Annam in Dearborn Shuts Down After Nine Years
Friday, July 17th, 2009If you haven’t had a chance to read Dearborn resident Dan Howes’ column in The Detroit News about the closing of Annam, one of Metro Detroit’s top-notch Vietnamese restaurants, it’s worth a read. Dan, a former colleague of mine during my years as a reporter at The News, writes that the closing of Annam is “one more casualty in a city accumulating empty storefronts like boys collect baseball cards.”
A note posted on the door of Annam tells it all. Dearborn resident and owner Phuong Nguyen tells Deepsaidwhat that if the economy improves she might one day reopen in another location. Making rent became much too difficult with her decline in business, she told us.
Dan hits on many of the topics we have heard from other businesses in town about fewer Ford workers at lunch, owners haggling with their landlords and paid parking.
” . . . the city’s on-again, off-again, can’t-make-a-decision dithering on paid parking and this summer’s construction on pock-marked Michigan Avenue and it’s a wonder all operating in the business district from Brady to Military aren’t out of business,” he writes.
Annam owner Phuong Nguyen tells Dan that “Dearborn is dead. It’s sad. Dead is when you drive and not every corner is fully leased. This is not normal for a downtown.”
No, it isn’t “normal for a downtown” but these aren’t normal times either and every city in America is struggling. It’s just in a short section of road in a city like ours that it’s a whole lot easier to count the vacant buildings. Nguyen’s words about Dearborn are more frustration than fact.
My neighbor sent me an e-mail with Dan’s article attached early this morning with just two words: “Oh, no!”, she wrote. Indeed. But Dearborn will survive this latest casualty. From where we sit, it is far too early to be writing the obituary for West Dearborn.
For Dan’s full article, please click HERE.