Dotted around the city, they were the headquarters of seven self-reliant wards.

These days, Ann Arbor's five political wards are transitory entities. Wards are redrawn every ten years to insure that they represent as equal populations as possible, and boundaries are freely adjusted by the party in power to create the maximum number of winnable seats.

That wasn't the case before the current city charter was adopted in 1956. Ann Arbor's old ward boundaries lasted much longer--some for more than 100 years--and the wards formed cities-within-the-city that provided residents with an identity more significant than a mere voting address. By 1896 there were seven wards, each with its own school, its own constables and fire wardens, and even its own permanent headquarters: a city-owned polling place.

Four of those polling places were in buildings expressly built for the purpose: 310 S. Ashley, 926 Mary Street, 420 Miller, and 411 S. Forest (now 411 Washtenaw). Another, at 1006 Swift, was a remodeled house. The other two wards had permanent homes in larger buildings: the old City Hall and the Armory. All but the old City Hall still stand, but only the Mary Street structure will actually be used as a polling place in the April 3 election.

Ann Arbor's four original wards were established when the city was incorporated in 1851. They were divided east and west by Huron Street, and north and south by S. Main and N. Fourth. The First Ward consisted of the southeast quadrant--basically the downtown. The Second Ward, today the Old West Side, went southwest. Northwest was the Third Ward, the area between downtown and Mack School. Northeast was the area known today as "the Old Fourth Ward."

The remaining wards were added gradually over the next fifty years: the Fifth Ward in 1861, when Lower Town, the settlement across the Broadway bridge, decided to join the city, and the Sixth (1868) and Seventh (1896) in response to growth in the university area.

In the nineteenth century, a ward's entire population voted in one place, usually either a public building or a store. The move to acquire permanent ward polling places began in 1895, when City Council appointed a committee "to investigate the matter of a location for ward buildings in the First and Second Wards." The committee reported back that there were "certain desirable pieces of property that can be obtained at reasonable prices, which if they are not now secured may soon pass into other uses and out of the reach of the city entirely." Acting on the committee's recommendation, the council purchased two pieces of land: the southwest corner of Huron and Fifth Avenue in the First Ward and 310 S. Ashley in the Second.

The Second Ward polling place was the first built, in 1901, using bricks from a university building torn down the previous year. Next came the Seventh Ward building, completed in 1905 on Mary Street. The First Ward followed with its own polling place in 1908, but not in the freestanding building originally planned. By buying property adjacent to its first lot, City Council eked out enough land to build a complete City Hall. The First Ward polling place was relegated to the basement.

The Third Ward building was erected in 1911 on the northeast corner of Miller and Spring. The same year, Fourth Warders were given a room in the new Armory on Ann Street at Fifth Avenue, and the city remodeled an existing house on Swift Street for the Fifth Ward. Finally, in 1930, the Sixth Ward got its own polling place when the city built an attractive Tudor-style brick building at 411 S. Forest.

Although the ward buildings were set up primarily for voting, groups often requested permission to use them for social gatherings. Petitioners included the Third Ward Men's Club, the Boy Scouts, a Sunday school, and the Players Club. Several times, stores asked permission to use the polling places for temporary storage. In World War II, the Second Ward polling place on S. Ashley was used by the draft board and as a civil defense headquarters.

Paper ballots were used in city elections until 1941. That year, City Council, acting on the recommendation of a special committee, decided to purchase twenty-three nine-party, forty-column, manually operated voting machines. (Some of them are still in use.) A few months later, council appointed deputy treasurer Fred Looker as "custodian of voting machines." Mickie Crawford, deputy county clerk, remembers Looker telling her that in the early days of the new system, people were very distrustful of the machines and frequently asked for recounts on the suspicion that the machines had messed up.

In 1944, the man who eventually replaced Looker, Sam Schlecht, worked on his first election. Looker asked Schlecht, who worked in the Water Department, to help at the Miller Avenue polling place. "In those days, everyone voted," Schlecht says. He recalls that candidates' supporters brought in carloads of people to vote. Many voters were illiterate, and Schlecht spent the day showing them, at their request, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt's name was on the ballot.

Later, as custodian of the machines, Schlecht would start preparations several days before an election. He had to take wood, coal, or kerosene to each of the polling places to start up the potbellied stoves, not only for the comfort of the poll workers, but to warm up the machines enough to be used. He also brought in all the supplies needed, including paper, sharpened pencils, signs, ropes to show the voters how to line up, and the huge old poll books that listed every voter in the ward. The books were so heavy, Schlecht says, that it took two men to lift them.

The use of the ward polling buildings was phased out in the 1950s and 1960s as the city's population growth and the consequent division of wards into precincts created the need for more and larger voting places. Schlecht doesn't remember a specific decision, but one by one, except for Mary Street, the polling places stopped being used. Today, there are sixty-three voting precincts, the majority of them in schools.

The Second Ward building was the first to leave city hands, in 1959. Today it's owned by John and Mary Hathaway, who use it as a meeting place. The old City Hall was replaced by the City Center Building, but all the other ward polling places survive. The Third Ward building, expanded and remodeled, is now Knight's Market. The Fourth Ward polling room has been reclaimed by the Armory. The Fifth Ward polling place on Swift has reverted to a private home, and the Sixth Ward building on Washtenaw has also been converted into housing.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The polling place at 926 Mary (above) is the only one of seven built between 1901 and 1930 that's still used in elections. 1006 Swift (top left)--originally a private home--has reverted to residential use. The brick First Ward building at 310 S. Ashley is now owned by John and Mary Hathaway, who use it as a meeting place.

Once the object of neighbors' wrath, Lustron homes have emerged as winsome modernist antiques.

Lustron homes were one of the most innovative solutions to the post-World War II housing shortage. Nine of them can still be found in Ann Arbor, in close to their original condition despite dire predictions at the time of their construction (1948-1950) that they would soon be a pile of rust.

Except for the cement slab they rest on, Lustron homes are made entirely of steel. The outside walls consist of two-foot square, porcelain-finished steel panels in either yellow or tan. The roofs are made of interlocking steel tiles. The inside walls are also of steel, as are the doors, ceilings, and the built-in furniture. A clever room layout of halls, sliding doors, and large windows makes maximum use of the space, and the 1,025-square-foot, two-bedroom houses feel much roomier than they are. Jane Barnard, owner of the Lustron at 3060 Lakeview, says, "The use of space is perfect. There is nothing I would change."

Lustron homes were the brainchild of Carl Strandlund, an industrial engineer who worked for a Chicago company that manufactured porcelainized steel panels for gas station exteriors. Strandlund's great inspiration was to use essentially the same material for housing.

For start-up money, Strandlund got a $15.5 million loan from the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation, followed by several other loans. He used the money to take over a huge, twenty-three-acre factory in Columbus, Ohio. There he set up his sheet-metal presses, high-speed welding rigs, enamel sprayers, and drying ovens. His house kits, designed to be set up like giant Erector sets, began coming off the line in 1948. Each kit consisted of 3,300 individual parts and weighed 10 tons. The original price was $7,000.

Lustrons came to Ann Arbor through the efforts of visionary businessman Neil Staebler, who heard about them while working in Washington for the Federal Housing Administration in the years just after the war. He recalls, "I thought they were a swell idea. Lustron promised to be a durable material, which it has proved to be." When he returned to Ann Arbor to live, he applied for the local Lustron franchise.

In all, Staebler was able to arrange for nine Lustron homes to be built: at 605 Linda Vista; 3060 Lakewood; 1121,1125, and 1129 Bydding; 1711 Chandler; 800 Starwick; 1910 Longshore; and 1200 S. Seventh. All but one were put up by Clarence Kollewehr, a carpenter who went on to become the business manager of Local 512 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Kollewehr and his crew, which consisted of two other carpenters and two laborers, had some trouble erecting the first few Lustrons, but soon became so adept that they hardly had to refer to the building manual. If there were no snags, they could erect a Lustron home in less than a week.

Kollewehr has fond memories of the Lustrons, which he describes as "an engineering monument when you consider how they were built." The only problem he remembers is that the outside panels would sometimes get chipped while being pounded in. But the kit was so well designed that it even included enamel paint in the color of the model, so that the crew could do quick touch-ups at the end of the day.

The Lustrons' practical, progressive aura appealed especially to people at the U-M. But probably the best-known Lustron buyers were Ray and Olive Dolph, builders of the Dolph mansion in the Lakewood subdivision off Jackson Road. When they decided to move to a smaller house, leaving the mansion for their son, Charles, and his family, the Dolphs chose a Lustron, appreciating its nice house plan and new materials. Says Charles's ex-wife, Marge Reade, "We were liberal about those things."

Few people, it turned out, were as liberal as the Dolphs. "The city didn't care much for [Lustrons], or the neighbors either," recalls Clarence Kollewehr. "There were comments wherever we worked. The neighbors were not tickled." After selling nine Lustrons, Staebler decided to switch to more conventional prefabs, finding the opposition to Lustrons "a hornet's nest." Lustron was going out of business anyway. Although the houses were well designed, the company never became financially stable and went bankrupt in 1950.

During the Lustron bankruptcy hearings, it was revealed that Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, one of Carl Strandlund's staunchest supporters in his loan requests, had been paid $10,000 by Lustron to write a 36-page article explaining how veterans could get housing loans. Although a direct connection between payment for the article and McCarthy's support for the Lustron loans was never proved, many found it curious that McCarthy earned more per word than Winston Churchill, whose war memoirs then held the record.

In spite of the scandal and the warnings of early death by rust, ihe local Lustrons and others around the country have held up remarkably well. Ron Hin-terman, a former owner of the Lustron on Seventh, says, "It looks the same now as it ever did." Of the Lakewood Lustron, Marge Reade says, "It looks as good as it first did. It will be recorded by history as quite a little card."

Some Lustron owners have had to endure quite a bit of teasing. Rachel Massey, who recently moved from the Lustron on Chandler, says her friends dubbed it "the little Fleetwood." Richard Sears, who lives on Bydding, says his friends compare his home to a refrigerator, asking him if a light comes on when he opens the front door.

When Bob Preston moved into the Lustron on Linda Vista, his friends threw a housewarming party. Most of the gifts were magnets, plus a can opener that came with a note: "In case you forget your house key."

Owners find Lustron maintenance relatively easy once they get used to it. The outside is easily cleaned with a garden hose, while the inside walls respond nicely to soap and water. Rust is a problem only when the walls chip, and then it can be treated with a car-body product such as Rustoleum or Bondo. Over the years, owners have also taken highly divergent approaches to interior decorating. Massey had fun with Art Deco. Claire and Paul Tinkerhouse, the current owners of the Lustron on Linda Vista, have painted the walls with textured paint and decorated with antiques to downplay the shiny steel look. Jane Barnard keeps her decor clean and open so as not to let the lines dividing the steel panels make the house seem too fussy.

Jazz musician Ron Brooks, owner of one of the Bydding Lustrons, moved one of the walls to enlarge his living room and added dry wall. (Brooks was intrigued to hear of the Staebler connection, since his jazz club, the Bird of Paradise, is located in the garage that was part of Staebler and Sons car dealership, a business begun by Neil Staebler's father.) The only current owner not to sing the praises of his Lustron is artist Richard Sears. "It's not terribly efficient, hard to insulate," says Sears. "If I could afford it, I'd tear it down and donate it to the landfill." Sears has also made the most dramatic interior changes of any Lustron owner: he's removed all but the bathroom walls so he has room to stand back and view his paintings.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The innovative all-steel Lustron kit house made the cover of Architectural Forum in June 1947. When production started in 1948, the ten-ton, 3,300-piece prefab houses sold for just $7,000.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Lustrons' diverse room layout made the small homes feel surprisingly roomy. "The use of space is perfect," says owner Jane Barnard. Barnard's Lustron in the Lakewood subdivision was built as a retirement home by Ray and Olive Dolph; they moved into it from the nearby Dolph mansion.

