MichMinnies (Minnie’s House and Michigan): 307-315 North State Street

MichMinnies consists of Michigan House (blue) and Minnie’s House (purple). Michigan House was the first student cooperative in Ann Arbor and has been in operation since 1932. Minnie’s House is named for Minnie Wallace, the previous owner of the house at 307 North State Street. Her playful antagonism towards the occupants of the Michigan Socialist House next door inspired the ICC to name her former house in her honor after purchasing it in 1970.

Vail (Stefan T. Vail) House: 602 Lawrence Street

Stefan T. Vail Cooperative House was founded in 1960. The Vail house is an historical building constructed in 1848. Also known as the Mitchell-Gregory-Prettyman House, the house is constructed of adobe brick. Vail House was named for Stefan T. Vail (or Stephanos Valavanis), who was an ICC member and president in the mid-1950s. While at the University of Michigan, Vail helped to devise the financial structure of the ICC. After earning his doctorate in economics, Vail was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. In 1958, while camping near Mount Olympus in Greece, Vail was shot and killed by an army officer who mistook him for a deserter.

Linder (Benjamin Linder) House: 711 Catherine Street

Benjamin Linder Cooperative House was purchased in 1988. Ben Linder was an American engineer and a clown. In 1983 he moved to Nicaragua, where he rode his unicycle into villages dressed as a clown to administer critical vaccinations to Nicaraguans. While working on a small hydroelectric dam that he designed and built, Linder was murdered by the Contras, a loose confederation of rebel groups funded by the U. S. government. 

A Life Worth Living: Benjamin Linder, 1959-1987, by Alan Wald (Agenda, June 1987)

Ruths’ House: 321 North Thayer Street

Ruths’ House was organized in 1993 and purchased in 1994. Ruths’ House is named for two women. Ruth Buchanan was the house mother for the first cooperative house in Ann Arbor, the Socialist House (or Michigan Socialist House), which opened in 1932. She worked six and one-half days a week as a receptionist at the Exhibit Museum. During World War II, she wrote to U-M students, faculty, staff, and alumni serving in the war. She wrote 17,828 letters, 6952 birthday cards, and 7398 get-well-cards. She sent more than 57,000 copies of the Michigan Daily to servicemen and women. She requested that they call her Aunt Ruth.

Ruth Bluck, who lived in three of the cooperative houses (Rochdale, Owen, and Osterweil) was the first woman to become ICC President, serving from 1946-1947. Forty-two years later, Jennifer Skwiertz (Minnie’s House) was the second woman elected as president of the ICC, 1978-1979.

King (Coretta Scott King) House: 803 East Kingsley Street

Coretta Scott King Cooperative House was organized in 1983. The house was purchased by the ICC in 1953 as the first married student housing cooperative. The house was first named Couples House, then Roosevelt, and last, as Brandeis House. Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader. The wife of Martin Luther King Jr., she was a leader for the civil rights movement, a voice for peace, the founder of the King Center, and organizer of the Coalition of Conscience. The Coretta Scott King Cooperative House is no longer designated as family housing. It has six separate units, with less common space than other cooperative houses.

Nakamura (John Nakamura) House: 807 South State Street

Nakamura House, founded in 1948, was one of the first houses to be purchased by the ICC. John Nakamura was a member of the Inter-Cooperative Council at the University. Nakamura was drafted into the army in October 1941 and assigned to the Signal Corps. After President Roosevelt issued orders that Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the United States were to be classified as 4-C/aliens, he was honorably discharged from the army for “erroneous induction.” In February 1942, he registered for the draft and visited his Senator and Congressman to advocate for re-enrollment in the army. On April 15, 1945, in an assault on the German Gothic Line in Italy, he was killed in action during a barrage from German mortars and howitzers. Less than a month later, his unit broke through the Gothic Line with the German Army surrendering on May 2. He was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Debs (Eugene V. Debs) House: 909 East University Avenue

Debs House was acquired and established by the ICC in 1967. Previously, this house had been the site of two other Ann Arbor co-ops, Congress House and Lester House. Screenwriter and director Lawrence Kasdan lived at Debs Cooperative in the late 1960s. Eugene Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, and one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). One of the best-known socialists living in America at the time, Debs was prosecuted by the administration of Woodrow Wilson for his opposition to World War I. He ran for president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket four times. His last run, in 1920, was from his prison cell. He received 3.4% of the vote.

Johnson-Rivera (Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera) House: 900 Oakland Avenue

The Johnson-Rivera House began as the Muriel Lester Cooperative House, founded in 1940 as an all-women’s cooperative. In 2019, ICC members voted to change Lester House’s name to Rivera House after queer activist Silvia Rivera and rebrand the house as the ICC’s first QTPOC (Queer & Trans People of Color) house. These changes went into effect in 2021. Rivera is a designated safe space for the QTPOC but all interested students can apply. Muriel Lester was a social reformer, pacifist, and non-conformist. Sylvia Rivera was an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist and a noted community worker in New York. Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women. Marsha P. Johnson, whose birth name was Malcolm Michaels Jr., was an African-American gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen. She was an outspoken advocate for gay rights, was prominent in the Stonewall uprising of 1969, was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front, and was known as the mayor of Christopher Street.

Owen (Robert Owen) House: 1017 Oakland Avenue

Robert Owen Cooperative was purchased in 1947. Before the property was officially purchased, Owen House was located in a rented house on State Street and began operating in the 1940’s. In 1945, Owen House changed to a women’s house because of the scarcity of male students during World War II. It changed back into a men’s house a year later as soldiers returned from the war, and went co-ed in the 1960s. Owen House also housed the ICC office until it moved into the Student Activities Building in 1957. Robert Owen was a Welsh manufacturer turned social reformer and the founder of utopian socialism and the co-operative movement.

