This is how you navigate.

Monday, March 7, 2016

Discover Larrytown Ann Arbor

Gentle readers, have you been to Larrytown? Centered around the section of Packard between Stadium and Jewett, the Larrytown Corridor is a trendy commercial district and home to several local businesses including: eat, Morgan and York, Garrett Scott, Bookseller, Fraser's Pub, and Ricewood BBQ. According to the Larrytown website, the name Larrytown, was selected for the neighborhood "for its obvious euphony, the faint echo of another local destination district..."

Previously:

Ricewood BBQ is open for the 2016 season

10 comments:

  1. On twitter @cynicalgrrl points out that there is a great Dairy Queen in Larrytown too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I thought this part of town was known as South Park

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yoooo... who decided our neighborhood was arbitrarily called LarryTown? After reading the website the name was decided for its 'ease of everything called Larry'. We've a place, we've a history, we're called Sopack (South Packard).

    ReplyDelete
  4. #SoPac is a much bigger area. LT is a subset of it, as I read the map.

    ReplyDelete
  5. #SoPac is a much bigger area. LT is a subset of it, as I read the map.

    ReplyDelete
  6. My understanding is that Larrytown really just refers to the business corridor at the top of the SoPac neighborhood. South Park is the name of the subdivision that contains parts of both Larrytown and SoPac.

    http://www.a2gov.org/services/GIS/Documents/Subd%20Maps/Sct0933.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hey! It's the founding father (or guy who once made a throw-away joke and then registered a cheap domain name) of Larrytown -- I didn't realize there was a separate debate over Larrytown going on in the comments over here. I'll paste in below a couple of notes (with minor revisions/clarifications) that I hammered out in response to a query this afternoon I got about what right I had to name a neighborhood:

    Thanks for the note and I'm glad to find somebody else who is as committed to the neighborhood as I am -- I've loved the past 17 years I've spent living and working in a three-block patch of SoPack, MidPack, Larrytown, the Industrial Corridor, along the former Interurban Line, within the minimalist political stronghold of the @twentypoundcarp, and the area designated under the Ann Arbor City & Planning Master Plan as South Area. I'd never dream of imposing a name for you to choose to talk about where we live -- a destination that's still affordable, has a great mix of small local businesses like John Roos (with his diplomatic passport from Water Hill) and Matt & Tommy's place and Ricewood and Oz's and even (cough cough) a small antiquarian book shop run by a guy who thought it would be funny to create around his own shop a downmarket Kerrytown (itself a coinage based on a later developer's grandmother's natal land if memory serves). One thing I like about the trolley flats and former fairgrounds and the majestic speedbumps of Iroquois is that we aren't easily subdued to one identity yet! Drop by the shop some time if you're at this end of SoPack [though shoot me a note first: my hours are like my naming of neighborhoods: arbitrary and capricious]. -- Garrett Scott, @bibliophagist bibliophagist.com

    (With a comment I then added because I cannot write unless I write at length:)

    Oh! And I forgot my earlier annexation at the hands of another into SouthTown,
    http://www.damnarbor.com/2014/04/southtown-ann-arbors-newest-neighborhood.html
    which I thought then and think now is a great idea, because I love the idea that anyone might care enough about where they live might want to embody and embrace its peculiar characteristics, to put together the encyclopedia entry for their neighborhood, maybe under a cross-reference from Uqbar -- even if as Ben notes it [Southtown] is a heterogeneous designation, a territory that ranges the vast geographic stretches from the community airwaves of the CTN studio in the southwest to the the Circle K in the northeast, and yet leaves me with questions like: Does Fraser's lie outside the SouthTown ambit while Chia Shiang nestles within its borders? Does any border create a kind of erasure? Does naming call neighborhoods into being, or instead does a vibrant neighborhood or neighborhoods inspire a sense of play that bubbles up with arbitrary jokes and goofs and love for a sense (or senses) of place? Presumably there's kind of an arbitrary distinction between the two positions.

    Perhaps multiple neighborhoods overlay each other simultaneously and every morning as I walk to work through the dim ghosts of your Sopack you are batting off the mists of Larrytown, like the overlay of worlds in Daniel Pinkwater's masterwork, "Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars." (My meditation on Pinkwater's 1970s novels as a harbinger of New Urbanism will have to wait until I have less on my desk that needs to get done.) Thanks! Garrett/@bibliophagist

    ReplyDelete
  8. (And because I cannot leave well enough alone, I'll note that some of the borders of Larrytown -- such as they are -- were hashed out at a table at with some of the Thursday morning RoosRoast crew. We decided to include a spur of land on the east end to include a friend who had just moved to town and asked to be annexed.)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Your irredentist neighbors to the north will annex Iroquois and call it SoLoBuPa, on the grounds that the kids go to Burns Park but that it's in the South planning area.

    ReplyDelete