In the nineteenth century, when industry was on a much smaller, more local scale, a good-sized county seat like Ann Arbor could be expected to have at least one carriage factory, probably more. Ann Arbor had several. The biggest was Walker and Company's Ann Arbor Carriage Works, whose legacy is the handsome red brick building on West Liberty now occupied by the Ann Arbor Art Association.

Walker and Company catered to the high-class end of the carriage trade. U-M regent and publisher Junius Beal would have nothing but a Walker carriage, and Ann Arbor Mayor Samuel Beakes, eager

to spread the fame of local products, succeeded in convincing Grover Cleveland's administration to purchase two vehicles from the Ann Arbor Carriage Works. The firm also made more plebeian products such as merchants' delivery wagons, simple fire wagons, and spring wagons for farmers taking produce into town. Light sleighs called cutters were made and sold for use in winter months on Ann Arbor's snow-packed streets. Most townspeople, of course, could afford neither the carriage, the cost and feeding of the requisite horse, nor the stable in which to house it. For occasional outings, they could rent a rig from the Walker Livery Company, which the Ann Arbor Carriage Works also supplied with vehicles.

Christian Walker founded the carriage factory in 1867--an opportune time, because Ann Arbor (like most Northern towns) experienced great growth in construction, industrial expansion, and general overall wealth in the years just after the Civil War. Within a few years the firm had outgrown its original wooden building on Washington Street, and in 1886 Walker erected the sizable, 7,200-square-foot structure now occupied by the Ann Arbor Art Association. A while later the manufacturing area was enlarged by adding an interconnected factory building fronting on Ashley.

Unlike many carriage manufacturers, Walker and Company made each carriage nearly from scratch, from the springs and axles welded in the smith's shop to form the chassis, to the wheels, shafts, and bodies made in the woodworking shop. Leather upholstery and oilcloth tops were put on in the trim shop. The oversize suspension springs the company used to make Walker carriages relatively easy to identify. Though the showroom had some assembled models on hand for immediate sale, most vehicles, no matter how modest, were custom-made according to the purchasers' particular specification in a process that usually lasted four to six weeks. Most of the time went into drying paint. The working environment at shops like this was a far cry from the automobile factories that supplanted them. Workers specialized in a particular craft--smithing, woodworking, painting, or upholstery. Far from being interchangeable elements in an assembly line, they advanced from apprentices to skilled craftsmen in careers whose masters commanded a natural respect and authority. In a small shop (Walker and Company seems to have had from twelve to eighteen employees), workers were much more likely to feel responsibility and pride for what they made.

The Ann Arbor Carriage Works prospered from the start. Christian Walker lived in an elegant brick Italianate house on the northwest corner of Liberty and Seventh. (It still stands, painted grey and without its porches.)

After Christian Walker's death in 1888, it seems that the firm retrenched somewhat. It was owned and managed by trim department head Michael Grossman, master blacksmith Christian Braun, and George Walker, Christian's brother and the head of the woodworking shop, who took over sales. They built a new but smaller building on West Liberty, now occupied by Rider's Hobby, joined it to the Ashley Street factory by a freight elevator, and moved the showroom there, selling the larger Liberty Street building to the Henne and Stanger Furniture Company, which stayed there until the 1950's. An old advertisement painted high on the building's west wall may still be seen: HENNE & STANGER. FURNITURE, CARPETS, DRAPERIES, ETC. UNDERTAKING. (Furniture stores often used to be undertakers as well because they stocked the coffins.)

The carriage company did its best to keep up with changes in transportation. When bikes became popular, Walker's became, according to its advertising, "the most extensive dealer in the city," selling Columbia bicycles. Later, Walker employees used their skills in repairing some of Ann Arbor's earliest automobiles. Walker and Company even produced a few cars for the local gentry, buying the chassis with motor and transmission and then making the bodies.

Carriages, not cars, were what the firm made best, and by 1921 it was clear that carriages had had their day. The three owners were ready to retire anyway, so they decided to close up shop.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Above) Employees of the Ann Arbor Carriage Works sometime between 1886 and 1888. Harry Koch, who loaned the photo, says that founder George Walker is fifth from the left (in black apron). Next to him, Koch says, are trim shop head Michael Grossman (in white apron) and woodworker George Walker (in black).

[Photo caption from original print edition]:(Right) On a windy day, assorted associates of the Ann Arbor Art Association adopted the pose of their predecessors nearly a hundred years before. From left to right, loft artists GraceAnn Warn and Ann Wood, volunteer Sabra Feldman, education director Pat Eriksen, volunteer Jane Hawkins, board member Dick Macias, director Marsha Chamberlain and her assistant Susan Monaghan, loft artists Char Bickle and Kay Yourist, assistant director Amy Cohn, loft artists Chris Roberts Antieu and Mary Gentry, exhibit gallery director Susan Froelich, and volunteer Linda Hyatt.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: 1893 photo of Liberty between Main and manufactured by Walker & Co.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Hamilton Park Road Wagon

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The Ann Arbor Art Association, founded in 1909, bought the Walker Building in 1976. The city had acquired it and the adjoining two buildings in the 1960's with the idea of tearing them down for parking. Growing sensitivity for historic preservation led to a turnabout in which the city legally protected the buildings as part of a historic district. After a three-year renovation, the Art Association now has a large first floor gallery and shop, classroom space on the second floor and basement, and loft space rented to working artists on the top floor.

Design for Living
Thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill and Mary Palmer raised their family in a work of art.

On a Saturday morning a little over a year ago, a group that included prominent local architect Larry Brink; Doug Kelbaugh, dean of the U-M’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; builder Bruce Niethammer; and George Colone, a heating specialist from Hutzel Plumbing & Heating, met to discuss a failing radiant heat system beneath the concrete floor of a fifty-year-old house. If it had been just any house, the solution would have been obvious: jackhammer the concrete and replace the pipes. But on hearing that suggestion, owner Mary Palmer recalls, “I nearly fainted. It wasn’t acceptable.” The reason so many people shared her concern was that the floor in question was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The group worked out a solution that would preserve the part of the radiant system that still worked, about a third of the total. Hutzel would install a new boiler and radiators to heat the rest of the house--but would hide all the new components behind couches, inside cabinets, and under beds.

“ ‘Change’ is not in the vocabulary up there,” says Bruce Niethammer, who’s worked on the house since 1974.

Larry Brink trained under Wright and has consulted on hundreds of Wright homes. “The Palmers maintained their house the best of all owners,” Brink says. “They took the best care of the house from day one.”

But while staying true to Wright and his principles, Mary and her husband, Bill, made the house their own, using it to express and enhance their interests in music, yoga, gardening, and art. “You take something, it becomes part of you, you become part of it,” explains the Palmers’ good friend Priscilla Neel, who is also an architect. “That’s what makes a building individual.”

It was quite a coup in 1950 to get the foremost architect of the century to design a house for a young couple in Ann Arbor. The Palmers had no “in” with Wright; they just asked him. But from meeting Mary Palmer fifty years later, it is clear why she would be drawn to Frank Lloyd Wright. A gracious lady with a hint of a southern accent (she grew up in North Carolina), her whole demeanor--her simple but elegant style of dress, her artistic sense, and her concern with doing things right--fit into a whole, like the perfectly integrated details of a Wright design.

Mary and Bill Palmer met as students at the U-M--Mary in music and Bill in economics. After graduation Bill was asked to stay and teach. In the early years of their marriage, the Palmers lived in an old farmhouse on Geddes, now the home of attorney Clan Crawford. The older women in the neighborhood befriended Mary. “They broke the rules about not inviting instructors to dinner parties,” she recalls. “These ladies knew gardens, literature--they were rich in what Ann Arbor had to offer.”

Elizabeth Inglis, who lived in the family estate on Highland (today the U-M’s Inglis House), was one of these remarkable women. One morning she phoned Mary to tell her that the road behind her house was being extended for building sites. Mary called Bill at work, and he came home at lunchtime. Mrs. Inglis, in gardening boots, showed them what she considered the best lot. “This is the most beautiful place in the city,” she told them. The young couple took her advice and bought both that lot and the one next to it--a total of one and a half acres of varied terrain.

Mary, a woman of wide intellectual interests, spent hours reading at the U-M’s architecture library while thinking about what kind of house to build on the site on Orchard Hills Drive. At the time she was very interested in antiques, so it might seem natural that she would have been drawn to a traditional style. But she was also very interested in Japan, one of Wright’s sources of inspiration. She had visited Japan, audited classes on Japanese art, and taken Japanese language classes.

Mary’s reading led her to Wright. The architect was then eighty-three years old but still active. Hoping to see one of his homes for herself, Mary telephoned Gregor and Elizabeth Affleck, who lived in a 1941 Wright house in Bloomfield Hills. The Afflecks responded by inviting the Palmers to dinner. Bill and Mary drove to Bloomfield Hills on a frigid February day. “We had an ‘experience,’ ” Mary recalls. “And they had as much of an experience showing it to us as we had. How it felt to be in one of Mr. Wright’s buildings opened up to me!”

On the way home Mary said to Bill, “Let’s see if we can get Mr. Wright.” Bill agreed it was worth a try. He thought that the project might appeal to Wright: Ann Arbor, despite the presence of the U-M architecture school, had no example of Wright’s work.

Mary wrote Wright a letter that concluded, “I hope you will design our house and we will not have to go to a lesser architect.” Her mother, who lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, had told her that Wright was going to be lecturing at North Carolina State, so Mary suggested in her letter that they could meet there. Wright agreed.

The Palmers attended the lecture and then gave Wright a topographic map of their property. “He opened it and looked at it,” Mary recalls. “Then he looked up, rolled it back up, and said, ‘I’ll design your house.’ It was that simple.” Not known for false modesty, Wright told them, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful for your children to grow up in one of my houses?”

Thinking back, Mary Palmer suspects Wright accepted the commission because “he saw a young couple who were really going to build--who wouldn’t back out. There was a big falloff of clients, many who went to him for designs never built.”

Some months later, the Palmers picked up the house plans at Taliesin, Wright’s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Wright delivered the plans and left the Palmers alone to review them. The most striking detail was that the design was made up of equilateral triangles instead of the rectangles of a traditional house.

“I must say when we looked at the triangular module it was a surprise,” Mary recalls, “because we didn’t ask for it. But I had some background, because I was familiar with the Anthony house in Benton Harbor.” As he had with the Anthony house, Wright had produced a floor plan without a single conventional ninety-degree angle--every angle is either 60 or 120 degrees.

Although familiar with architectural styles, the Palmers had never seen preliminary plans and were not quite sure how to interpret them. When Wright returned to the room after about fifteen minutes, he told them to take the plans home and think about it. They showed the plans to Mary’s family in North Carolina, who also found themselves at sea. After a month or two of pondering, they got back to Wright and told him the house was too small.

Mary expected some resistance, because “the plan looked so perfect as it was,” but Wright replied that he was just trying to keep costs down for their sake. “He enlarged the house with no trouble,” she recalls. Wright made the bedrooms several modules larger, added a mud room and pantry to free up space in the kitchen, and put a study for Bill at the back of the house.

The plans, now kept at the U-M’s Bentley Historical Library, detail not only the building materials but also the design and placement of the furniture (most of it built in) and even the color scheme--Wright’s signature “Cherokee red.” For the exterior, the architect specified red tidewater cypress, sand-molded brick, and a matching perforated concrete block. Part of the roof would be flat; the sloping portion would have red cedar shingles. Although Wright was not big on basements, he included a small utility basement under the kitchen. The rest of the house would be constructed on a concrete slab finished with a red glaze coat called “colorundrum.” (Maintaining the slab’s appearance was a major goal of the recent heating repair.)

The Palmers hired Erwin Niethammer, Bruce’s uncle, to build the house. “He was one of the best builders around,” recalls local architect David Osler. Niethammer was also well suited to the job because he was not easily intimidated--“He didn’t take nonsense from anyone,” according to Osler.

