Marvelous Marvin's difficult move might spell trouble for its future

Despite all the coin-operated fortune tellers at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, unanswered questions remain.

We know that on Monday, the Farmington Hills City Council high-fived developers who plan to bulldoze the northern chunk of the Hunter's Square shopping center to make room for a Meijer grocery store. We know that the owner of the 32-year-old collection of vintage and modern arcade games and other curiosities has said he'll try to find a new place for them.

What no one knows is where, and what nobody can even imagine is how to make that happen — which means it might not.

"I don't know what the odds are" that the plug will be pulled, said general manager Andrew Rosenfeld. "But it's possible."

Moving stinks, but what if you had all this stuff?

He and owner Jeremy Yagoda and the children of all ages who've been packing the place since the possibility of closing arose in November would much prefer to keep the lights flashing, and the likes of Zelda the Mysterious, Louie the Love Shrink, Ask the Brain and the old Mandarin in the Happy Good Fortune machine dispensing their wisdom at 50 cents per pearl.

But Marvin's is 5,500 square feet of pinball machines and oddities and giant posters. It has more than 1,000 electrical outlets and a repurposed dry cleaning carousel 20 feet off the ground that carries tin replicas of World War II fighter planes and the Goodyear blimp in an erratic loop. Movie posters, a U.S. flag, a giant fish and a three-dimensional clown face cling to or hang from the ceiling.

How do you take it all out, let alone put it up someplace else?

That's the conundrum, and the reason Rosenfeld even lets himself consider the notion that when the lease expires in January, Marvin's will expire with it.

'It's still cool'

When you spend your workdays in a place jam-packed with smiles, though, you're inclined to be an optimist. Rosenfeld said he fended off the reality of the situation all the way to Monday night, when the council vote was unanimous.

He's still trying to keep positive thoughts zapping the negative ones as though they were aliens in "Space Invaders," which, of course, Marvin's owns in a collection that seems to touch on every era.

"We're going to move forward," he said. "A bigger place, a better place."

The 52,747 people who signed an online petition to save Marvin's would like that. The three generations of Kelly Pauley's family who drove in from St. Clair County on Friday afternoon would like it, too: 20 years after she first brought her kids, she said, "It's still cool."

Yes. That we know, without question.

No shortage of food

One thing Rosenfeld still isn't clear on is why Meijer wants to put a grocery store at 14 Mile and Orchard Lake Road.

There's a Whole Foods, he noted, directly across 14 Mile. A Busch's to the west and Johnny Pomodoro's to the east along the same road. A full-size Meijer 5 miles away in Southfield, and another one 5.7 miles away in Commerce Township. A couple of Kroger stores, closer yet.

Meijer did not grow from one store in Greenville in 1934 to 259 now by being foolhardy, so we will assume it has its reasons, even if it did not return calls from the Free Press to divulge them.

"In a perfect world, I'd like a rebuilt mall. This one is getting a little tired," Rosenfeld said.

One map the landlord showed Marvin's a while back even had the arcade's building spared, he said, but a sketch doesn't count as getting something in writing.

He's stuck with the imperfect world where Marshall's and Home Goods have migrated across to the east side of Orchard Lake, California Pizza Kitchen closed and Five Below will be moving to the south end of the center where a Gap gave up years ago.

With no animatronics or antique neon to move, it should be easy.

Reassurance from within

There was a point, Rosenfeld said, where the actual Marvelous Marvin could have sat down with the local family that owned the shopping center and hashed things out.

Marvin Yagoda was a second-generation pharmacy owner in Detroit who started his arcade-and-more with a couple of coin-op rides in a massive food court called Tally Hall that gave way to Hunter's Square.

He died of a heart attack at 78 in 2017, at which point his son, Jeremy, took over. Jeremy is the brother-in-law of Rosenfeld, who has been a manager as well as a human resources officer, accountant, repair guy, scheduler and inventory chief for 17 years.

Marvin was a charmer, Rosenfeld said, "who used to get mad at me because I tried to bring some sense to it all."

When crews of workers came in, he'd tell them a few jokes, give them free hot dogs and have them busting their tails and laughing while they did. He went way back with many of his customers and with his landlord, who sold out to a big company that sold out to a bigger one that can't exactly sit down for a Coke.

Across the past few months, Rosenfeld said, he has heard from building owners as far south as downtown Detroit and as far north as White Lake Township, suggesting their space.

The preference is something close to where Marvin's is now, and larger — maybe 10,000 square feet.

They've been getting by with a tiny area, six long tables and 20 seats, to accommodate birthday parties or simply sitting down for a mini-pizza between games.

If there's an upside to getting uprooted, that's it. The downside includes finding a building, an architect and a contractor, pulling permits and getting one-of-a-kind machines and decorations from one point to the other without catastrophic damage.

It's daunting, but there's encouragement from beneath Marvin's own roof.

Two shiny quarters bought a consultation with Ask the Brain, which features a wizened old man with a monocle and a lab coat encased in a tall wooden cabinet.

It was actually too crowded and loud to hear what he said, but he dispensed a fortune-telling card that put the soothe in soothsayer.

"This will be your lucky year," it said, "enter business without fear."

Fire up the moving vans.

Neal Rubin's college graduation present from his family was a pinball machine, which tells you something about his academic priorities. Reach him at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Marvin's Marvelous finding new location for arcade will be hard