Ah, Blue Front. How I loved ye.
It was a little corner store when I was in Ann Arbor, a kind of funky holdover from the 70’s run by a dude who graduated in around ’75. Had a million newspapers for sale, from all over the world. Le Monde, The Guardian, Der Cherman Daily Noose, all over. And they had beer. Oh, did they have beer.
Cheap beer. Goebel’s sold for $4.99 a case, as I recall. A CASE. That comes to 20.8 cents per beer, but who’s counting? That beer stunk though. Let’s face it. It was awful then, and I knew it. For classy, international, upscale swilling I preferred Labatt’s at US$2.49 per six pack. Mix and match, no less. Oh man. Mon dieu, you could get Labatt’s Blue, Labatt’s Light, Labatt’s Extra Wet: all of ’em. Six for $2.49, at a whopping 41.5 cents per bottle.
One of the beautiful things about Blue Front it that it still had that laid-back, bell-bottomed, jean-jacketed, big-aviator-eyeglasses, white-guys-with-afros, untrimmed-mustache 1970s feel to it. There was still some of that left in Ann Arbor in the early ‘eighties. That whole Reagan era greed-is-good abomination hadn’t yet settled over everything, killing that freewheeling college-town, Legalize Pot! spirt of the ’70s. And Blue Front still had that vibe.
You could tell rent was still low. How else could the dude sell beer so cheap? There was still an attitude where it was okay to merely make ends meet and have a good time running a little business, still making it to the Blind Pig twice a week with enough “bread” left over to hit the Del Rio and Mr. Flood’s every other night. It was more like the New Orleans attitude. Working to live, not living to work.
And the advertising murals on the side wall (for Coke and a dry cleaner that must have been in the building back in the deco years, from the looks of the font) had been restored. There was still a Pepsi sign hanging on the Packard side from I’d say the early ‘sixties. Coke and Pepsi on the same building? That was pretty freewheeling and laid-back, right there. Things are so corporate now, you’d probably have to choose one or the other.
And the shape of the building was cool and anachronistic — that acute triangular shape common to buildings erected at those awkward intersections defined by weird old pre-automobile roads that went straight from one city to the next, originally laid down to accommodate horses, then trollies, then eventually cars. Then the grid streets were laid out and you’d get those goofball six-way intersections with triangular lots and buildings, in this case Blue Front and Campus Corner across the streets.
Blue Front also boasted a bold little turret in front, and I always thought it’d have been so cool to live up there. Funky. You just KNOW there were herbal jazz plants growing up there back in Ann Arbor’s radical heyday (oh, hell… and way beyond) and love beads somewhere back there and a cheeky poster of W. C. Fields playing cards. At least in my mind.
But now it’s gone. Blue Font, I’m glad I knew ye. I lived in Ann Arbor during college then came back about 10 years later and lived there for another stint. On a cold November day a few months before we left for good, I took a picture of that place and resolved to paint it. In 2008 I did, and that painting’s now hanging at the Ann Arbor Art Center, hoping for a good home.
UPDATE: that painting has been sold.