Mary Palmer recalls that Niethammer was “receptive to the unusual. He looked at the plans and said he’d never seen anything like it, but thought he could build the house.” He also told her they were the most “beautiful set of plans he’d ever worked with.”

Gathering the materials was probably the biggest challenge. The cypress had to be specially ordered, the blocks specially fired. Working with Fingerle Lumber and Niethammer, the Palmers found the best craftsmen in the area to make the built-in furniture.

Bruce Niethammer was only four when the house was being built, but he still has a vivid memory of a Sunday drive his family took to the site. “We saw the house up on the hill and piles of dirt and lumber,” Niethammer recalls.

“It was an event,” recalls Priscilla Neel, who visited the site regularly during construction. So did Bob Metcalf, a U-M architecture prof and future dean. “It was a unique experience for a town to have a Frank Lloyd Wright house,” Metcalf remembers. David Osler, too, was a frequent visitor. John Howe, the head draftsman at Taliesin, came by periodically to make sure things were going all right, but so far as these sidewalk superintendents could tell, Niethammer seemed to do fine on his own.

Of course the Palmers, living just a few blocks away, also viewed the progress of the house. “When it was being constructed, we all went out to see it over and over,” recalls the Palmers’ daughter, Mary Louise Dunn, then about ten. “We saw it was going to be marvelous.”

Mary Palmer says she left most of the decisions about the house to the architect. “Mr. Wright was not autocratic--just sure of himself,” she recalls. “He would say ‘I don’t think you’d like . . . ’--and he was always right.”

The Palmers moved into the house shortly before Christmas 1952. The large triangular living area at the center of the home was ideal both for family life and for entertaining. It has windows on two of its three sides, and a pyramidal ceiling formed by three triangular sections.

The room is still arranged exactly as it was in Wright’s plans half a century ago, with a grand piano as the focal point. People sitting on the built-in couch, a parallelogram, look toward the piano and onto the grounds beyond. Between the couch and piano on the right is a large brick fireplace. On the left side of the room are the Wright-designed dining table and chairs, and tucked behind them is the kitchen, separated from the living area by specially manufactured perforated blocks.

The ceiling in the sleeping wing is much lower, as is common in Wright houses. (The architect was a short man, and some have speculated that he would have made the rooms higher had he been taller.) A more pedestrian architect might have switched to a conventional design for this less visible area, but Wright continued his triangular pattern, even designing hexagonal built-in beds in the master bedroom and children’s rooms. (Mary Palmer used to have sheets specially made but now just folds them under.) The house is situated so that the bedrooms get morning sun.

The living room’s unexpected angles and peaked ceiling, the sun pouring in the large windows, the view of the landscaped backyard--all combine to create a breathtaking experience. After almost fifty years, Mary Palmer says, she is still continually amazed by the beauty of the house.

When the Palmers first moved in, their two children, Mary Louise and Adrian, were still young, and they tried to lead as normal a family life as possible. “We used the house,” says Mary Louise Dunn. Asked whether it was hard to live there, Dunn replies, “There was always a standard of how to treat the house--higher than most, imposed by the house. There was no basement rec room, no place that wasn’t absolutely beautiful.” But, she adds, “the payoff, if we couldn’t do anything like everyone else, was that it was so special.” The semirural location (it was outside the city limits until 1999) also allowed activities that couldn’t be done in a more urban setting, such as taking Sassafras, the neighbors’ donkey, down to Nichols Arboretum to ride. When Dunn was a teenager, she had parties like other kids, rolling up the rugs and dancing to rock ’n’ roll.

After living in the house a few years, the Palmers put in a terrace off the living room. Wright had said that the terrace, which was part of his original plan, would be a good place to have weddings, and in time both Mary Louise and Adrian would be married there.

In 1964, after a visit to Japan, the Palmers built a Japanese garden house, which they used as a guest house and meditation area. By then Wright was dead, but Taliesin’s John Howe designed it in the same style as the house, complete with a three-section pyramidal ceiling. The last major change was a garden wall that Brink executed, using Wright’s design with a few necessary modifications.

Elizabeth Inglis suggested that the Palmers wait a year before starting to landscape, so that they could see what they had. Since the site was once an orchard, there were some beautiful trees on the lot, including apple trees that went back several decades. When they were ready to begin, Inglis sent her own gardener, Walter Stampfli, over with flats of pachysandra and euonymus. The garden turned into a lifetime passion for both Palmers. “It was a real collaboration between Mother and Father,” recalls Dunn. “Mother was the artistic one. She gave unstinting consideration to the whole garden, considering it from every angle.” Of her father she says, “He was a great gardener, actually planting, appreciating plants, doing cuttings, watering, fertilizing.” The garden, which even today is being further refined, follows the site’s natural contours and uses a limited palette of plant materials. Although formed with great art, it looks utterly natural.

Mr. Wright, as Mary Palmer calls him to this day, did not see the house until it was finished. She remembers his first visit: “He didn’t look at the house. He went right to the piano and sat down and played.” Asked what he played, she replies, “Something he composed extemporaneously.” Music was a shared interest for the architect and his clients: Wright once told Mary, “If you didn’t like music, you wouldn’t like my architecture.” Wright, whose father had been a music teacher before studying for the ministry, often compared his architecture to music.

Wright stayed overnight with the Palmers in 1958. Invited by the U-M architecture students to give a lecture, he agreed on the condition that he would talk only to them and not to their professors. Wright slept in one of the Palmers’ hexagonal beds and had oatmeal for breakfast.

On an earlier visit to Michigan, in 1954, when he was to lecture at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, he stayed with the Afflecks but came to the Palmers’ for dinner. Gil Ross, a U-M faculty member and the first violinist of the university-based Stanley Quartet, was a close friend of the Palmers, so they asked him if the quartet would perform for Wright. Mary recalls that they opened with a Haydn quartet. When the first movement ended, Wright stopped them, saying something was wrong. Everyone looked uncomfortable--the Stanley Quartet were first-rate musicians. Then Wright explained that their playing was fine but that their location bothered him. He walked over and helped them move their music stands and chairs between two piers leading out to the terrace, where he thought the music would sound better.

Many of the Palmers’ friends were people connected with music. “I first knew the music faculty as teachers, then as friends. It was the beginning of all our friendships,” recalls Mary. Both Palmers were active in the University Musical Society and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and often entertained musical luminaries in their house. Dunn recalls meeting such performers as Lena Horne and Frederica von Stade.

The Palmers’ yearly caroling party is also fondly remembered by those who attended. “About twenty families would sing and then eat. Mary’s was a perfect place for it because of the sensational acoustics,” recalls publisher Phil Power, whose parents, Eugene and Sadie Power, were good friends of the Palmers. Dunn recalls that at Christmastime her mother would bring out a special set of Welsh bells, spanning two octaves, to add to the music from the piano.

Mary’s interest in music segued serendipitously into another interest: yoga. Bill Palmer got to know many foreign students in college, and Mary first heard of yoga through his Indian friends. When she went to the Y to sign up for her first yoga class, she was pleasantly surprised to run into her good friend Priscilla Neel putting her name down for the same class.

Palmer and Neel’s original teacher was an American, as was her replacement. Both teachers did their best, but in retrospect, Neel says, the exercises were “by rote-more like calisthenics.” When the second teacher was leaving, she told Palmer and Neel that they should take over. The second teacher had encouraged them to read some of the yoga literature, including B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, which came out in 1966 with a foreword by violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

“Of all the artists who come to Ann Arbor, the one I’d really like to meet is Mr. Menuhin,” Mary Palmer told Alva Sink, whose husband, Charles, then headed the University Musical Society. Later, when Menuhin came for a concert, the Sinks invited the Palmers to a small party afterward. Mary took Iyengar’s book with her and told Menuhin that she wanted to go to India and study with the author. “Without batting an eye, he said, ‘You must go,’ ” she recalls. “He was pleased someone knew about this dimension of his life.” When Bill was on sabbatical, she traveled to India, carrying a letter of introduction from Menuhin, and met with Iyengar in Poona.

“She came back very enthusiastic,” recalls Neel. The women and a few friends began to practice yoga at the Palmers’ house. “One of us would read [Iyengar’s book] on tape. Then we’d put it on and learn the positions,” recalls Neel. In 1973 they convinced the Y to sponsor Iyengar’s first visit to the United States. “Then he came and showed us how to really do it,” Neel recalls. For the next decade, until he retired, Iyengar visited Ann Arbor regularly. After coming to Ann Arbor, he was invited to cities all around the country and attracted students to India, where Palmer and Neel helped him open a yoga institute. “Mary always entertained when Iyengar was in town,” Neel recalls. “He’d stay at her house.”

Iyengar was only one of many guests over the years, some drawn by fascination with Wright’s architecture, others by the warmth of the Palmers and their shared interests. “Mary’s an incredibly gracious hostess,” says Anne Glendon. “The house and her intellectual interests are a unified whole.”

Glendon recalls a spring party to honor Carl St. Clair, then conductor of the Ann Arbor Symphony, when “the grounds were beautiful with daffodils.” David Osler, whose wife, Connie, started the docent program at the U-M Museum of Art, remembers a gathering at the Palmers’ in honor of Marshall Wu, the curator of Asian art. “Magic,” says Osler. “It was a warm fall evening. The moon was out. Everything was waxed and polished.” One party that stands out in Mary’s mind is a dinner she gave for Yehudi Menuhin. “He liked to sit on the floor, so we had tables sitting on the floor with white tablecloths.”

Different visitors respond to different aspects of the house. Architect Ralph Youngren, impressed to find all the original furniture still in place, was intrigued by “the odd-shaped drawers and dressers” and by the Palmers’ attention to detail, down to the special red gravel they ordered for the driveway. Ann Arbor Building Department head Larry Pickel was struck by how the hexagonal shape of the beds made it impossible to put pillows next to each other.

“I was fascinated by being in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,” says retired U-M surgeon Herb Sloan. “I’d been in Wright houses that were museums, but not one where someone lived.” Judy Dow Rumelhart, who used to live across the street, remembers how she “adored going out in the teahouse. It’s a romantic house--another world.” Mary Louise Dunn says that even her teenage friends responded to the architecture: “You couldn’t be human and not recognize it’s unique.”

Although the Palmers were generous in sharing their house, Bill and Mary also guarded their privacy. They opened their home to the general public on only two occasions. In the 1980s they allowed it to be shown on the Women’s City Club Tour, helping to make that year’s tour the most lucrative ever. A few years ago Mary opened her house for a UMS fund-raiser that sold out instantly.

Bill Palmer died in November 2000. Mary is still enjoying the house. It’s Wright’s only house in Ann Arbor--unless one counts a house on Holden Drive that was built in 1979, twenty years after Wright’s death, from plans he drew--and living in one of his buildings is a continual balancing act. “All owners of Frank Lloyd Wright houses are plagued by curious people,” says Brink. On a recent visit to the house, while looking out a window with Mary Palmer, I saw a car slow down and creep along as it passed the house. Mary told me that happened all the time. As if anticipating this kind of attention, Wright designed the house for maximum privacy. Not much can be seen from the road, and what is in view tells very little about the delights inside and out back.

“She was the perfect client for Mr. Wright,” says Bruce Niethammer of Mary Palmer. Even after Wright’s death in 1959, the Palmers kept the house as close as possible to his original conception. At first Mary worked closely with John Howe and Larry Brink; Howe has since died, but Mary still works with Brink. For instance, Wright designed chairs for the living room, but the Palmers used some Scandinavian chairs instead. Mary was never satisfied with them, and turned to Brink for help. Using Wright’s original design, he figured out how to make Wright’s chairs and had them fabricated by Phipps of Port Huron.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Frank Lloyd Wright house without a challenging roof--but again Brink, with Niethammer executing the plans, has devised improvements that keep the look of the house intact while keeping the Palmers dry. “Mr. Wright lived on the edge in his architecture,” explains Niethammer. “Low sloping roofs are not really suited for cedar shingles. It’s too shady--too flat. It’s pretty, but it holds moisture, because the water doesn’t run off.” Close attention to maintenance has saved the sloping roof, while the original tar sections of the flat roof have been replaced with lead-coated tin.

