For a long time, an evening in Depot Town meant picking one thing: dinner at one of the handful of restaurants that stay open past eight, or nothing. This September, for the first time, it means picking two things within an easy walk of each other, and neither one requires a drive.
The shift comes from two buildings finishing renovations on almost the same timeline. One is a Civil War-era hotel that spent five years and ten million dollars getting rebuilt from the inside out. The other is a 148-year-old freight depot that has quietly become a stop on a university performing arts series with acts that would otherwise play Hill Auditorium or the Power Center. Neither project set out to create a walkable evening. They just happened to land a few minutes apart from each other, in the same fall, and that's the part worth understanding if you already live here and haven't connected the two yet.
The Building That Spent Five Years Empty
The Thompson Block at 400 N. River St. has been a fixture in Depot Town's skyline since 1861, when it opened as a hotel and storefront and then almost immediately became a barracks for Civil War enlistees, including soldiers of the First Michigan Colored Volunteer Infantry. The Thompson family ran businesses out of it until 1950. After that it sat, then it burned in a 2009 arson fire that gutted everything but the exterior wall and two interior walls, then a construction worker died on the site in 2015, three years before the property changed hands again.
Ann Arbor investors Jon Carlson and Greg Lobdell bought the building in 2018 at the invitation of city officials, and it took another five years and a reported ten million dollars in renovation before anything reopened. What came out the other side is Thompson & Co., a Southern-cuisine restaurant from Carlson and Lobdell's Mission Restaurant Group, the same company behind Blue Tractor, Grizzly Peak, Jolly Pumpkin, and Avalon in Ann Arbor. Executive chef Keith Martin built the menu around his family's Louisiana roots, starting with shrimp and grits, Nashville hot chicken, and a fried green tomato BLT, with plans to work in dishes like oxtail as the kitchen settles in. The restaurant serves dinner all week with lunch added on weekends, in an 11,000-square-foot space with both indoor dining and a covered patio with its own outdoor lounge and fire pit.
The other ground-floor tenant is Mash, a whiskey and bourbon bar that opened in the building's second half. It leans into the room's own bones: a full-service bar where old train rails serve as footrests, and a wall sculpture and set of tables built from a mature oak tree that had literally grown through the building's collapsed roof before construction crews took it down. Local woodworker Adrienne Nickles salvaged that wood rather than letting it go to a dumpster, which is the kind of detail that only shows up if someone in this neighborhood happened to be paying attention when it happened. Mash runs live entertainment several nights a week, giving Depot Town something it didn't really have before: a second late option in the same building as dinner, so you don't have to choose between a proper meal and a longer night out.
The Freighthouse Picked Up Right Next Door
A few minutes' walk up River Street, past Frog Island Park, sits the Ypsilanti Freighthouse, built in 1878 and listed on the National Register of Historic Sites. It spent most of the 20th century as exactly what it sounds like, a distribution point for rail-bound goods, and the city took over its management in 2020, making it available again for community and private events.
What makes the Freighthouse relevant to an evening plan right now is the University Musical Society's residency there, which runs each September and returns again in the spring. UMS books the kind of talent that usually plays their main venues in Ann Arbor, but at the Freighthouse almost everything runs pay-what-you-wish, and Ypsilanti residents get first access to tickets before the general public. This year's priority window for residents opened August 4, with general sales following on August 11, so by the time you're reading this, everything is open to anyone who wants in.
The September 2026 lineup includes:
- A night of square dancing with the Detroit Square Dance Society, the residency's opening event, with dances taught and rehearsed live on the floor before the group performs them.
- Open Mic Night on September 16 at 7:30 p.m., hosted by singer-songwriter Annie Bacon, open to singers, poets, comedians, and rappers from the neighborhood, free to attend and free to perform.
- A recreation of John Coltrane's Africa/Brass album led by jazz musicians Marcus Elliott and Kris Johnson, timed deliberately to land during the year of Coltrane's 100th birthday.
- The residency's closing show on September 27 at 6:30 p.m., featuring My Brightest Diamond, the project of classically trained vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Shara Nova, as a pay-what-you-wish event starting at $5.
That Coltrane detail is worth sitting with for a second. Coltrane was born in September 1926, which makes this fall the actual centennial of his birth, not just a convenient programming month. UMS's own staff have said this is the show they're most excited about on the whole schedule, and it only exists because a working jazz musician approached the organization directly after playing an earlier Freighthouse date and asked if the idea was possible. That's a fairly specific origin story for a concert, and it's the kind of thing that doesn't happen at a venue that's just passing through a neighborhood on a tour schedule.
Why September Specifically Is The Window
The UMS residency is biannual, which means once the My Brightest Diamond show closes out on September 27, the next one doesn't arrive until spring. If you've been meaning to check out the Freighthouse and kept putting it off, this is the actual deadline, not a soft one. The building itself is also closed for scheduled maintenance in late August, so the residency's return in September marks the first real stretch the space has been fully open and programmed in weeks.
Thompson & Co. and Mash don't have that same seasonal cutoff. Both operate as ongoing businesses now, not pop-ups, which means the evening loop this piece is describing isn't a one-time event calendar item. It's simply what a Thursday or Friday night in Depot Town looks like this fall, available again next fall, and the fall after that.
The Short Walk Between Both
What ties these two buildings together isn't proximity alone, plenty of places sit a few blocks apart without anyone treating them as a pair. It's that they now serve different halves of the same evening. Thompson & Co. and Mash cover dinner and a drink in a building whose walls date to before the Civil War. The Freighthouse, a short walk past Frog Island Park, covers the rest of the night with programming that ranges from square dancing to a jazz tribute recorded a century after its subject was born, at a price point that starts at whatever you decide to pay.
Neither business set out to build this loop on purpose. Thompson & Co. spent five years just trying to get the doors open. UMS built its residency around resident access and pay-what-you-wish pricing, not around foot traffic to a restaurant down the street. But the timing landed the same fall, and for anyone who already calls Depot Town home, that's the actual news here: not that a restaurant opened, or that a concert series exists, but that this particular stretch of river street now holds an entire evening's worth of plans without requiring a car.
If you've lived in Ypsilanti long enough to remember what the Thompson Block looked like boarded up after the fire, this fall is worth walking through slowly. Neighborhoods change in fits and starts, and this is one of the rare stretches where you can watch two separate, unrelated projects land in the same season and turn a corner of town you already knew into somewhere slightly different to spend a Thursday night.
At JoAnn Barrett, we spend as much time paying attention to what's opening and changing in Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, Chelsea, Dexter, and Saline as we do watching the market itself, because the two are never really separate. If you're curious what a neighborhood like this means for your own next move, whether you're weighing a first home nearby or wondering what your current place is worth in a market that's still finding its footing, schedule a free consultation and we'll walk through it together.
