The Mothers and Fathers of Braun Court Say Goodbye to a Space That Belonged to All of Us
\aut\ Bar and Trillium Real Estate owners, community members, reflect on what made the space special — and why it’s time to move on
In many ways, recent news about the future of Ann Arbor’s storied Braun Court was expected. At some point in the not-so-distant future, the seven residential-turned-commercial buildings lining Braun’s Kerrytown courtyard will likely be knocked down and replaced by high-end condos. As Pride Source reported in June, real estate developer Wickfield Properties has submitted the redevelopment plan to the city for approval. Already, preliminary work is underway at the site.
The unique commercial space has long been in decline, but for decades it served as an informal outdoor community center, a hive of queer nightlife and a hub of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship. Standing in the quiet, shady courtyard today, one would be hard-pressed to conjure the sights, sounds or even the smells of a once-bustling space that evolved into a nexus for queer community in a city that has wrestled with queer acceptance, despite a long-held reputation as a progressive Midwestern haven.
“At one point, we were battling daily with a homophobic neighbor,” Martin Contreras, co-owner of ⧵aut⧵ Bar, which closed in 2020, told Pride Source recently. “Lots of people didn’t want us there.” Contreras and business (and life) partner Keith Orr persevered despite the pushback, of course, leading the charge on creating a place where every member of the LGBTQ+ community (“and I mean everybody,” Contreras emphasizes) could feel safe to exist just as they were. The couple served as self-appointed caretakers of the space for over 33 years, “not including the couple years of construction and getting the buildings ready,” Orr says.
There was ⧵aut⧵ Bar, which the couple established after closing Mexican restaurant La Casita, followed by Common Language Bookstore (also owned by Contreras and Orr), Washtenaw Rainbow Action Project (later renamed the Jim Toy Community Center) and, finally, Trillium Real Estate — wide-ranging endeavors sharing an important central tenant: openly LGBTQ+ ownership and an authentic commitment to the local queer community. Braun was truly a space “for us and by us,” as the saying goes — a place where allies were welcome, but LGBTQ+ voices were centered.
“It really became this important, vital space,” says Tim Retzloff, history and LGBTQIA+ studies professor at Michigan State University. “It became a gathering space — a place where, when the marriage decision came down, people just went there. When [Dana] Nessel announced her candidacy, that’s where she did it. After Jim Toy’s memorial, people naturally gathered there. It was a space unlike any other in Ann Arbor outside the university, and I think it’s going to be a serious loss.”
"Keith & Martin/Martin & Keith: Elegy for the ⧵aut⧵BAR," a short documentary produced by Ann Arbor District Library in April 2024.
Braun Court was where, seemingly, the entire greater Ann Arbor LGBTQ+ community gathered in 2012 when a Michigan judge overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, a decision in a case brought by April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, who had initially sued seeking to jointly adopt their five children. The case, led by out lesbian and future Attorney General Dana Nessel, was later a part of the Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges case, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. DeBoer and Rowse celebrated in Braun Court with a tearful crowd of well-wishers, and in 2017, Nessel announced her candidacy in the same spot.
Braun Court filled up in 2015 when the Obergefell decision came down, and again on its anniversary. The late advocate Jim Toy spoke at the event. "Sisters, brothers, President Obama has declared Stonewall a national monument," Toy said in his remarks. "If we're looking for a monument, look around us: Braun Court is our monument. Braun Court is our history. Braun Court is our community. Braun Court is where we work. Braun Court is where we come together to celebrate."
The community gathered in the space during hard times, too, including the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and following the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016. “It was the place where you gathered whether it was out of joy or out of sadness,” Orr recalls. “To this day, I think about Pulse Nightclub and I get a little teary for what happened there, but also for the sense of loss to the community. Our bars are supposed to be safe spots, and people were mass murdered in one of our safe spots, and so the community felt like it was an attack on communities across the nation. We gathered, and it was an amazing moment.”