Palmer, still as enamored of Wright as ever, bristles at any criticisms, saying, “Everything you hear about Mr. Wright has two sides.” On my original visit she had me move from the couch to the Wright-designed chairs to show me how comfortable they were, and later she had me make the same test with the dining room chairs. She is appalled that people will say to her, “But do you really live here?”--or, worse, “I think it’s an interesting house, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live here.” She is unambiguously not in agreement: “I can’t imagine having something so fulfilling in so many ways--visually, the tremendous serenity, the fantastic drama.”

Beyond its own pleasures, the house has given the Palmers opportunities to meet fascinating people, many of whom ended up as friends. “Anyone interested in architecture comes to Mary’s,” says Brink. Bob Metcalf recalls a big Wright symposium in the 1970s attended by all the leading Wright scholars. In honor of the event, architecture students painted a 120-foot canvas of a building Wright designed but never built for a site in Kansas, and hung the canvas from Burton Tower. The event ended with a big party at the Palmers’ for all the participants. More recently a delegation of Japanese architects, led by Taliesin-trained Raco Indo, visited the house. E. Fay Jones, a Taliesin-trained architect best known for his Thorncrown Chapel in Arkansas, and the celebrated Indian architect Charles Correa, a U-M architecture graduate, have also visited.

“As a group, musicians seem to seek out the house as well as architects,” Mary says, remembering the time she got to hear Hephzibah Menuhin, Yehudi’s sister, play their grand piano. Menuhin was staying at Inglis House before a concert, and Gail Rector, then head of the University Musical Society, asked the Palmers whether Menuhin could practice on their piano. Menuhin came over and ran through her entire program. Asked if she listened, Mary replies, “Of course.”

More recently, the house gave her the opportunity to befriend members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who gave awe-inspiring performances of Henry VI and Richard III under UMS auspices last March. Current UMS president Ken Fischer is a great friend and admirer of Mary Palmer, and when a group from RSC visited Ann Arbor a year before the performances to check out the facilities, Fischer took them to see the Palmers’ house. They raved about the experience, and when the whole troupe came the next year, another visit was high on their wish list. Mary responded by inviting all of the actors to tea--served on the “India Tree” Spode china that Wright had personally selected for the house.

Mary gained more than fond memories from the RSC visit. She actually acquired an addition to her house: a piece of “sculpture” for her garden. Tom Piper, an RSC set designer, had been among the first group to visit. When he returned the next year, Mary took him around the garden and said, winking, “Instead of charging, I ask advice. What’s missing is sculpture. I’ve been looking all my life, but nothing is right.” After discussing the question with the rest of the RSC group, Piper suggested they give her one of the ladders from the set.

Contacted by e-mail, Piper explains, “I wished there was a way to thank her for her hospitality and jokingly suggested that she should have the whole ‘hell mouth’ set in the garden. That seemed a little impractical!!! So I thought she should have one of the metal ladders as a memento of the play. Frank Lloyd Wright is a great hero of mine, and it’s wonderful to think of a bit of my set becoming a sculpture in the garden of one of his finest houses!”

The ladder, visible from the living room, is casually but artfully placed against a tree. As it rusts, it will fit even better into the ensemble of landscaping and house. It’s just the latest development in the continuing melding of Wright’s architecture with the Palmers’ interests and the greater community.

In retrospect, Mary Palmer says, “What attracted me to Mr. Wright was not pictures of the houses, not visiting other houses, but his philosophy that came into the house. It widened the whole reaction--how to live in the house, incorporating the landscape, the materials, the site--the whole big picture.”

Inspired by a teenage trip to Japan, the Dow Chemical heir spurned the family business to devote his life to architecture. From city hall to the U-M’s administration building, he put a quirky modernist stamp on the city.

Judy Dow Rumelhart was walking down Fifth Avenue one day recently when it started to rain. Looking around for shelter, she spotted the Ann Arbor District Library, a building originally designed by her uncle, Alden Dow. “And I thought how lovely it is,” Rumelhart says. “The library is one of my favorites.”

“The library and city hall are two of the ugliest buildings in Ann Arbor, and ISR [the U-M Institute for Social Research] is right up there,” says library board member Ed Surovell, expressing a dissenting opinion on the library and two other Dow designs. “They do not have the kind of imposing presence of a public building that creates civic pride.”

Alden Dow (1904–1983) is an unlikely figure to provoke such controversy. Though Frank Lloyd Wright once called him his “spiritual son,” Dow had none of the older architect’s egotism or self-promotion. Shy and studious, Dow had to be encouraged to take on major public commissions by his devoted wife, Vada. He got much of his work through family connections; his father, Herbert, was the founder of Dow Chemical.

Alden Dow’s entree to Ann Arbor was through his sister Margaret and her husband, U-M physician Harry Towsley. His first residential commission, in 1932, was the Towsley home in Ann Arbor Hills. Over the next thirty-six years, Dow designed seventeen more Ann Arbor buildings; in the 1960s, his work was so highly regarded that both the city of Ann Arbor and the U-M hired him to design their administrative centers: the Larcom Municipal Building (1961) and the Fleming Administration Building (1964).

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he studied, Dow sought to integrate his buildings into their environment. His motto was, “Gardens never begin, and houses never end.” Especially in his residential projects, he was capable of blending building and landscape brilliantly.

The going was tougher when the commission was a civic building downtown. He sometimes attempted to domesticate these urban settings by specifying massive upper-story planters, but in Ann Arbor, most of these have long since been abandoned as impractical.

Despite the common elements he sometimes used, Dow was no assembly-line architect. His Ann Arbor buildings have evoked comparisons as diverse as “a Mondrian painting” (the Fleming Building) and a “bureau of drawers” (city hall). But especially in recent years, those characterizations have not always been flattering.

Last year, shortly after taking office, U-M president Lee Bollinger announced that he wanted to move his office out of the Fleming Building, which he called “fortresslike.” (Its slit windows, arched entryway, and looming overhangs do give the Fleming Building a defensive look, but the popular belief that Dow designed it to shut out student protesters is unfounded—the plans were completed well before the campus demonstrations of the 1960s turned violent.)

Others have since risen to the building’s defense, including Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the celebrated “postmodern” architects whom Bollinger retained to develop a new master plan for the university. But Bollinger’s comments are a sure sign of Dow’s declining stature in the city he did so much to shape.

Alden Dow was born in Midland in 1904, the fifth of Grace and Herbert Dow’s seven children. His parents had assumed that he would go into the family business, but they also encouraged his creativity by exposing him to art, historic buildings, and gardens. When he was a teenager, the whole family took a trip to Japan. “They went in a big ship and stayed for three or four months,” relates his niece Judy Dow Rumelhart. The trip exposed Dow to two of his greatest influences as an architect: the exacting simplicity of Japanese design and the striking modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose newly completed Imperial Hotel the family admired.

Dow spent three years at the U-M studying mechanical engineering, but then begged his parents to let him switch careers. He transferred to Columbia’s School of Architecture and in 1930, while still a student, his father got him his first commission: a clubhouse for the Midland Country Club. Upon graduation, Dow joined a Saginaw firm and married Vada Bennet, his childhood sweetheart, in 1931. His sister and brother-in-law, Margaret and Harry Towsley, promptly hired him to design their home.

As originally designed, the Towsley house was basically a three-bedroom ranch, although much more elegant than those that would become ubiquitous after World War II. Its features included clerestory windows, a copper roof, and raised planter boxes designed to blend house and landscape.

Dow designed the interior of his houses in minute detail and even dictated the color schemes. “He loved strong colors, primary colors, and jewel tones,” recalls Rumelhart—“cherry red, cerise, emerald green, purple amethyst, ruby topaz.”

Considering Dow’s great interest in gardens, it’s ironic that his most influential innovation at the Towsley house was the way he designed the driveway: he specified an attached garage facing the street, believed to be the first in the country. “We thought the house looked like a gas station,” recalls family friend Jack Dobson.

Asked whether it was strange to grow up in such an unusual house, Rumelhart replies, “I loved the house. . . . and had a sense of pride of being in it. I thought all architecture should look like that.”

During construction, Dow fought repeatedly with city building inspectors, who he saw as trampling on his artistic license. For instance, he wanted to give the house unusually low ceilings, 7'6" instead of the required 8'. Denied, he recorded his losing battles in a series of four bas-reliefs in the front hall; one shows an architect being stomped by an authoritarian foot while another depicts him strangled in red tape.

Although the house had been planned as a starter home, the Towsleys lived there all of their lives. They just kept asking Dow to design additions, which he did in 1934, 1938, and again in 1960. Dow put his latest ideas into each revision such as a landscaped backyard viewed through a big dining room window and so many built-ins that there was little need for furniture: he provided a built-in safe, walk-in refrigerator, clothes drawers that opened on both the bedroom and dressing room sides, and even metal drawers especially designed to store Margaret Towsley’s extensive collection of linen tablecloths. The original color scheme was vividly patriotic in the main living areas: cherry-red rug and turquoise walls.

In 1933, Alden and Vada Dow spent six months at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio-home complex in western Wisconsin. While Alden studied architecture, Vada completed her own fellowship in painting, weaving, and pottery.

Dow and Wright maintained a friendship for years after the Dows’ time at Taliesin. The two architects visited each other in their homes and Dow even named one of his daughters “Lloyd.” They had a serious falling out, however, in 1949, when Wright lost a commission to design the Phoenix Civic Center because his fee was too high--and Dow agreed to take the job in his place. According to Craig McDonald, director of the Alden Dow Home and Studio in Midland, it was Vada Dow and Olgivanna Wright who finally persuaded their husbands to make peace.

After Taliesin, Dow set up his own firm in Midland. Despite the Depression, Dow Chemical was booming, and he designed homes for an ever-increasing circle of clients. As his reputation grew, he received commissions from as far away as North Carolina (a residence for the president of Duke University) and Texas (an entire company town, Lake Jackson, for Dow Chemical during World War II). But Midland always remained his base: of the 138 buildings he designed in his career, 104 are in his hometown.

Ann Arbor is second only to Midland, with eighteen Dow buildings. Surprisingly, very few are private homes; he built only two more residences here, both for doctors who knew Harry Towsley: the Sibley Hoobler house (228 Belmont Road) in 1949, and the Joe Morris house (7 Regent Drive) in 1962. Hoobler has since died, but Joe and Julia Morris still live in their Dow house and vividly remember the design process.

In the early 1960s, Joe Morris asked Harry Towsley whether he thought Dow would design him a house. Towsley suggested that he write and ask, and Dow responded by inviting Morris to Midland for lunch. During lunch, Morris recalls, the architect “talked about sailboats, about housing--he had an idea about housing for Third World countries by making plastic modular units and dropping them in by helicopter. When we returned, I told his secretary we hadn’t talked about my house. She said, ‘Wonderful. He needs to get his mind off his work.’ ”

The Morrises waited two years before Dow had time to work on their house. When they finally sat down to review the plans, they found that Dow had definite ideas about what he wanted. For instance, Joe recalls, Dow’s original plan did not include room to eat in the kitchen--“He said we would never eat in the kitchen.”

“We insisted we would,” Morris continues. “So he relented and designed a [built-in] kitchen table.” The furniture that Dow didn’t build in, he selected, including daybeds, dining room table and chairs, and the chairs and sofa in the living room. All of the built-ins and carefully coordinated furniture result in a very clean look. Morris calls it “magnificent simplicity.”

