Smoke Shop 'Curls' Away - Land's Landmark Gone

Smoke Shop ‘Curls’ Away

Land’s Landmark Gone

As with the times, people and places are also changing in Ann Arbor. What used to be the maize and blue Campus Smoke Shop is now a leveled empty lot. What was once a place for picking up the newspaper, at the corner of Maynard and E. Liberty will someday soon become a high-rise office building.

Jacob Eskin, who operated the Campus Smoke Shop, realized the change in the times, too, and has moved to Adrian to manage a branch of the Maison Edwards Specialty Shop in the community. He left Ann Arbor in March, after managing the Campus Smoke Shop for eight years, a shop which had been in Eskins’ family for 20 years.

Although leaving Ann Arbor, Eskin was excited about the challenge of a new shop and he admits, “I’ll begin at 70, instead of 40.”

Though plans have not been made final for a new office building at Maynard and E. Liberty, such a construction is now being discussed. There is no corner store for buying newspapers and chatting about the weather and how the New York Giants have done, one of Eskin’s favorite teams.

Eskin managed to stay in the smoke shop business most of his life. Though his new store in Adrian is actually a specialty shop, he’s happy building up the business again, meeting new customers and admitting that it’s all a part of “going along with the times.”

During World War I Eskin worked in Dunhill and Co. tobacco shop on Fifth Ave. in New York City. “Now that was a tobacco shop...they are tobacconists in the true sense of the word!”

Eskin always did like working for himself, he said, and that’s what saddened him about the end of the Campus Smoke Shop that had long been part of the small-town Ann Arbor of years past.

The old Campus Smoke Shop was a landmark for the small, college town, of Ann Arbor, but both are gone today, and the bustling city and office buildings are a part of Ann Arbor today.

Campus Smoke Shop Has Disappeared