Ann Arbor Monorail

On my one night in Ann Arbor this year Anne and I ventured downtown. The old adage, you can’t go home again rings truer and truer every time that I try. The small sleepy college town is now more and more a megalopolis. Last month, I drove up to Michigan to pick up my baby and then we drove on the next day to a week in New York. On this one night, we parked in the old library lot, which is now an underground parking structure, instead the simple asphalt parking lot of a long ago fond memory. We walked circuitously down to Main, by way of Huron. They have a Google! Main Street was hopping. Bill’s Beer Garden was doing a good business, but because our cousins are always crowing about the Old Town, we went there instead. It was really dead. Don’t get me wrong, after a day on the road and a month and a half without my wife, the last booth in an empty bar was perfect, otherwise we would have walked out. After dinner we toured the shops of Main Street. One curio shop had the pictured poster. Its part of a line that I’m not sure is entirely factual. The poster boasts a monorail circa 1964, the year of the New York Worlds Fair. Two years earlier Seattle inaugurated the first one. Extensive research, read Google, elucidated that in 1964 every burgh in America was planning to build a monorail. So why not build an Ann Arbor monorail from Westgate to Arborland? There were other posters in the shop’s window. One spoke of a visitation from the Nazi Graf Zeppelin. The poster quotes a 9/26/35 date, but I believe that the correct date was 10/26/33. It flew overhead during a Michigan/Minnesota game.