I'm getting old.. This was the place to be once upon a time. There was always some wannabe musician playing harmonica outside the store. This was one of the gathering places for what was left of the counterculture in the 80's and 90's. And the store wasn't exactly the cleanest place either. But then again neither were the students who shopped there.. Village Corner Closes
Since 1970, the Village Corner party store stood at the southeast corner of the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus, a dusty, dark cavern of all things fermented that supplied libations to four decades of students and wine lovers.
It was eclectic in its product lines: Schlitz, Pabst and Budweiser for the college set; fine wines from France and Germany for those with a more refined taste.
They came together in a store that was, well, far more Midwestern beer vault than snooty wine shoppe.
"It looks like a dive," said Leslie Roberts of Ann Arbor, a fan who bought several bottles Friday night. But she said that with a knowing smile. "I know good things can come in dingy packages."
Saluted by wine lovers from across the country — and by students who knew the store had a ready supply of toilet paper and beer — the Village Corner, at least at its location at South Forest and South University, is gone.
Friday and Saturday marked its last weekend as it makes way for redevelopment that will include a high-rise student apartment building. Owner Dick Scheer hopes to reopen soon in the area, but he said he hasn't decided where that will be.
"We're moving," he said Friday night, as customers buzzed in and out to take advantage of a 20 percent off sale on wine. "We're not quitting."
That's good news for wine fans like Steve Shoemaker of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who has been a Village Corner customer since his wife, Julie Wolin, was working on her Ph.D. at U-M in the 1970s. He got past the store's appearance to appreciate its affinity for wine and its employees' willingness to help.
Wine for a concert
In 1984, he sought some advice. "I said, 'I'm going to see Billy Idol. What wine would you suggest?" Unruffled by a half-joking reference to the bleached-blonde punk rocker, the clerk had a reply: a Cote du Rhone.
Yes, perfect.
"It's really a different store," Shoemaker said.
Scheer and his wife, Sally, have run the store for 40 years, enjoying a remarkable run fueled by students' thirst for beer and liquor and older adults' growing love of wine. They tapped into a wine craze that started in the 1960s and has grown for generations. "We hitched our wagon to that," said Scheer, 67, a graduate of U-M.
A few things have changed. Today's students are also interested in microbrews as well as wine. Years ago, students walked right past the wine and headed for the coolers. "A lot of the students today are really savvy," he said.
While the beer accounted for the most sales, the wine helped the owners weather the ebbs and flows of the school year and made them famous; the store is known around the country for its selection of smaller vintners from Europe.
Wall of shame
But for many students and local residents, the store might bring back other memories: like the wall of fake ID shame --Â an "X" in each eye -- that once lined the area behind the counter. It was Scheer's way of alerting too-young customers that, hey, if you're not old enough to buy beer, don't even think about it.
Mike Anderson grew up in Ann Arbor and remembers the wall and the fear it created.
"The impact, of course, was the sheer volume of them, row after row, a rogue's gallery of failure, a platoon of the disappointed," he said in an e-mail.
Those IDs, stuffed in paper bags, are now part of what has moved on. Everything had to be out of the store by midnight Saturday, Scheer said, and he expected a busy day. But sadness didn't seem to be part of his moving equation.
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
This was the place to be once upon a time. There was always some wannabe musician playing harmonica outside the store. This was one of the gathering places for what was left of the counterculture in the 80's and 90's. And the store wasn't exactly the cleanest place either. But then again neither were the students who shopped there..
