Something Old, Something New

A new student housing project rises above an old student rental house at the corner of Division and William streets on the southern edge of downtown Ann Arbor.

Order It From Zaragon

It's amazing how much the nearly finished Zaragon West apartment high-rise looks like the artist renderings from when it was drawn up two years ago. I've watched this project take shape up over the course of many months, both up close and personal and from afar, including here as seen from my downtown Ann Arbor office vantage point. The 14-story project, formerly known as Zaragon Place 2, will bring nearly 200 new beds to the downtown with ground-floor retail space. Read my story from when it was approved.

Shaping Up

A $50 million underground parking structure being built by the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority on South Fifth Avenue, next to the downtown library branch on what's known as the Library Lot, continues to take shape.

Life Goes On

It was another Sunday night in Ann Arbor. As the sun retreated to the west, a beautiful orange and blue glow crept up beneath a towering crane where work continues on a new underground parking garage downtown. A few blocks over, a half-finished student high-rise known as Zaragon West reached anxiously into the evening sky as light danced on the dented hood of an automobile parked across the street from a pizza parlor. On State Street, University of Michigan students walked the quiet sidewalks lugging backpacks filled with dense texts. On the campus diag, flags representing nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives exactly a decade ago on 9/11 dotted the lawn where hundreds of people gathered for a candlelight vigil to reflect and remember. A stone's throw away, street performer Julian Montgomery filled Nickels Arcade with the soulful sounds of his cello. "It's just God speaking to me," he uttered to a passerby who asked about his music. Around the corner, the flagship store of the Borders book store chain offered 90% off deals on the eve of its last day in business. Two motorcyclists buzzed past the State Theatre where the marquee advertised a $6 showing of the popular 1994 Tarantino film "Pulp Fiction." And in front of a bar just up the street, a drunken man who recently relocated to Ann Arbor from Miami, Fla., carried a red rose which he planned to give to the prettiest girl he could find. Ten years later, life goes on.