Reprinted: History of the Arbor Light building

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor

This story originally ran in the Glen Arbor Sun on June 28, 2001. We’ve posted it again to celebrate the life of Elsie (Petrosky) Warnes, who passed away on December 17, at age 88.

Years ago, the booming music and jovial laughter wafting through Glen Arbor on warm Saturday nights didn’t necessarily lead you to Art’s Bar for a cold beer, but rather, across Lake Street to what is now the Arbor Light building, where the Warnes family held weekly town dances above a general store and ice cream parlor.

As Gil Warnes Jr. remembers, the business run by his father Gilbert, Sr. through the 1920s and ’30s was a virtual community center, visited by not only the Glen Arbor town folk but also folks from surrounding villages and even the Manitou Islands. With horse and buggies, on wooden bicycles, or in the new fad of the time — the automobile — they would frequent the general store to satisfy practical needs: filling up on gasoline or purchasing 16×16-foot ice blocks which were dragged off Lake Michigan in the winter and stored in salt to maintain a low temperature, all before the revolutionizing refrigerator came to Glen Arbor.

Or patrons would satisfy their vices near the (114)-year-old building, and that didn’t always mean stopping for ice cream. During Prohibition, according to Gil, Jr., thirsty men would hide their potent home brew or moonshine inside a hollow oak tree across the street where the Glen Arbor fire hall now sits, while they attended dances. Periodically, the daring men would descend back onto the street and swill to their hearts’ content … if local kids hadn’t already stolen the bottles from a different hole in the tree!

Accessible through a ticket counter on the fourth step of the stairway that still exists on the north side of the Arbor Light building, the dances themselves provided some of the fondest memories for Gil, Jr. and his wife, Elsie, also a local girl, whom he met and kissed for the first time when they starred opposite each other in a play at Maple City-Glen Arbor School. In the play “was the first time we were married,” said Gil, Jr.

Elsie remembers her parents rocking her to sleep and laying her behind the piano as they took part in lively square dances during the happy-go-lucky “roaring 20s” for Glen Arbor.

Even during the week times were jovial. An avid baseball fan, Gilbert, Sr. sat in his store every day smoking cigarettes and listening to the Tigers game on the radio, and relayed the news all over town whenever Hall of Famer Charlie Gehringer cleared the bases with another double up the gap. Where the Cottage Book Shop sits now was a miniature baseball field, and there Gilbert showed many a child how to catch a baseball the correct way, holding one’s mitt up to avoid being hurt.

But fortunes changed for the Arbor Light building in the late ’30s, strangely mirroring the storm clouds building around the world. Gilbert died in 1939, leaving his 17-year-old son Gil, Jr. and his wife Pearl to fend for the store. The younger Gil attests that he weighed only 109 pounds at the time, yet inherited the responsibility of lifting the huge ice blocks, which were imperative products for the town’s well being in the summer.

The two men did not bear the brunt of the work for long, however, as Gil joined the Air Force in 1941 and served in Europe until the war’s conclusion. He would build and operate what is now Bear Paw on M-22 after returning in 1945. Pearl gave up the business and moved to Detroit around 1942, and what once was the town’s unofficial community center remained closed to the public until Bob and Elna Garthe, teachers at Glen Lake Schools, leased it from John Eichstadt and opened an arts-and-crafts shop. To bring back locals in droves, the Garthes showcased hand-dipping candle exhibitions every Wednesday in the former ice cream parlor until, said Bob, candle dipping just became too labor-intensive.

Woody Stebbens purchased the building in 1985 and sold it a year later to Pat and Karen Watson, who, ever since, have run the gift shop and flower outlet, which the younger generation of locals identifies with the Arbor Light.

Other faces have come and gone: Barb Siepker and her Cottage Book Shop took the place of ice cream and candle shows from 1995-99 before giving way to Ed Bosse and his fine wines. The Glen Lake Artists now operate out of the back wing and co-exist nicely with the Watsons’ gift shop.

Despite all the traffic over the years, the hardwood maple floors built by a Swedish immigrant named Ehle in 1892 are as strong as their creator’s Viking legacy, and though wine tasters and gift samplers occasionally hear mysterious creaks coming from the floorboards above, no one has danced in this building in a long, long time.