Joe Morris was one of many clients invited to visit Dow’s combined home and studio in Midland. A beautiful and unusual building, it was a good advertisement for his artistry.

Like the Towsley house, Dow’s evolved in a series of additions. It began in 1933 as a long train car–like studio. In 1935, he added its most striking feature, a room half-submerged in a pond. Officially called the “floating conference room,” but known informally as the “submarine room,” its ingenious use of water invites comparisons to Wright’s more famous Falling Water.

In Midland, Dow was able to build the low ceilings he was denied in Ann Arbor. “I got a kick out of his studio,” recalls Fred Mayer, U-M’s director of university planning. “He was about 5'6", so the studio was designed for him. I’m 5'8", so it was okay with me.”

The low ceilings and small proportions in Dow’s house reminded Morris of “Beatrice Potter homes in Peter Rabbit. There was the same childhood comfort in his home.” Bill Reish, who visited Midland in the seventies to discuss an addition to Greenhills School, recalls the “sunken room at duck-eye level, with ducks floating by.” Former library director Gene Wilson missed that view--“The pond was leaking the day I was there, so he had it drained.”

People remember Dow’s appearance as slightly eccentric. “He was wearing different-colored shoes, I think yellow,” Wilson recalls. Adds Rumelhart, “He wore his hair longer than the conventional doctors I was used to.”

Craig McDonald, who was Vada’s assistant in the last years of her life, recalls Alden as “quiet and understated. He was somewhat shy, but expressed himself through design.” The late Guy Larcom, who oversaw construction of Ann Arbor’s city hall, remembered him as “a small man, undistinguished--but impressive when he talked about architecture.”

“He could be very intense if he got excited about something,” Rumelhart says. “He could pick a flower and be overwhelmed. He had a creative intensity.

“I loved Alden,” Rumelhart continues. “He said it was okay to be a singer. The medical world was terrified of the arts, but he told my parents, ‘She’s talented. She should be doing what she is doing.’ ”

Dow’s peak period in Ann Arbor came during the 1950s and 1960s when he built six university and three civic buildings. The U-M’s Margaret Bell Pool (1952) was his first college commission; it opened doors, and he eventually worked on nine other campuses in Michigan.

Before it was built, the U-M had two pools reserved primarily for men, while women had only the “Barbour bathtub” in the basement of Barbour gym. Margaret Bell, head of women’s physical education, had long wanted to redress this injustice. According to Sheryl Szady, who has researched the history of U-M women’s athletics, “She said, ‘Before I leave, I’m getting a pool.’ ” Bell organized bridge parties, sold tiles, and organized benefit parties to raise the necessary funds. Margaret Towsley, a friend of P.E. professor Marie Hartwig and a generous patron of progressive causes, probably contributed to the project.

The new pool was state of the art. Designed for synchronized swimming and for Michifish shows (elaborate performances with costumes, lighting, and staging), it had an air flow system that sent cool air over the spectators in the bleachers and warm air over the pool. Underwater speakers allowed the synchronized swimmers to hear the music.

According to Szady, the day before the pool opened, Bell, Hartwig, and another woman “hopped in and played around.” At first, men were allowed to swim at the pool only on Friday nights. The pool became coed in 1976 when the building was enlarged to become the Central Campus Recreational Building. Last year the kinesiology department put on another addition, but Dow’s original building is still discernible, especially the second-story planters, the only ones in Ann Arbor that are still maintained.

In 1964, Dow designing two large buildings just a half a block apart on Thompson Street: ISR, the first new building in the country dedicated solely to social research, and the administration building, later named in honor of Robben Fleming, the university’s tenth president.

The two buildings have striking exteriors, but both have been criticized as being designed from the outside in, sacrificing interior utility to achieve an exterior effect. For instance, as originally designed, the massive white aggregate panels that face ISR would have left the offices behind them with no exterior windows. According to retired psychology professor Bob Kahn, one of ISR’s founders, Dow had to be persuaded to move the panels out slightly so that small slit windows could be added.

Dow planned ISR’s interior in detail. The space was divided into modules, each with a large open area facing a window wall, with two offices on either side of the open area and two slightly bigger offices in the corners. “The offices would be almost all one of two sizes to minimize status,” recalls Kahn. Dow was proud of the egalitarian effect, noting in his 1970 book, Reflections, “All occupants have a similar relationship, through glassed area, with the outside.”

But research projects did not always divide neatly into the modules Dow prescribed. And despite his egalitarian goals in designing the faculty offices, the ISR layout also perpetuated what, in hindsight, looks like a far greater inequity: while the researchers had private offices, the female support staff was assigned to desks that sat in the middle of the central area, without a shred of private space. Room dividers were eventually added--but these in turn blocked out light to the side offices.

Maintenance on the windows also presented a problem. They were locked with special keys and pivoted open to wash. People would open the windows to let in air, then not secure them because they didn’t have the key. Once, “a person on the fifth floor was leaning against the window when it pivoted,” recalls retired ISR administrator Jim Wessell. “He almost fell out. Luckily he was caught by someone nearby.”

The windows on the Fleming Administration Building opened the same way but were arranged very differently: in geometric patterns reminiscent of a Mondrian painting. While intriguing from the outside, the design created some very curious interior spaces, with long, thin windows in unpredictable locations.
Dow’s most unusual campus building, the Fleming Building, is also the most controversial. Ed Surovell calls it “a cube in space” and says of the entrance, “you have to hunt for it like a medieval castle.” People who work in the building complain of the “mazelike” layout.

The Regents’ Room on the first floor is designed with an arched ceiling, which, according to Craig McDonald, was used “to give a feeling of being in a larger space.” Two similar arches take up the rest of the first floor: the middle arch is a corridor connecting the east and west entrances, and the other serves as offices. The cavernous look has caused people to compare the space to a beer vault or a wine cellar, and audiences at regents’ meetings often decry the absence of windows and call it “the cave.”

Rumelhart defends the design, saying, “Alden took the assignment and created a painting. He was a great fan of Mondrian and he fulfilled that feeling.” Also siding with Rumelhart is architect Denise Scott Brown. Asked about the Fleming Building, she calls it “honorable architecture” and says it is “nicely proportioned.” “Taste cycles,” adds Brown’s husband, Robert Venturi. “There was a time when Victorian architecture was thought ugly and torn down. We have to be tolerant of the immediate past.”

Changing taste is one problem with the building, but of the more utilitarian problems, many are not Dow’s fault but are the result of growth. “It was never intended to have as many people as it does now. When there was a big lobby on every floor, it was more aesthetically pleasing,” says Dick Kennedy, retired vice-president for government relations.

“You’d get off the elevator and see a bank of windows onto the plaza,” recalls Kay Beattie, who worked in the building in its early days. “You had the feeling no one worked there.” Beattie also remembers that, in vintage Dow fashion, each floor had its own vivid color theme--longtime employees describe them with names like “Howard Johnson orange” and “football field green.”

As controversial as the Fleming Building is, it could have been even more eye-popping. According to Fred Mayer, university architect Howard Hacken vetoed Dow’s original plans to finish the exterior in white stucco with blue windows and gold trim. “Very rah-rah,” Mayer laughs.

Dow left a strong mark on the U-M campus, but it was nothing compared to his impact across Division Street. In the library and city hall, he defined the two most important buildings in Ann Arbor’s public life.

The library was built first, in 1956. “After the war there was no established library architecture,” recalls Gene Wilson, then a library staff member, later director. “Dow had built the Midland library, and we thought it was grand.”
His Ann Arbor design had all of the Dow hallmarks. Even today, after two additions, one can still recognize his hand in the elevated planter faced with turquoise enamel paneling and the lovely little garden on the south side.

“I always liked it,” Wilson says of the library. “It was state of the art for its time.” But, he admits, there were problems. “Dow was more concerned with visual impact--he wanted it to be noticed, he didn’t let function get in the way. There was a circulation desk but no reference desk, and there was no clear delineation between public and private areas. We had to scramble around to make [the layout] work.”

Like many other clients, the library also found that Dow’s elevated gardens were difficult to maintain. Wilson doesn’t recall exactly when the library stopped tending the second-story planters, but says, “it would have been very early. There never was a way to get to them except by a long ladder put up by the sidewalk--any maintenance was done by the janitor climbing the ladder. One day the ladder slipped and the janitor fell and broke his leg. After that we lost enthusiasm.”

Dow’s other great downtown project, the Ann Arbor city hall, has been a conversation piece ever since it opened in 1961; in addition to a chest of drawers, it’s been compared to “an inverted wedding cake” and “an upside-down carport.” It’s also been called “a poor man’s Guggenheim,” an allusion to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous upward-spiraling museum in New York City.

The building is an inverted stepped pyramid, with the floors growing wider as they go up. The second floor is a large promenade that Dow thought might be used for public meetings or for city council members to step outside to caucus. (Rumelhart has always thought it would be a good place to perform plays.)

Inside, Dow put elevators, stairs, conference rooms, and department head’s offices near the building’s core. The space around the periphery of the building was kept open. “The idea was that there were to be no prestige offices, no best windows,” recalled Guy Larcom in an interview before his death last winter. “It was all open to public view.”

Kathy Frisinger, then the city’s assistant director of central services, oversaw the move into the new building. She remembers that although employees were glad to be together after being scattered at seven different locations, many didn’t like the open floor plan. “You could see from one end to the other,” she explains. “If you talked to someone, everyone could see you talking, see which office you went into.”

The promenade never got much use, and there were serious problems with roof leaks. Switchboard operator Mary Schlecht recalls that when it rained, the police department downstairs had buckets all over the place. The planters Dow specified on the second and third floors also leaked. “The plants grew well on the north side, but it got too hot on the south and you had to water almost every day,” a former employee recalls. City hall’s maintenance people, like their counterparts at the library, eventually gave up on the planters; they’re now filled with rocks.

Dow ordered the building’s furnishings with his characteristic eye for vivid color. “I’ll never forget that day when seven Steelcase trucks came. Big semi trucks drove up with turquoise and orange furniture,” laughs Frisinger, who supervised the unloading. “I saw mine were to be orange and I said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and did a quick switch.” Nonetheless, she says, “I basically enjoyed the building. I liked the big offices, the open spacious feel in the building. Dow was ahead of his time.”

As city hall has become more crowded, its once open spaces have given way to a warren of cubbyholes. Furniture and curtains have been placed in front of most of the big windows in the inner offices to give more privacy. The top floor, recently remodeled after the district court moved to the county courthouse, today comes the closest to the spacious feeling Dow originally intended.

Dow worked up to his death in 1983, but the debate continues on his rightful place in architectural history. The question of whether or not his buildings look good comes down to personal taste, and there can be no global or permanent answer. Setting that aside, a study of his Ann Arbor work shows that while many have serious practical problems, there were always reasons for what Dow did.

Near the top of the list of problems would have to be his flat roofs, a distinction he shared with his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. “Talk with any person about an Alden Dow building and they will sing its praises and then remember the trouble they had with the roof,” says Greenhills’ Bill Reish. Dow’s elevated planters were another recurring source of trouble. The only one still in use in Ann Arbor, at the U-M’s kinesiology building, supports a few scraggly plants. Ann Arbor has apparently tended its Dow buildings less carefully than his hometown. Craig McDonald reports that numerous examples of Dow’s elevated plantings are still flourishing in Midland.

Lighting could be listed among Dow’s greatest failures but also among his greatest successes. It was obviously a lifelong obsession and when it worked, it worked gloriously, as in the big windows that both let in light and created splendid views in his private homes. When his plans went astray, however, people worked in dark caverns such as those in the Fleming Building and ISR.

It could be argued that these failures were not so much design errors as a misreading of human nature, especially the need for privacy. “Human nature will confound you if you fight it too much, even with a good idea,” comments Fred Mayer.

Dow seems to have been the most successful in his smaller projects, particularly the private residences where he could think out the use of every inch of space. In the larger buildings, he was most successful in the ones built for a specific use, particularly those associated with family members such as Greenhills or the medical education building.

