Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity (Trotter House), 1924

1443 Washtenaw Avenue

Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity (Trotter House), 1924
Creator: Rousseau, Albert J.

"The Phi Kappa Sigma house was lavishly built at a cost of $125,000 in 1924," wrote noted writer and University of Michigan alumnus Edmund G. Love in a 1988 article in the Ann Arbor Observer on what he called his "depression education." Love also wrote: "By 1932, its members were so financially pressured that I was given a job in the house only after I recruited half a dozen new members." Love was the son of a Flint lumberman whose finances during the Depression forced his son to drop out of college and work at menial jobs. Love was determined to finish college, however, and in 1932 he returned to Ann Arbor and to his former fraternity. "No matter how broke I was, however, I spent the fall in a very posh atmosphere. The Phi Kappa Sigma house... sat on a huge plot of land... on Michigan's fraternity row, and had sweeping lawns, front and rear, with a stand of great trees surrounding it."

This fraternity house, purportedly designed by noted local architect Albert J. Rousseau, is in a style reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Chicago School with its wide sweeping porch and low sloping roof. Rousseau also designed a number of other buildings in Ann Arbor including St. Mary's Student Chapel, the facade for Lawyers Title, his own home at 2001 Vinewood. The fraternity was and is extremely elegant in its simplicity of design and materials. The site today could still be described in Love's words of 1932.

In the 1970s following the Black Action Movement on campus, the University of Michigan purchased the house for a center where African-American student groups could hold meetings and cultural events. The house was renamed Trotter House after journalist and African-American activist William Monroe Trotter. Born in 1872, Trotter graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University after growing up in the white suburbs of Boston, and was the first African-American to receive a Phi Beta Kappa key at Harvard. After earning a master's degree at Harvard, Trotter dedicated his life to battling oppression and to educating other African-Americans on important issues of the day.