Ann Arbor has the Museum on Main Street (at left), but that's run by the county-wide Washtenaw Historical Society. And whereas they put on periodical exhibits, and have a cool collection of artifacts in the basement, it's not a city museum.
Ann Arbor also has the Kempf House, another exemplary volunteer-run project that is the nicely-done recreation of one historical home. Also not a city museum.Ann Arbor also has the fantastic wealth of the Bentley Library, which is sort of a combination of city and U-M historical archives. It is a wonderful place, open to all. But it's not really a city archives per se. Close, though. The AADL is also archiving many beautiful old historical materials, and is fast on its way to becoming an *online* city archive--one thing Ypsilanti could improve on and learn from.
But there's no one place where you can go and tour a whole houseful of amazing preserved artifacts from throughout the long life of a city 4 times Ypsilanti's size. Or see historical info-displays, timelines, maybe some audio recordings--and so on.
This baffles Dusty D. I'm sure that with all of the extremely talented historical folks in AA (Wystan Stevens and Grace Shackman leap to mind, but there are many others I've met) the city could find enough volunteers to keep such a resource going, and tap the talents of such people in creating it. So...consider me befuzzled. A mystery.