Some of Dow’s critics complain that he received the Ann Arbor jobs only because of his connections with the Towsley family. Certainly some of his work came directly through his sister and her husband, or as a result of friendships or community contacts made through them. Fred Mayer defends Dow on this score. “Having connections will give you a chance,” he says, “but if you don’t do something good, it won’t save you.”

Most of the serious criticism of Dow is aimed at his multistory buildings. Architects don’t like to speak ill of other architects, even dead ones, but off the record, several express doubts about Dow’s “bulky, boring” multistory designs.

“Nothing is related to human scale in ISR. It’s just a big white space,” says one architect--who goes on to describe the Fleming building as “weird.” But Mayer again comes to Dow’s defense. “He was a talented architect,” he says. “I don’t know if he will make it in the ranks of the great, but talent and creativity are evident in his best buildings.”

Dan Jacobs, who’s designed several additions to Greenhills, agrees. “I’m a great admirer of Dow. I admire the simplicity of his structural system.”

Despite the complaints, it should be noted that all of his Ann Arbor designs, except for one razed gas station, are still being used for their original purpose. Even the Fleming building, threatened during Bollinger’s term with a changed use, is still the administration building. Asked about Bollinger’s dislike of her uncle’s building, Judy Dow Rumelhart lets out a good-humored laugh--but then admits that she has chided Bollinger for his criticism of the building. “He can move out, but I hope he uses it for something else, maybe English classes,” she says. “Let it be used by someone to enjoy.”

An Alden Dow Chronology:
Between 1932 and 1970, Dow designed eighteen Ann Arbor buildings. Details are given only for buildings not described in the main story.
1932: Towsley home, 1000 Berkshire.
1949: Hoobler home, 228 Belmont.
1952: Margaret Bell Pool (U-M).
1956: Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S. Fifth Ave.
1958: Ann Arbor Community Center, 625 N. Main. Dow designed the building at the request of his sister, Margaret Towsley. Towsley not only contributed most of the cost, she also paid for many of the buildings furnishings--even dishes and towels.
1959–1965: Matthaei Botanical Gardens, (U-M). The gardens’ offices and conservatory are instantly recognizable as Dow’s work thanks to the turquoise-faced second-story planters (long since abandoned). Herb Wagner, professor emeritus of botany, remembers fighting to include a lobby and meeting room in the plans; more than thirty years later, Wagner says, it remains “one of the best university botanical gardens in the nation.” Dow also designed the garden superintendent’s house.
1960: Leonard gas station, 2020 W. Stadium. Possibly conceived as a prototype for Michigan-based Leonard, this simple, well-landscaped gas station was Dow’s first commercial work in Ann Arbor. It is the only Ann Arbor Dow building no longer standing.
1961: Guy J. Larcom Jr. Municipal Building, 100 N. Fifth Ave.
1962: Morris home, 7 Regent.
1962: Conductron headquarters, 3475 Plymouth. Keeve “Kip” Seigel, founder of the high-flying Conduction conglomerate, was a friend of the Towsleys. The low-slung brick building is currently the headquarters of NSF International.
1963: University Microfilms, 300 N. Zeeb. Dow met University Microfilms founder Gene Power, a U-M regent, through the Towsleys. To recycle water used in processing microfilm, he included a moat on the south side of the building, creating what he called “a reflecting pool for office and cafeteria.”
1964: Institute for Social Research (U-M).
1964: Fleming Administration Building (U-M).
1964: Michigan District Headquarters, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, 3773 Geddes. Dow built some lovely churches in Midland, but this is his only church-related structure in Ann Arbor. Its four wings are grouped in the shape of a Greek cross; the teepee-like dome on top symbolizes the church’s early Indian missions.
1966: Towsley Center for Continuing Medical Education (U-M). Dow’s last major job for the university was arguably his most successful. One of Harry Towsley’s specialties was continuing education, and the brothers-in-law collaborated closely on a simple, straightforward building marked with Dow trademarks such as long corridors filled with windows and plants. “It’s state of the art, designed for traffic flow, with an auditorium and four break-out rooms, a huge lobby,” facilities coordinator Robert Witte says. “If I was ever asked to design a medical education building, I would design it off the Towsley Center.”
1967: Greenhills School, 850 Greenhills. Judy Dow Rumelhart was a member of the original planning committee for this private north-side school, and Margaret Towsley was on the first board. Dow laid out the building as a series of clusters, each with classrooms around the edge and a court in the middle. In the middle of each court is a common space called a “forum”; in the corners are areas for quiet activity, called “alcoves.”
Starting in 1968 with grades 9–12, Greenhills gradually expanded to accommodate grades 6–12. By opening alcoves and linking them to new clusters, Dow designed additions that felt as if they were part of the original. Over the years, the brown walls and curiously colored carpets Dow specified have been toned down, and doors have been added to control noise. Still, Bill Reish says, “It works wonderfully as a school.”
1970: 2929 Plymouth. After Gene Power stepped down from University Microfilms, he commissioned Dow to build this small office building just east of Huron Parkway. “I was glad I selected Alden, because my site presented a difficult design problem,” Power recalled in his autobiography, Edition of One. “The zoning regulations stated that floor space could not exceed 40 percent of the land area. There had to be one automobile parking space available for every 110 square feet of floor space, and the structure could be no more than three stories high. Dow met these requirements by raising the building on columns, with only a small entrance lobby and elevator area extending down to the ground-floor level. Most of the area on that level formed a parking lot beneath the rest of the building.”

Power’s son, U-M regent Phil Power, recalls the office as “a lovely place to work. It had a beautiful view of North Campus. It had a fireplace, shelves with Eskimo art, orchids, a nice sitting area, and was lined with bookshelves.” The building—which always reminded Rumelhart of “a giant toadstool”—is now rented to a number of small tenants.

[Photo caption from book]: Dow was proud of his egalitarian design for the faculty offices at the ISR. But he also perpetuated what, in hindsight, looks like a far greater inequity: while the researchers had private offices, the female support staff was assigned to desks in the middle of the central area, without a shred of private space.

Eighty years later, they’re back in the spotlight.

Ann Arbor’s oldest surviving apartment houses, built between 1923 and 1930, were glamorous affairs designed by the area’s leading architects. Many included such amenities as doormen, on-site maids, cafes, and beauty parlors. Even so, they drew mixed reactions: some Ann Arborites welcomed them as elegant and cosmopolitan additions to the city, while others deplored their size and their effect on existing neighborhoods.

Now they’re back in the political spotlight. Since 1994 the city has been fighting to protect the buildings, one of which was demolished by the U-M in 2003. Meanwhile, as city planners look for ways to expand downtown housing, they’re confronting many of the same issues raised by the original apartment-building boom eighty years ago.

In the nineteenth century the U-M campus was surrounded by student rooming houses. Apartment buildings as we know them today, where each unit has its own kitchen and bath, didn’t arrive in significant numbers until after World War I.

As the U-M’s enrollment and employment swelled in the 1920s, multistory apartment buildings were a good solution to the housing crunch. But the idea took some getting used to.

The 1906 Cutting, corner State and Monroe, was the first apartment building in Ann Arbor.

The city hired the Olmsted Brothers, son and stepson-nephew of the famous landscape architect and city planner Frederick Law Olmsted, to make recommendations for Ann Arbor’s future development. Besides encouraging street improvements, more parks and playgrounds, and scenic drives, the Olmsteds’ 1922 report urged the city to enact a zoning ordinance. Council responded by dividing the city into four zoning categories: single residential, residential, local business, and industrial. Apartment buildings were permitted only in the “residential” district near campus.

That zone included one existing apartment building: the twenty-unit Cutting, built in 1906 on the southeast corner of State and Monroe. “For its time the Cutting was a remarkable structure, one of very few apartment buildings in the city, where rich people lived and where elegant old ladies sat looking out on the world through lace-curtained plate-glass windows,” recalled Milo Ryan in his 1985 memoir View of a Universe. “A carriage was usually to be seen waiting at one of the three entrances.”

Florence Mack, widow of department store owner Walter Mack, lived in the Cutting with her son Christian. Broadcaster Ted Heusel, who as a boy lived nearby, recalls that Christian “was so spoiled he used to take a cab home from the Blue Front, two blocks away.” The Cutting was torn down in 1962 for a parking lot. “People lived there forever,” recalls veteran Ann Arbor real estate agent Maynard Newton. “When it was to be torn down, they tried to sue, saying they had a proprietary right because they’d been there so long.”

The 1920s apartment houses followed the example of the Cutting: they were elegant buildings designed in the latest styles, mainly Tudor and Spanish Revival. And, as in the Cutting, their tenants made up a who’s who of Ann Arbor.

The Anberay, built in 1923 at 619 East University, was the first of the postwar apartment buildings. U-M architecture professor J. J. Albert Rousseau designed it in a U shape around a court. The light brick, zigzag roof, and balconies on each of the three levels, often filled with flowers, give it a Spanish flavor.

Early Anberay tenants included grocery heiress Elizabeth Dean, whose bequest to the city continues to bankroll the tree-planting Dean Fund; Palmer Christian, U-M organist; and Francis Kelsey, the archaeology professor whose finds from the Near East make up a large part of the Kelsey Museum’s fabulous holdings. This illustrious tenant mix continued into the 1960s, when then-tenant Ray Detter recalls his neighbors included Herbert Youtie, an expert on the Dead Sea scrolls; Renaissance scholar Palmer Throop; and Jacob Price, a U-M history professor who ran for city council.

Washtenaw Apartments, at 322 East William, dates from 1925. Although a simple red-brick building, it has elegant touches, such as a decorated stone entrance and stone wreaths on top. Carl Wurster, who grew up on Division Street around the corner, remembers his dad saying that the place was being constructed from very shoddy materials and would never last--but almost eighty years later, it still stands. When finished, the building didn’t impinge very much on the lives of Carl and his sister, Elizabeth. Carl delivered papers there, and tenants occasionally rented spaces in the Wursters’ garage. The only person Elizabeth and Carl knew in the building was their math teacher, a Miss Shipman.

The 1926 Hildene Manor, at 2220 Washtenaw, looks from the outside like an English manor house with classic Tudor details--dormers, half-timbering, nine-over-nine windowpanes, and heavy wooden doors. Inside are eight six-room apartments, plus common areas and a three-room caretaker’s flat. Set back on a wide expanse of lawn, “it was the apartment in Ann Arbor--the most expensive and the best,” recalls Ted Heusel.

The Wil-Dean, 200 North State, and Duncan Manor, 322 North State, are perfect mirror images of each other, except the first is faced with light brick and the second with red brick. Harold Zahn and Dugald Duncanson hired recent U-M architecture grad Gardiner Vose to design the buildings, and construction on both started in 1928. Zahn took ownership of the Wil-Dean, which he named after his son Dean William; Duncanson claimed the other, naming it Duncan Manor. Asymmetrical, with balconies, tile work, and casement windows, the buildings fit in with the best of the Tudor apartment houses.

The 1929 Kingsley Post, at 809 East Kingsley, a Spanish/Moorish Revival design by R. S. Gerganoff, is nothing like the architect’s most famous Ann Arbor building, the Washtenaw County Courthouse. With its elaborate ornamentation--tiles, rounded windows, wrought-iron decorative balconies, arched entrance--the Kingsley Post stands in striking contrast to the comparatively drab post–World War II apartment buildings flanking it.

In the early 1950s, when they were first married, Ted and Nancy Heusel lived in a third-floor efficiency in the Kingsley Post. Jimmy Murnan, manager of the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, lived on the same floor but in a more luxurious apartment overlooking the river valley and the railroad tracks. Murnan, a big circus fan, would invite the Heusels over to watch circus trains unload.

The Planada, because of its location on Ann Street, was an attractive place for people employed at University Hospital to live. But its location worked against it when it was torn down to provide parking for the Life Sciences complexes.