Baker (Ella Josephine Baker) House: 917 South Forest Avenue

Ella Baker Graduate Cooperative has had several names throughout its colorful history, included Mark VIII, Pickerell, Joint House, Tri-House, and the James R. Jones House. Baker originally operated as two separate houses; Mark VIII, a women’s co-op, purchased in 1961, and Pickerell, a men’s co-op, purchased in 1965. The two houses were connected via the addition of a large central room and functioned as a single co-op. After being remodeled in 2007, the co-op adopted its current name and shifted focus to attracting graduate students. Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a grass roots organizer. She was the director of branches (and the highest-ranking woman in the organization) of the NAACP. She was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and an inspiring force in the creation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

Luther (Luther Buchele) Houses: 1510 and 1520 Hill Street

Luther Buchele Cooperative House is made up of two houses on Hill Street, 1510 (photo at left) and 1520 Hill. The buildings were purchased by the Inter-Cooperative Council in 1986. Previously, the buildings were home to John Sinclair, the band MC5, and the White Panther Party. Located behind the two residential houses at 1522 Hill is the ICC’s Moses Coady-Paulo Frieire Cooperative Education Center, where many ICC events and house officer trainings are held. Luther Buchele was hired in 1951 as the executive secretary of the ICC, the first full-time staff member. At the time, he was living in Nakamuru House, one of five co-ops on campus. When he retired after 34 years in 1985, the ICC had grown to 18 houses with 600 students living in the houses. He is widely credited with professionalizing the ICC and ensuring its long-term viability.

Black Elk House: 902 Baldwin Avenue

Black Elk was acquired along with Luther in 1986, as part of a deal with the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, who used to live there. The house has a long tradition of vegetarian and vegan cuisine. Heħáka Sápa, commonly known as Black Elk, was a holy man of the Oglala Sioux. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told to John G. Neihardt, was a popular book at the time.

Gregory (Karl D. Gregory) House: 1617 Washtenaw Avenue

Karl D. Gregory Cooperative was originally built in 1909 for the Tau Gamma Nu fraternity and was purchased by the ICC in 1995. Gregory House is the only house in the organization that is expressly substance-free. No tobacco, alcohol, or illicit drugs are allowed on the property. Gregory was an African-American professor of Economics at Oakland University and an alumnus of Nakamura House. Before he joined the faculty of Oakland University he worked for the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) in Washington, D.C., and was the chair of the Congress of Racial Equality. Gregory donated $20,000 to the ICC, which served as a down payment to acquire a new coop. The house was named in his honor.

Truth (Sojourner Truth) House: 1507 Washtenaw Avenue

Truth House was purchased by the ICC from the Phi Sigma Sigma Sorority in 1970. Originally it was named Bruce House, after comedian Lenny Bruce. It was renamed Truth House in honor of Sojourner Truth. It is the largest cooperative on Central Campus. Truth House has many international students and a large proportion of graduate students. Sojourner Truth was a formerly enslaved woman, who became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the nineteenth-century. Born Isabella Baumfree, in 1843, she said that the Spirit called on her to preach the truth, renaming herself ‘Sojourner Truth’.  In 1851, at a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, she delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. She was involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau and lobbied against segregation.

Osterweil (Harold Osterweil) house: 338 East Jefferson Street

Harold Osterweil Cooperative House was the third house bought by the ICC. The first residents were men during the summer of 1946, but in the fall of 1946, Osterweil House became a women’s house, and, in 1970, became co-ed. Osterweil House is the smallest in the ICC, with four single rooms and four double rooms, and the nearest to campus. Osterweil lived in one of the cooperative houses and was the chairman of the personnel committee of the Inter-Cooperative Council. Osterweil was admired for his brilliant scholarship and his high sense of responsibility as a citizen. He won a scholarship to Harvard Law School and was awarded the Sears Prize for being first in his class. He enlisted in the United States Army and was a lieutenant during World II. He was sent overseas in March 1944, and killed in action at Normandy, France, while serving with the 9th Infantry Division, on July 31, 1944. The Osterweil Prize in Economics at the University of Michigan is given to a senior with the most outstanding academic record and the greatest social awareness.

Escher (MC Escher) House: 1500 to 1520 Gilbert Court

Escher House is the only building in Ann Arbor built specifically for cooperative housing. When the University of Michigan was developing the North Campus in the 1950s, the ICC persuaded the university to set aside three acres on a hilltop off Broadway for a “cooperative village”. When the federal government made low-interest loans available in 1958, the ICC started planning. Initially, the loan would have required the University of Michigan to co-sign and it was reluctant to do so. In 1964, Congress removed the co-sign requirement and the ICC procured a $1.24 million, 50-year low-interest loan from HUD in 1968. The opening was scheduled for the fall of 1970. The building was not quite ready and the future residents slept on the floor of the fraternity house next to the building site. Escher House is a single building comprised of nine suites: Valhalla, Bertrand, Karma, Falstaff, Trantor-Mir, Walden III, John Sinclair, Bag End, and Zapata. The doors for each suite have paintings by Joy Blain that illustrate the themes of the suites' names. These nine suites initially operated as nine distinct co-ops but were consolidated due to perceived inefficiencies in administration.

MC Escher was a Dutch draftsman, book illustrator, tapestry designer, muralist, and printmaker. Inspired by the tile work of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, Escher developed “the regular division of the plane” and often created complex architectural mazes with perspectival games and impossible spaces.