Tower Inn Closes on West Huron After Decades

Tower Inn closed in December. The bar at 701 West Huron Street in Ann Arbor is done, and with it goes one of the last places near campus where a pitcher of beer cost what a pitcher of beer used to cost.

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 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. That clarity of purpose is rarer than people think.

What made it matter was time. Tower Inn had been on West Huron long enough that your parents might have drunk there. Certainly your older siblings. The place accumulated decades of University of Michigan students passing through, and each class inherited it from the last. You went to Tower Inn as a sophomore because a senior took you there, and four 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.

West Huron is not the campus corridor that gets the most attention. South University and State Street carry the foot traffic and the name recognition. But the blocks around Huron and Ashley had their own ecosystem — Tower Inn, the bars and restaurants that clustered nearby, the apartments full of students who treated the neighborhood as home base. Losing Tower Inn thins that ecosystem out.

Ann Arbor has now lost Red Hawk, Blue Leprechaun, and Tower Inn in the span of seven months. Three campus-area institutions, all gone. Red Hawk lasted 33 years. Blue Leprechaun lasted 17. Tower Inn outlasted both. Each one served a slightly different crowd, but they shared a common function: they were affordable, they were consistent, and they were where people went without thinking about it. The kind of place that exists in the background of your college years until it doesn't, and then you realize it was the background that made the picture.

What replaces a place like Tower Inn? In the current market, probably something more expensive. That has been the pattern. The cheap spots close, the leases turn over, and the new tenant builds a concept aimed at a higher check average because the rent demands it. I don't know what's planned for 701 West Huron. But I know what was there, and I know that Ann Arbor has one fewer place where you can sit with a cheap pitcher and not be performing anything.

Tower Inn was at 701 W Huron St, Ann Arbor.