Orr isn’t exactly sure which ingredients contributed to the recipe for success he found with Contreras, but he suspects one key element was safety. “There was a feeling of safety just walking into Braun Court,” he says. “I felt it the first time I walked into the space, and I remember being really surprised.” As the couple began renovating multiple Braun Court spaces, safety would remain a priority, even when it wasn’t convenient — or cheap.
“We needed to do this right,” Contreras recalled. “Our community deserved a nice space, something set apart from what we’d come to expect from gay bars in other places. I could never really convince some of our neighbors there that good outdoor lighting, for example, was important for safety, so we just took it upon ourselves to invest in it because it was needed, and we knew it was important and that people would benefit from it.”
Upgrading the lighting was a small endeavor versus the Herculean task it was to overhaul the residential buildings in Braun Court. Orr and Contreras added a commercial kitchen in a “postage stamp-sized residential kitchen,” tore out the entire second floor of ⧵aut⧵ Bar to upgrade the framework to make sure it could withstand the weight of hundreds of guests and added countless homey touches that introduced brightness and color to their own little corner of Kerrytown.
Orr describes a typical night at ⧵aut⧵ Bar as something akin to staging a play. “You don’t see the sets being moved into place — the props. It started in the morning on Fridays and, by the afternoon, we were restocking the bar, getting ice in the bins and the kitchen is where the servers are rolling silverware and prep is continuing, but now the line cooks have arrived and they’re starting to take things and heat them up for the steam table, getting specials prepared. Meanwhile, I’m in the office preparing the menu inserts for those specials,” he remembers.
After a slow open around 4 p.m., Orr remembers things would be buzzing by 5. “There’s a hum going on at that point because it’s all of the machinery behind the scenes, turning, one hopes, like clockwork. And yes, it’s like a play.”
“I used to tell our staff, at 4 o’clock, the curtain goes up. Everything has to be in place: the props and the costumes. Everything has to be lit. The music had to be planned for different hours during the evening. Different light settings to create a mood and an atmosphere, and people don’t think about all that when they walk into a restaurant, what had to go on there. Sometimes, we’d even call curtain time and we’d always plan for a busy night. I hated running out of menu items.”
To say Jim Leija’s fondest memory of Braun Court is one he’ll never forget is an understatement — it’s where he met his husband 21 years ago in the upstairs bar at ⧵aut⧵. “We met in a very old-fashioned way,” he recalls, “upstairs through a mutual friend at the bar. We’re about to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary.”
Leija, an Ann Arbor District Library board member and the Deputy Director of Public Experience and Learning at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), loves that the couple met before technology transformed dating. In the pre-dating app era, connecting with someone in person was much more common, and Braun Court was an ideal setting. “And so, yes, the idea of that space being gone, it’s really hard to wrap your head around,” he says. “There is a lot of sadness around the loss.”
Leija says his earliest memories of Braun Court coincided with his time as a University of Michigan undergraduate, where he was involved with activism. In 2002, he remembers, the infamously homophobic Rev. Fred Phelps and several Westboro Baptist Church members protested just outside Braun Court, hoisting “God Hates Fags” signs. Leija joined a group of counter-protesters focused on non-violence and de-escalation tactics.
“As things were getting really, really heated, I was trying to intervene peacefully. I was a music student at the time,” recalls Leija, who is a member of PRISM Chorus. “I just started to sing Christmas carols, and the rest of the group joined in. One of the protestors said to me, ‘You have a beautiful voice.’ I replied that it was a gift from God, and she said, ‘Too bad he wasted it on a fag.’ I looked at her and shook my head and went back to the ⧵aut⧵ Bar.”
Inside, Leija was met with a warm welcome and a sandwich his friend had waiting for him. “What a relief, to be surrounded in that space by warmth and safety. That’s the kind of thing we’re so sad to lose in that space.”