The Planada, at 1127 East Ann, opened in 1929. It catered to employees at the then new University Hospital a block east--the 1931 city directory lists nurses, therapists, interns, and research assistants among the residents. Like the Kingsley Post, it was a Spanish/Moorish Revival design, but less symmetrical. The Observer’s Eve Silberman, who lived in the Planada in the 1980s, recalls that “the apartment definitely had more character than any I’ve rented before and after.” Silberman particularly liked the gargoyles in the lobby. She moved, however, because she did not like sharing her apartment with a mouse.

Forest Plaza, 715 South Forest, was built the same year as the Planada. Although there had already been a number of successful apartment projects and its site was in the “residential” zone, the original plan for the building set off a storm of controversy. The older apartment buildings were three and four stories high; Forest Plaza’s developers wanted to go up nine stories--a sketch that appeared in the Ann Arbor Daily News shows an elegant tower that would have looked at home on New York’s Park Avenue. The “Spanish Renaissance” design was expected to cost $400,000, including the land.

Presaging future controversies, neighbors led the fight against the new building while real estate agents and businessmen defended it. U-M professors Frederick G. Novy and Charles Cooley, who lived in houses on either side of the site, argued that the new structure would block their light and air and would increase congestion in the neighborhood.

After much discussion, a compromise was reached: Forest Plaza was scaled down to five stories and set far back on the lot. The resulting building, while not as ornate as originally proposed, still has many attractive details, including Spanish tiles, terra-cotta decorations, and rounded windows. The increased setback actually adds to its elegance, making it reminiscent of glamorous apartments on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Like other apartment houses of the era, Forest Plaza provided homes for many upper-level university people. A 1930 Michigan Alumnus photo essay mentions that Forest Plaza was the home of Harry Kipke, football coach and later regent. Mark Hildebrandt recalls being taken there as a child to visit his parents’ friends Jan Vandenbroek, a U-M engineering professor, and his wife. Hildebrandt remembers Vandenbroek’s apartment as “classy but comfortable, with soft dark-red carpeted floors, Spanish irregular plaster, wrought-iron sconces.”

Forest Plaza’s current manager, Chris Heaton, says long-term residents have told him that the building used to have a doorman who would park cars for the few residents who owned them, and a maid living on the first floor, who was available to do housework.

At the Wil-Dean, 200 North State Street, and its near twin, Duncan Manor, corner of State and Lawrence, tenants still enjoy the elegant Tudor styling.

The debate over Forest Plaza led to new ground rules for apartment construction. Part of the compromise allowing it to be built was an agreement that city council would revisit the zoning law, which it did. At a public hearing, a speaker called for more limits on apartment buildings, citing several instances in which “the homes next door to apartment houses have stood vacant since the construction of the larger building, being of value neither for a single home nor for another apartment house, as the one apartment is usually enough to care for the district.”

On May 5, 1929, city council voted that future apartment buildings could be no more than three stories or forty-five feet high. Clothier and theater owner J. Fred Wuerth dissented, protesting that “the growth of the city would be held up by discouraging outside capital.” Supporters answered that the law would encourage developers to construct a larger number of smaller buildings, and so would help preserve the city’s residential character.

Neither side realized that the apartment boom was already essentially over. Only one more apartment house, Observatory Lodge, was built before the Great Depression, followed by World War II, virtually halted construction in the city.

If Observatory Lodge was the last apartment house of its generation, it at least was a spectacular expression of the best of the age. Built in 1930 at 1402 Washington Heights, Observatory Lodge, like the Planada, was just a few steps from the 1925 University Hospital. One admirer calls its design “a feast of Tudor Revival details,” including oriel windows, heavy Tudor-style doors, half-timbering, and a quirky squirrel weathervane. Inside are stained-glass windows, beautiful tile work, and a lobby fireplace. Residents in its thirty-four units also enjoyed the services of a beauty parlor and barbershop. And it must have been approved before the 1929 height limit went into effect: it’s four stories high.

Apartment construction resumed in the 1950s and 1960s, when U-M enrollment more than doubled. This time around, apartment developers created buildings catering to U-M students as well as staff.

Maynard Newton recalls that when he came back from the Korean War in the mid-1950s, students still rented rooms in boardinghouses--“big, comfortable houses, run by a landlady usually called ‘Ma’ something, such as Ma Guenther on Oakland or Ma Jeffries on Monroe. These ladies thought the value was in the house,” Newton recalls. “But savvy Realtors realized the land was what was valuable.”

Developers began buying up old houses around campus and downtown, demolishing them, and building modern-style apartments on the lots. A few, like the Nob Hill complex off South Main, were thoughtfully designed and integrated into their neighborhoods. Most, however, were bare-bones cubes derisively dubbed “cash boxes”--both because of their flat roofs (unlike the peaked roofs of the surrounding older houses) and because they were built to squeeze as many rental units as possible onto their lots.

In 1963 city council amended the zoning ordinance to limit apartments to bigger lots, and to require that they be set farther back from their lot lines. These two provisions, followed by the formation of historic districts in and around downtown, virtually eliminated teardowns of existing structures to build apartments.

The 1963 zoning change also abolished the height restriction for apartment buildings, instead setting limits on the “floor-to-area ratio” (FAR). Two high-rise apartment projects, the eighteen-story University Towers on South University, finished in 1965, and the twenty-six-story Tower Plaza, at William and Maynard, approved in 1965 and finished in 1969, were built under the new regulations. Tower Plaza was particularly controversial.

The Tower Plaza debate echoed the one nearly forty years earlier over Forest Plaza. Proponents saw the high-rise as an asset to the city, opponents as an affront to downtown’s existing scale. Eunice Burns, who was on council when Tower Plaza was approved, recalls that she and the other three Democrats were called antidevelopment because they voted against it. (With the backing of council’s Republican majority, it passed anyway.)

In classic Ann Arbor fashion, council then appointed a study committee and hired a consultant. The resulting report, Central City High-Rises and Parking, suggested a system of premiums, allowing developers more height in their buildings if they added amenities such as public space in front, parking, or landscaping. These changes, plus further increases in minimum apartment lot size and setbacks, were enacted in 1967.

It would be impossible to build a high-rise like Tower Plaza under the current FAR limits. Still, residents who have arrived since the 1960s take Tower Plaza for granted. Some even admire its clean lines and appreciate that the landlord included a cutaway first story and shopping arcade, even before the system of premiums was enacted.

Kingsley Post, 809 East Kingsley, was designed by R. S. Gerganoff in Spanish Moorish style.

The 1923–1930 apartments, also scoffed at by some when they were new, today look very elegant next to the cash boxes abutting the Kingsley Post, or the monolithic Mary Markley dorm near Observatory Lodge. “They are a good example of apartments of that era,” says Heather Edwards, Ann Arbor’s historic preservation coordinator. “They gave people the chance of living in the downtown vicinity in buildings pleasing to look at that also met all their needs.”

Four are already in historic districts: the Wil-Dean, Duncan, and Kingsley Post are in the Old Fourth Ward, and the Washtenaw is in the East William Street district. The historic district commission has worked to preserve the other five, but the process has been slow. In 1994 city council voted to designate 120 buildings as “individual historic properties” (IHPs), a classification intended to protect historic buildings that are outside of historic districts. Included in the list were the An¬beray and the Planada, both then owned by the Draprop Corporation.

Draprop sued, claiming the city had no legal right to designate buildings as IHPs without the owners’ permission. The circuit court upheld the city’s right to do so, but in 2001 the Michigan Court of Appeals declared Ann Arbor’s IHP district invalid. “They said it didn’t meet the definition of a historic district—that it didn’t hold together geographically or thematically,” explains Louisa Pieper, historic preservation coordinator at the time.

At the recommendation of the state historic preservation office, the HDC divided the original IHP list into thematic sublists—apartments, of course, but also churches, early homesteads, industrial and commercial structures, landmark homes, schools, and transportation—and appointed study committees to research each area and decide which properties were the most significant.

The apartment committee recommended protecting all five surviving early apartment buildings that weren’t already in historic districts—the Anberay, Forest Plaza, Hildene Manor, Observatory Lodge, and the Planada. Any city restrictions would not apply to the last two, however, since the university owned them.

The 1930 Observatory Lodge, 1402 Washington Heights, was the last apartment built before the Depression put a stop to most construction.

Observatory Lodge, in need of repairs, was closed several years ago but is now being converted into offices. A sadder fate awaited the Planada: when the university bought it, the report to the regents warned that “the building will be demolished and the site integrated into the adjacent campus.” It was torn down in fall 2003, and the U-M plans to build a parking structure on its site.

While the legality of the IHP is being investigated, the issue of height of buildings is also part of an on-going discussion. The eight-story Corner House Lofts on the corner of State and Washington is the tallest new residential building in the city in more than thirty years. And like its predecessors in the 1920s, it has been controversial. The city planning commission voted against approving the project, only to be overruled by city council.

The passage of the greenbelt measure November 2003 gave even more impetus to the height debate. A number of people--even some who had been no- or slow-growth advocates--began asking whether preserving more green space around the city obliged Ann Arbor to accept greater population density within its boundaries. Mayor John Hieftje enthusiastically supports the idea of more downtown density, although he says he began thinking about it independently of the greenbelt.

Noting that only about 200 new residents moved into downtown Ann Arbor in the 1990s, Hieftje says he’d like to see 1,000 more arrive in the next decade. He argues that an increased downtown population would provide the economic base for the return of practical stores, such as food markets, and would ease parking and congestion problems, especially if the new residents also worked downtown. While this increased density would obviously require more multifamily dwellings, Hieftje says they would probably be condominiums rather than apartments.

Does Hieftje mean Ann Arbor will see a new generation of high-rises? “Taller buildings would upset the delicate pedestrian balance downtown,” Hieftje replies. “I’m protective of Main Street and a block or so off it, as well as State Street. But I can see them maybe on Thompson, Maynard, or Huron.” Eighty some years after Ann Arbor’s first apartment-building boom, the town is still debating how and where future generations of downtown residents will live.

Following brass bands around Basel turned Reuben Kempf's career from the ministry to music

The Kempf House, at 312 South Division, a nationally recognized gem of Greek Revival architecture, is now a city-owned center for local history. It is named for Pauline and Reuben Kempf, the husband-and-wife music teachers who lived in it from 1890 until 1953. The Kempfs were guiding lights in the local music community who often loaned the Steinway in their front parlor—Ann Arbor's first grand piano—to the university. It was played in the May Festival, by such luminaries as Victor Herbert and Ignace Paderewski.

The Kempf House was actually built in 1853 by Mary and Henry DeWitt Bennett. The Bennetts came from Stephentown, New York (southeast of Albany), where they had doubtless seen numerous examples of Greek Revival architecture. Henry Bennett, described by contemporaries as a genial and warm-hearted man, served as postmaster and, later, as steward and secretary of the U-M. After Bennett retired, they moved to California.

The house was sold in 1886 to a neighbor, who rented it out for a few years. Then in 1890, Pauline and Reuben Kempf, married seven years and the parents of a daughter, Elsa (Paul was born six years later), moved into the house. They lived there for the next sixty-three years.

Pauline and Rueben Kempf enjoy sitting on their porch with daughter Elsa, right, and a woman thought to be a neighbor.

Both Pauline and Reuben were raised in Ann Arbor's large German community, and both showed early musical promise. Pauline was the daughter of Karl Widenmann, the German consul for Michigan and owner of a hardware store on the northeast corner of Main and Washington. The family lived in a big house on Fourth Avenue until Pauline was fourteen, when her father was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. He sold his business and moved his family to Whitmore Lake, where he died eight years later. The family could not afford to send Pauline to music school to study singing, but two professors at the university, impressed with her talent, arranged for her to give a recital in the Athens Theater (later the Whitney) at Main and Ann. The proceeds were enough for one year at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

Reuben Kempf, born in 1859, a year before Pauline, grew up on a farm in the area now occupied by Briarwood. According to his daughter-in-law, Edith Staebler Kempf, "he learned to play the organ at the Bethlehem Church school, and by the time he was a teenager played the pipe organ quite well. But this didn't impress his parents. They said ‘You will study for the ministry.' In those days they didn't ask you."

