I'm looking through you, and you're nowhere

[austin_dern]

Before we went bowling, we went to a nearby bagel shop, because they've got really good bagels, and we can get a lunch and then a dozen (or more, because we usually get there around when they're closing --- they're a breakfast-and-lunch place and we're not early risers --- and they toss us a sometimes embarrassing number of extras). It also gave us the chance to read the local alt-weekly, where we discovered to our horror that the Travellers Club International Restaurant and Tuba Museum, which is just what it sounds like, had closed. (A Travellers Pub is opening up, which what the paper reported on.) This appears to have been a landlord-inspired bit of booting people around, because the adjacent Triple Goddess bookstore, adjacent, had moved. We'd thought it was opening a new location, but no, they're just in a new spot (and just down the street from us).

And furthermore the White Brothers music store, just by the Travellers Club, moved to a new location. bunny_hugger had feared that moving was one of those death-rattles of a long-running business --- the thing where a store gives up its longstanding location for a new, presumably cheaper one, and then collapses altogether. Perhaps it is, but the evidence is unclear in this case, based on research bunny_hugger did. It transpired that the White family also owned the Restaurant and Tuba Museum, and suddenly all sorts of things make more sense: the proximity of the restaurant and the shop, the simultaneous closing of one and relocation of another, and why a diner would have such a strong tuba orientation.

We spent a lot of the afternoon moping about the loss of quirky local attractions like a diner/tuba museum, and bunny_hugger increased the chances that she'll try the White Brothers for guitar lessons she hopes to take. And we went to a local supermarket instead of Meijer's to pick up some stuff.

Trivia: The width of the London Bridge was never uniform until 1760, after all the houses on it were removed. Source: Old London Bridge: The Story Of The Longest Inhabited Bridge In Europe, Paricia Pierce.

Currently Reading: The Port of New York, Carl W Condit.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

It shocks me that it's gone. It's one of the handful of places in metro Lansing that I think of as truly unique local institutions. I always used to bring out-of-towners there to show them local color, even though the food was a bit variable and the service could be awful.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I know. I'm stunned; it's exactly the sort of place that has to be around because it makes so much sense as the place to bring out-of-towners to.