’s appeals to sway the congressman, which continued up to the end of 1907, were in vain. William retained his position, and became the first postmaster in Ypsilanti history to secure a second term. He married Detroit teacher Sarah Hutton, bought a home in the midtown area, and had two children, Frances and William.

Over time, feelings against William seemed to abate. By 1916 he was city treasurer and served on a county road board. In 1938 he was honored at an oratory festival at Normal College, as a former star orator.

The protests of an entire town had not dislodged the resolute and resourceful postmaster. The former teacher had done his homework.

Reader-Submitted Mystery Artifact

Last column’s artifact drew a number of correct guesses.

Mystery Object (Image links to 3D version)

“Its a woodworker’s scribe tool,” said ABC. Cosmonican also knew. It was a delight to learn that this tool is still in use in modern form today.

This week’s Mystery Artifact is special as it is a reader-submitted Mystery Artifact, a fun feature which I’d like to include in this column as often as possible. Do you have innumerable cool old tools/machines/doodads lying around? Why not take a picture and send it to ypsidixit@gmail.com and I’ll include it as soon as possible. See if you can stump other readers!

This object certainly stumped me. Had I not been told what it is, I simply would never have guessed. What might it be? Perhaps it’s not exactly what it seems …

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti,” which was released Oct. 6, 2011. Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like Laura Bien. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

Jim Ottaviani – University of Michigan librarian and graphic novel author. His latest book is "Feynman," a biography of physicist Richard Feynman.

For  a graphic novel with a title like “Feynman,” my smart-aleck reflex is to pronounce the word silently to myself with deliberately wayward stress – so the final vowel gets its full flavor, instead of an unstressed schwa.

That way, it patterns with Superman, Spiderman, Aquaman, Ironman, Batman and other comic book heros. And that allows me to wonder what special powers this Feynman might have, how he got those powers, what his home planet was …

Of course, the Feynman in Jim Ottaviani’s recently published graphic novel is actually not a comic book hero. It’s Richard Feynman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum physics. (So Feynman’s home planet was Earth, you see.)

Ottaviani explained during his teeter totter ride a couple of weeks ago that he’d not intended the title of his most recent graphic novel to be a word play. It was the publisher who had chosen the title, when Ottaviani had “punted” on that task.

Soon after talking with me on the totter, Ottaviani left town for a book tour. He’ll be back in Ann Arbor in a couple of weeks when he gives a talk on “Feynman” in the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Library Gallery, on Oct. 13, 2011 at 5:30 p.m.

To prepare for his talk, you can buy “Feynman” at Nicola’s Books.

To me, the most interesting part of my conversation with Ottaviani involved the graphic novel as a mechanism for telling a story – in the case of “Feynman,” it’s a physicist’s biography. There’s nothing particularly novel about that – Ottaviani has covered scientific subject matter before in comic book form. His previous work includes a number of books that contain episodes from the lives of Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Marie Curie, among others.

But that led me to contemplate a different idea. What if one of the staples of Chronicle coverage, a government meeting report, were presented in the form of a graphic novel?

Ottaviani’s reaction to the idea: “Do that, please, is all I can say.” At least the title of that comic book (with apologies to Sabra Briere, Margie Teall, Sandi Smith and Marcia Higgins) would be straightforward: “Councilman.”

Though I can’t draw, I did take a shot at creating two panels of “Councilman.”

(Image links to higher resolution file) Councilmembers were in the middle of a routine vote ...

... when suddenly a strange electricity filled the chambers. Had the city's CFO, Tom Crawford, been rubbing a balloon on his head again? It seemed to be more intense than that ...

The images in those panels are constrained by the limits of my “artistic” ability as expressed with software made by Adobe. That’s not how Ottaviani works, of course. He describes each panel in detail, and that description is eventually handed off to the illustrator, who actually draws what Ottaviani has visualized. The illustrator for “Feynman” was Leland Myrick.

How big a project would a city-council-meeting-as-graphic-novel be? The last city council report published in The Chronicle came in around 13,000 words. A rule of thumb for comic book panels, Ottaviani told me, is that each panel should have about 35 words of dialogue. That would work out to 370 panels – if every word in the report were included as dialogue. But clearly, not every word would need to be included as dialogue. Much of the meaning could be conveyed through the illustrations.

In thinking about how to make a comic book out of a city council meeting, I paused to reflect on how The Chronicle approaches meeting coverage. While we include a considerable amount of descriptive detail about the meetings, as well as background to orient the reader, there’s also a lot of material that gets pared away.

Some of the material that gets pared away might be arguably be less important than material we include. For example, why include a photo of a helium balloon trapped against the ceiling of the city council chambers (with a joke caption), but not a description of a liquor license transfer? After riding the totter with Ottaviani, I was rummaging around the Internet for some information about Feynman, and found a succinct answer to that question. It’s in Richard Feynman’s lecture, delivered on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize. From his introductory remarks:

I shall include details of anecdotes which are of no value either scientifically, nor for understanding the development of ideas. They are included only to make the lecture more entertaining.

Included in Feynman’s introductory remarks is the expression of another basic tenet of Chronicle reporting – we’re committed to telling readers what we did to “get to do the work.” So if we had to email or call a source after the meeting, in order to pin down a fact, we’ll tell readers that up front. We think our reports are a plenty dignified way to tell readers exactly what we did. If we didn’t attend a meeting, we won’t report on it as if we did. In Feynman’s Nobel lecture, he puts it this way:

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks … So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work … So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.

Jim Ottaviani’s complete Talk is worth a read. If you’d prefer to see him talk live, in person, he’ll be talking about “Feynman” at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Library Gallery, on Oct. 13, 2011 at 5:30 p.m.