To much fanfare, our long-awaited neighborhood grokkery store, The Plum Market, opened in February and it is so nice to be able to finagle my way around the construction to get home from work, park my car, grab a grokkery bag and *walk* over there. I just love walking by all the backed-up traffic on N. Maple.

But I’m not sure I like the latest in grokkery store developments here in my little neighborhood on the Planet Ann Arbor. A developer has plans to replace a whole bunch of little brownfield-type businesses with an Aldi store and some as yet unknown other shops. I have nothing against Aldi exactly (beware, their image and Flash heavy site loaded ultra-slowly on my broadband connection). But I’m an old stick-in-the-mud who doesn’t like real estate developers in general (exception being Plum Market) and I’m not sure I want all of the crappy old businesses that inhabit the brownfield on the NE corner of the Dexter/N. Maple intersection to go away. Lemme think. TV repair outfit. Chop shop/used vee-hickle outfits. I’ve never been able to figger out how many of those there are or whether or not they are somehow interrelated. Vacuum cleaner outfit. And those vacuum cleaners are *always* out there on the gravel in front of the store. They were out there when it was raining cats and dogs yesterday. They have *got* to be dysfunctional. Maybe the store knows the writing is on the wall? I dunno.

We have never been customers of any of those businesses. Maybe the TV place once back in the Jurassic Age when lightning apparently struck one of our TV sets while we were up in the Great White North one summer. But still. I kind of like that our corner is cluttered up with a bunch of rag-tag old buildings and used jalopies and drenched vacuum cleaners.

And it isn’t clear from the postcard we received from the developer whether the whole thing will involve demolishing Knight’s or not. I don’t *think* it does. It better not! Otherwise, I dunno. Would you guys rather live next to a quiet little brownfield or a new grokkery store with some other new businesses in front of it? Click here or on the pic for a short slideshow.

Grok grok. Ol’ Baggy has obvyussly flipped ‘er lid now. Grokgrok. That’s not five rabbits! It’s *four* *Vackyoom cleen’rs*! grok grok grok.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.