Still, Leija acknowledges that Ann Arbor is changing — and desperately needs new housing options. “We’re a very different city than we were even 20 years ago,” he says. “And I’m confident queer spaces will come back. Some are in the works and some, like queer Fridays at Necto, are still happening. Change happens, and I really believe that for everything, there is a season.”
In 2001, across the shady courtyard, where a homophobic neighbor held out on selling for far too many years, a couple named Sandi Smith and Linda Lombardini started a new company, Trillium Real Estate, and ushered in an even more inclusive vibe around the courtyard. Together with the other queer and queer-affirming business owners in Braun Court, the couple became fixtures in the space. “Sandi and Linda” and “Martin and Keith” didn’t even need last names within Ann Arbor’s LGBTQ+ community.
About that one-time resident — the homophobe. Orr remembers him as a “madman.” “He had a big construction fence up around the entire house, and he was extremely homophobic — I mean, we had to call the police on him on a few occasions,” he says. “I remember one time, during the La Casita days, he came flying through the patio with a machete in his hand, screaming.”
“Thank god Sandi and Linda bought the building from him,” Contreras adds. “Not only to get him out of there, but way above and beyond that. It was like, ‘All right, the courtyard’s even a little gayer now!’ And the eyesore was gone, too.”
In the early days, Smith and Lombardini worked out of the second floor of their building in Braun Court. Orr remembers running a phone line through the windows from one bedroom to the other and that the two women had shared early dates at La Casita — a true full-circle moment.
Smith holds fond memories of those early days and of Braun Court’s significance over the years, though she’s pragmatic about the way time tends to progress whether we are ready for it or not. “What we bought into was a vibrant community we were delighted to be a part of, and I think we all had a pretty darn good run here. But the community is gone. The buildings are in disrepair. It’s just kind of sad if you walk through it right now. It’s time to move on.”
Moving on for Smith and Lombardini includes a new location in Ann Arbor — perhaps along the Huron River. “We’re pretty excited about it,” says Smith, who adds that she’s confident they will find community in their new spot, too, where they will host events with a view of the water.
Trillium was the last business to sell, following the Jim Toy Community Center in 2015, Common Language Bookstore in 2018 and ⧵aut⧵ Bar in 2020. Smith says many people approach her with sad feelings about the loss of Braun Court. “It was a treasure to a lot of folks who lived and went to school here, and it was designed in this very cool way. Probably a family built it with their extended family members who chose to be connected by the front porches in this very intimate setting,” she says. “I think that intimacy with the gathering space in the center of those seven houses was appealing.”
From the beginning, though, Smith says it was challenging to transform the residences into viable commercial spaces. “They were designed as houses, and as I’m sure Martin and Keith will tell you, there was always a need to improvise to make those spaces work. But that small, intimate setting is what really gave this kind of magic setting and a sense of security.”
As a realtor, Smith knows the Ann Arbor homebuying market better than most, including the undeniable fact that it’s a tight market with few homes available to buy. “Yes, it’s high-end condos, but we didn’t sell out to the Big Bad Wolf,” she says. “The realtor part of me knows that we need housing of all kinds. We need low-income housing, affordable workforce housing, middle-income and family houses and places for young families to start off right. And yes, we need luxury homes, because if we don’t have them, then the top of the chain doesn’t move and we don’t get any of those kinds of housing going on.”
Ultimately, Smith says, people clearly want to be in Ann Arbor, and to accommodate them, new housing must be built. “We can’t make people drive in from far-off places all the time,” she says. “They want to live here, so let’s create that space. That’s what I’m taking forward — we’re part of a foundation of a future of Ann Arbor.”
“Braun Court was special, yes,” Smith says. “People just knew to go there — LGBTQ+ people, allies, friends, family, neighbors — and that’s the piece I can take forward and say, ‘We were a part of that, and we helped create that space, and that was really cool.’ And that’s also what you get to miss.”
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