Kerrytown and the Farmers Market

The brick buildings you see here in Kerrytown are among the oldest commercial structures in Ann Arbor. The oldest, built in eighteen seventy-four, housed the Luick Brothers Lumber Company. The neighborhood is named for County Kerry in Ireland, reflecting the wave of Irish immigration that shaped working-class Ann Arbor in the late nineteenth century. These were warehouses and supply yards, the kind of blocks that keep a city functional but rarely get celebrated.

By the late nineteen sixties, the buildings had been converted into markets and shops, their exposed beams and brick walls suddenly desirable again in an era when industrial aesthetics had become fashionable. The conversion preserved the bones of the neighborhood while changing its purpose entirely.

The Farmers Market in Kerrytown has been running since nineteen nineteen. It moved to its current location in nineteen twenty-one and has operated there ever since, through the Depression, through World War Two, through the counterculture sixties, through the craft food revolutions of the nineteen eighties and nineties. It is the kind of institution that outlasts the arguments about what it represents.

The most famous business to emerge from Kerrytown's modern era opened on March fifteenth, nineteen eighty-two. Ari Weinzweig had studied Russian history at the University of Michigan and was working as a dishwasher. Paul Saginaw was the manager of the same restaurant. They shared an ambition: a traditional Jewish-style delicatessen, the kind you could find in New York but not in Ann Arbor. They opened Zingerman's Deli in about nine hundred square feet with five tables and four stools. It is now an enterprise spanning nine businesses and more than five hundred employees, studied in business schools and credited with helping define the artisan food movement in the Midwest. Not bad for a dishwasher's dream in a lumber yard.