Falling Rock Cafe in Munising, Alger County, United States | Cafe

Welcome to Falling Rock Cafe, Munising, United States.   The Falling Rock Cafe & Bookstore features exclusive blends from Great Lakes Coffee Company. We are serving bagels, soup, cinnamon rolls, cookies, and cheese cake. We do have hot chocolate and coffee and lattes.

We bought a vacation home on Powell Lake (near Munising, Michigan) in the summer of 2001. After enjoying the beautiful year-round surroundings and getting to know many, many wonderful people, we decided to "retire" from our careers at the University of Florida (Nancy was a professor in Nursing, Jeff was an administrator in Health and Aging) and make Munising our full-time home.  Our buildings were built in 1896, the year that the City of Munising was incorporated, and originally housed the Smith and Lapham Hardware Company. Originally, the middle storefront and the corner storefront (now the Munising Wood Products Company) were "sisters," but the middle and end storefronts became a pair decades ago.

Early in the demolition of the buildings we discovered that the original tin remained virtually complete and intact throughout the walls of the middle storefront. Tin sheets and cornices were also salvaged from the original ceiling, but it was not possible to restore the ceiling because all of the plumbing for the second floor had been installed between the original ceiling and the initial false ceiling. The use of tin ceilings developed in the mid-nineteenth century, when mass produced sheets of thin rolled tinplate became readily available in America, and reached the zenith of their popularity in the 1890s. As a result, many old buildings like ours boast original antique tin ceilings, cornices, wall panels and wainscots. We, at Falling Rock Cafe have uncovered all of the tin wall panels and wainscots and have restored the walls to their original beauty.