Tower Inn Closed on Cross Street After Decades Near Eastern Michigan
The dive bar at 701 W Cross Street, across from EMU's campus, closed when its owners converted it into a Hamburger Mary's in January 2022.
Tower Inn closed in January 2022. The dive bar at 701 West Cross Street in Ypsilanti, across from Eastern Michigan University's campus, closed when its owners, Rois and Nathalie Savvides, converted the space into a Hamburger Mary's franchise location, according to FOX 2 Detroit's coverage of the opening. The new restaurant kept roughly a fifth of its menu as Tower Inn holdovers, a concession to regulars who had been ordering the same burgers and pizza for decades.
I should be specific about what Tower Inn was, because "dive bar" is both accurate and incomplete. It was a dive bar in the structural sense: dim lighting, sticky tables, a jukebox that leaned classic rock, TVs tuned to whatever Eastern Michigan was playing. The food was bar food. Burgers, fries, the kind of pizza you ordered because you were already there and hungry, not because it was good pizza. None of this is a criticism. Tower Inn knew exactly what it was.
What made it matter was time. Tower Inn sat at the corner of Cross Street and College Place long enough that generations of Eastern Michigan students inherited it from the class before them. You went as a sophomore because a senior took you there, and years later you took some sophomore there yourself. That transmission is how a bar becomes an institution, and Tower Inn was an institution in the way that only cheap, unpretentious, open-every-night places can be.
Tower Inn's second life as Hamburger Mary's did not last. The new restaurant closed suddenly that October, according to a later FOX 2 Detroit report. By early 2023, Basil Babe, a mother-daughter Thai kitchen, had moved into the same address, and it has run there since.
The building at 701 West Cross Street has now hosted three restaurants in about as many years: a decades-old dive bar, a short-lived themed chain that traded on the dive bar's name, and an independent Thai kitchen that outlasted both of its predecessors' combined run in the space. Cross Street across from EMU keeps turning over. What's changed is which kind of restaurant is winning that turnover.
Tower Inn was at 701 W Cross St, Ypsilanti, across from Eastern Michigan University's campus.