My last visit to The Heidelberg ended a few minutes after a man threw himself onto a row of tables. He lay supine for a moment and rolled off, taking a few hundred dollars of glassware with him.

The kicks and punches that followed were the second brawl I saw that night, and the puddle of red liquid in the mess of broken glass was blood, not wine, as I learned from a girl who’d been sitting at one of the overturned tables — her shirt boasted a bloody handprint.

On normal nights, The Heidelberg’s whitewashed basement is full of young professionals and graduate students who go there for unfiltered German ale served in liter-sized boots. Meredith Blank, a University graduate student, explained that the restaurant is a “fun, surprising” mess. The place graduate students go to when they want to get wasted.

Years ago, Ann Arbor native Bob Seger wrote a song about Ann Arbor’s Main Street, aptly titled “Mainstreet.” Listening to that song, you’ll quickly realize that Main Street used to be quite seedy in the late 70s. You can still find traces of that era in places like the bleach-scented basement at The Heidelberg, which my friend compared to the hallway leading to a motel pool and the dingy Embassy Hotel on Fourth Street.

In the 70s, a plate of spaetzle at The Heidelberg was the late-night snack for hungry undergrads. These days, the cheap burritos and beer available on every block of South University Avenue have taken its place, and Main Street serves a different crowd.

If you walk down Main Street on a Friday or Saturday night, you’ll find expensive restaurants, bars, unusual shops and interesting people, most of whom won’t be students. At the corner of East Liberty Street and Main, you may find Ann Arbor local Tom Bartlett on his gleaming red, seven-person bicycle. Ride it.

On the new Main Street, the food is sophisticated and the beer, artisanal, and the décor seems picked from every variety of upscale. By midnight, when most of the restaurants have closed, the crowd at Conor O’Neill’s Traditional Irish Pub & Restaurant is still feasting, and people are dancing at Rush Street, sipping on martinis at the Black Pearl and relaxing at the Ravens Club. Outside, it’s quiet. Whereas on South University Avenue, groups of students in liquor blankets and not much else strut quickly to the next party.

Everyone’s got somewhere else to be. But on Main, they’re content to stay where they are.

Most people I talked to said Main was quieter and a nice place to talk while having a drink. LSA junior Carmine Riviera, who was dining at the Black Pearl last week, said she finds the drinking environment to be classier, “and you don’t have to hang out with the unwashed masses.”

That last line was not a slur on the South University crowd so much as an acknowledgment that Main Street attracts a different clientele. Riviera’s friend Gautam Muthusamy, an LSA junior, said he loves the Black Pearl because "a lot of pseudo-intellectuals hang out here, like us, and the martinis are good.”

Maybe the martinis are good because they’re expensive. The going rate on Main Street for a cocktail — judging by the prices at Rush Street, the Black Pearl and the Ravens Club — is about $9. A pitcher of beer at the Jolly Pumpkin costs at least $18, even on nights when Good Time Charley’s sells them for $3 and the Blue Tractor, just a block away on East Washington Street, has them for $7.

Though students didn’t mention prices often, it’s clear that as a whole, they’re very price-sensitive.

Melanie, a waitress at the Black Pearl, told me that she sees far more students during happy hour, when the price of a martini drops by half.