The building that formerly housed The Ann Arbor News, at the southwest corner of Huron and Division.

However, the three-story News building is only one of several properties being considered as a potential home for the credit union’s administrative offices, says Jeff Schillag, the institution’s vice president of marketing and community relations.

Not all the potential sites are downtown, Schillag says. And any acquired space would replace leased office space.

Opened in 1936, the Albert Kahn-designed News building was shuttered last July when Advance Publications closed the daily newspaper.

A two-story press remains in the 80,000-square-foot building. The property also includes on-site parking, with entrances off of both Washington and Huron, and an additional parking lot on Ann Street. The building was renovated in 2004-05.

As part of its investigation into the property, the credit union retained Atwell-Hicks to take soil samples at The News building last week, Schillag says. Boring equipment in the parking lot was visible to passers-by as the engineers did that work, and prompted The Chronicle to follow up.

Pavement in the parking lot of the former Ann Arbor News building shows remnants of work done last week by Atwell-Hicks.

Schillag emphasized that the activity does not mean the credit union has decided to purchase the property.

Tax assessors put the 2009 value of The News building, at 340 E. Huron, at about $10 million and the lot at 336 E. Ann St. at about $600,000. The News building occupies the width of a block, with frontage on West Washington as well as Huron Street. The properties went on the market in October and are listed with Colliers International, with an asking price of $9.3 million.

In January, Swisher Commercial reported a vacancy rate of 17.6% in Ann Arbor’s office market. The rate for the downtown area was 16.5%, or 288,223 square feet.

The privately held Advance Publications Inc. bought The News – along with the Grand Rapids Press, Flint Journal and several other Michigan papers – in 1976.

Last year, the company reduced the number of publication days at the Journal and a number of the other Michigan papers. It also closed The News – in its place, the company launched a new enterprise, AnnArbor.com, which publishes online and offers print editions twice a week.

The UM Credit Union operates six branches in Ann Arbor, plus a branch on UM’s Dearborn campus. Its main downtown Ann Arbor office is next to the Ann Arbor District Library, at 333 E. William.

The University of Michigan Credit Union building on East William. The view is to the northwest. Behind the building, at the top of this photo, is the top of a crane being used on construction of the Fifth Avenue underground parking structure.

One of 19 Art Deco reliefs on the Ann Arbor News building. The figure is using an ergonomically-challenged switchboard phone system.

Since The Chronicle launched last fall, we’ve been covering the monthly meetings of the Ann Arbor Public Art Commission. At that first meeting we attended in October, the group discussed a project to take inventory of all the public art in the city – the idea is to create a database that can eventually be accessed by the public, giving details of where each piece of art is located, who the artist is, and any other relevant information.

Separately, we were later contacted by a Chronicle reader who said she’d like to see a series about public art in the city – essentially, the same kind of thing that AAPAC is compiling. So until their project is online, The Chronicle will be taking up our reader’s request in an occasional look at this city’s public art. In our definition, we’ll look at art on public and private buildings, as long as it’s visible to the public. We’re starting with something that’s connected to the field of journalism: the Art Deco reliefs on the Ann Arbor News building.

These pieces – 19 of them – are affixed to the original Albert Kahn building that was constructed in 1936 at the southwest corner of Huron and Division. (The building has undergone several expansions and renovations over the decades, so the stateliness of the original structure is somewhat diminished.) The 15-x-12 inch reliefs, made of cast aluminum, are easy to overlook: they’re placed on the upper half of the building and face two busy streets, with lots of motor vehicle traffic but few strolling pedestrians. It’s not the kind of setting where you linger, unless you’re waiting for the light to change.

An Art Deco relief, facing South Division Street, representing the printing industry. The Ann Arbor News is no longer printed this way.

Still, they’re worth a linger. Made by sculptor Corrado Parducci, each of the 19 square-ish reliefs (with some duplicates) represent 13 topics covered by journalists, based on a 1930s worldview: art, aviation, drama, justice, literature, music, photography, printing, radio, science, sports, telephone, and travel. [Aside: We wonder what 13 fields would represent the focus of today's journalists, and whether those topics will seem as quaint in 2082 as "telephone" seems today.] Parducci also did exterior reliefs on the University of Michigan’s Rackham building as well as on several buildings on the Eastern Michigan University campus.

The Art Deco style is reflected in the “rounded corners, the clear lines, the essential shapes of the small reliefs, along with the words set into the edge,” write Martha Keller and Michael Curtis, authors of “Public Art in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County.”

Keller and Curtis note that the figures in these reliefs are typically kneeling, a position that better allows them to fit into the square design – though, it must be said, also it makes them look extremely contorted. The figures are also relentlessly buff, a fact not remarked on by Keller and Curtis.

The Art Deco relief representing the journalistic topic of photography. The equipment is something we imagine might still be used by members of the Ann Arbor Crappy Camera Club.

Art Deco reliefs on the Ann Arbor News building, facing East Huron Street, are set into the dark granite about midway up the building. Also visible is the original front entrance of this Albert Kahn structure, which has been turned into a window.