Reuben was sent to Basel, Switzerland, in 1877, to the same theological seminary that had graduated Friedrich Schmid, the first German pastor in Michigan and a hero to the local German community. But Reuben had been there only a few months when his parents received a letter from the principal, recommending that they not force him to be a minister but let him follow his own wish to be a musician. Evidently he had been following brass bands around Basel. Edith Kempf says it broke his parents' hearts, but they allowed him to transfer to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Stuttgart, where he studied organ and piano and was a classmate of Victor Herbert.

When Reuben returned to Ann Arbor, he opened a studio on the corner of Main and Liberty, on the third floor above what is now Occasionally Gifts. He supplemented his income playing the organ at St. Thomas Church. In 1883 he married Pauline Widenmann, their common music interests forming an obvious bond. When they moved to Division Street from their first home on the corner of Main and William, they set up a studio in the front parlor where they could both give lessons.

The Kempfs' house was conveniently located: children could walk to their lessons from all over town. The front door was left unlocked so that students could walk in without knocking. If a lesson was still in progress, they would wait their turn on the red sofa. Geraldine Seeback, who was a student of both Kempfs, remembers them as warm and caring, but also very strict. Once, when she did not have her piano lesson prepared, Reuben hit her on the knuckles.

Seeback was a musical prodigy who first sang publicly at age five, standing on three Bibles in church. Her mother paid for her voice lessons by doing the Kempfs' laundry. Seeback still has the metal-wheeled child's wagon, which originally belonged to Paul Kempf, that she used to carry the laundry back and forth. When Seeback finished high school, Pauline Kempf helped arrange for her to go to the Cincinnati Conservatory.

Rueben Kempf organized the Lyra Male Choir to bring town and gown together through the universal language of music. Elsa Kempf served as the group’s mascot.

Besides giving lessons in their studio, the Kempfs were very active musically in the community. Pauline was the first choir director of the Congregational Church, and Reuben was the first organist and choir director at St. Andrew's. He was also music director of the University Glee Club and the Michigan Union Opera, and organist of the Ann Arbor Masonic groups. Because Reuben had connections in both the town and university communities, U-M president James Angell asked him to form a singing society in an attempt to bridge the gap between town and gown. Under Rueben's direction, the group, first called the Beethoven Society and then Lyra Gesangverien (singing society), gave regular concerts for the next thirty-five years.

The Kempfs often entertained, hosting diverse groups from students to dignitaries. A former maid remembers being extra busy during May Festival buying food needed for the many guests. There was always a live-in maid (the present office at Kempf House was the maid's room), and Pauline's mother, the widowed Mrs. Widenmann, also helped with the cooking. She particularly excelled at baking and noodle making. Edith Kempf remembers that “there was lots of good food, all made from scratch."

Reuben Kempf died in 1945 at age eighty-six. Pauline stayed on until her death in 1953, when the house was sold to Mr. and Mrs. Earl V. Parker. When Earl Parker died in 1969, the newly created Historic District Commission spearheaded a movement to convince the city to buy the house.

Today, thanks mainly to the efforts of Edith Kempf, the music studio has been almost entirely re-created, complete with the famous grand piano (which has only eighty-five keys, three less than the modern ones), the red couch, the two mirrors that Pauline's voice students used to check their posture and their mouth formations, Reuben's desk, a music stand, and the Lyra flag. Even the prints of Germany on the walls were there during the Kempfs' occupancy.

The sitting room, decorated to be contemporary with the studio, holds a horsehair couch from Reuben Kempfs parents' farm (in perfect condition because only the minister was allowed to sit on it) and an Ann Arbor Allmendinger organ.

The area around the Broadway Bridge was once home to factories, junkyards, and hoboes. Its transformation into three riverfront parks is one of the city's longest-running sagas of civic improvement.

The Broadway Bridge, connecting the central part of Ann Arbor with the north, spans the Huron River at a historically busy spot. Potawatomi Indian trails converged to ford the river there. When John Allen and Elisha Rumsey came west from Detroit in 1824, looking for a place to found a town, they, too, crossed the river at this spot. The first bridge was built just four years later. Replaced and widened several times since, it was most recently redone in 2004.

In 1830, Anson Brown, a pioneer who settled in Ann Arbor after working on the Erie Canal, dammed the river upstream from the bridge. Brown, his brother-in-law, Edward Fuller, and Colonel Dwight Kellogg used the flow from the dam to power a flour mill located just west of the bridge. Brown had grandiose ideas about turning the north side into the center of the city, but he died in the cholera epidemic of 1834, before his dreams could be realized. In 1839 William Sinclair purchased the property, repairing the mill and installing new machinery. His new setup worked so well that after the 1841 harvest he shipped to New York, via the Erie Canal, 8,112 barrels of flour--a record for Ann Arbor up to that time.

Sinclair's mill was destroyed by a fire in 1860, but he quickly rebuilt it and was back in business the next season. The next owners were the Swift family, first Franklin, then his son John Marvin. In 1892 the mill became part of a conglomerate. The Ann Arbor Milling Company, later called the Michigan Milling Company, bought it, along with several other mills in the area, and renamed it Argo. In 1903 they improved the mill and built a new dam, but again, fire claimed the mill. They rebuilt the mill, but with the development of cheaper steam power, water mills were increasingly hard put to compete. The dam and mill were sold in 1905 to the Eastern Michigan Edison company (later Detroit Edison), which was buying up all the water power along the river to generate electricity. Edison built a generating station that is still there; though it no longer produces power, it is still used as a transmission substation.

Beginning in 1866, the Sinclair Mill also powered the Agricultural Works, on the east side of the bridge (power was transmitted through a tunnel under the bridge). Founded by Lewis Moore, the Agricultural Works made all kinds of farm implements--plows, seed drills, mowing machines, hay tedders, rakes, straw cutters, corn shelters--and shipped them all over the country.

Finding a ready market in the days when most of the country's population was farmers, the Agricultural Works expanded throughout the century until it covered three acres, with a main building, wood shop, machine shop, painting building, lumberyard, and a foundry near the river. As it grew, it supplemented water power with steam power; by 1896, the promotional Headlight magazine declared it "one of the most important manufacturing enterprises of the city." But national manufacturers gradually took over the agricultural market, and the company closed in 1903. The Ann Arbor Machine Company, which made hay presses, occupied the premises for the next twenty years, using the same buildings. In 1924 Detroit Edison bought the site to build the garage and storage yard that are still there today.

Mills and factories weren't the only industries drawn to "Lower Town," as the area north of the river was known. In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, six slaughterhouses were built on the floodplain between the river and Canal Street. (Canal, although called a street, was "really an alley," according to Thelma Graves, who grew up nearby on Wall Street; residents of Wall used Canal to reach their back entrances.)

Though the last slaughterhouse closed in 1915, the floodplain remained heavily industrialized. In the 1920's, it was home to a concrete company, David A. Friedman's junkyard, a wire products company, the Leever and Leever lumber company, and Otto Earth's tin and upholstery shops.

Meanwhile, the south bank of the river was dominated by the railroad. The Michigan Central reached Ann Arbor in 1839, and the first train station was built on the west side of the bridge, near the present Amtrak station. In 1886 a new stone station, now the Gandy Dancer, was erected on the east side. But the handsome station had some less-than-attractive neighbors. In 1898, the land between the river and the original railroad station was purchased by the Ann Arbor Gas Company to build a new plant and storage tank. The plant heated coal (or, in later years, oil) in a vacuum to create a flammable gas that was piped into homes for cooking and lighting. The foul-smelling gasworks remained in operation until natural gas pipelines reached Michigan in 1955. Purchased by MichCon in 1938, the gas plant site is now the company's service center for Washtenaw County and parts of Wayne and Oakland counties.

By the turn of the century, manufacturing industries were being replaced by power industries, but all four corners around the bridge were still given over to commercial and industrial uses. By then, however, Ann Arborites were beginning to think that parks would be a more enjoyable use of the riverside--and present a better picture to the outside world.

Mayor Royal S. Copeland, in a 1902 address to city council, bemoaned the fact that "to enter Lower Town it is necessary to cross the smoky Detroit Street bridge [today the Broadway Bridge], [and] traverse a long dusty street with the gas tanks on one side and foul smelling dump heaps on the other."

The junk-strewn field east of the bridge was a particular sore point, because it was the first view of Ann Arbor to greet passengers arriving at the train station. Calling it "a blot upon an otherwise fair page," Copeland went on to paint a more attractive alternative: "How different it would be if the ground east of the street were a green sward, garnished with flowers and shrubs! How much more convenient for the Fifth Ward [Lower Town] if they could follow a gravel footpath through that Riverside park, climb a flight of steps to a narrow bridge over the tracks and find themselves at the foot of State Street."

Copeland appointed a committee, including the city attorney, empowered to negotiate with the property's owners. He also announced that an anonymous donor had offered to pay half the costs of condemnation and purchase of the land. The donor, he said, "believes our city is damaged in the eyes of the traveling public by the unsightly and disgraceful outlook from the [train] car windows." Copeland was confident that the $1,000 appropriated in city funds would finish the job and the rest could be used to improve the park.

The committee had meetings, met with property owners, and had the city attorney write letters; but in three years it did not make much progress in obtaining the land, which was owned by eight different people. In October 1905, the committee reported that "some of the persons interested in said lands refused to name any price for the same and others have placed a value upon their lands far in excess of what your committee is willing to recommend the council to accept. Your committee is of the opinion that said lands can only be acquired by condemnation proceedings." With the exception of some land near the station that the Michigan Central Railroad donated, the properties were obtained by condemnation. Pleased with their work, the committee reported that "by removing the unsightly and ill-smelling dump heap of tin cans and dead cats, the traveling public will form a better opinion of our city." On April 30, 1907, the site was formally named "Riverside Park."

The original Riverside Park all cleaned up.

Although the acquisition of Riverside Park was touted as a major accomplishment, little was done to develop it. Ann Arborites who were around before World War II say that Island Drive Park and West Park were the places to go; they remember using Riverside Park only as a cut-through, especially from Lower Town to campus. Jack Bauer Sr., who grew up in Lower Town, scoffs at the idea that it was ever even a park, saying, "No one ever went there. It was nothing but an opening." Indeed, it was so little used that when the park across the river on the north side was developed, it appropriated the name "Riverside Park," and Mayor Copeland's creation became known as "Hobo Park."

Hobo Park got its name because, as the closest public land to the railroad station, it was a favorite place for hoboes to hang out. Hoboing--riding the rails without benefit of a ticket, looking for work--probably started as early as railroading itself; but it became a real phenomenon in the 1890's and peaked in the Depression. Hoboes separated themselves from tramps by their willingness to work. Ann Arbor was a likely destination because the presence of the university meant work was somewhat easier to find here than in most Michigan cities.

Hoboes arrived by train, mostly in the warmer months, and fanned out all over the city. Older Ann Arborites, wherever they lived, remember hoboes coming to their doors and being given some food, sometimes in exchange for odd jobs, such as shaking out rugs, cleaning out furnace ashes, spading the garden, or mowing the lawn. Although some hoboes were tough characters, many were well mannered and clean. Some reportedly even had college educations. They were rarely invited inside, but ate their food on the back steps or in the backyard.

Jack Bauer recalls that when he visited his aunt on Swift Street in the 1930s, he saw the police come to break up fights among the hoboes camped along the overgrown millrace between the Argo dam and powerhouse. Hoboes also slept farther east at Dow Field--the bottom of what is today the Arboretum but was then a university dump--and, of course, at Hobo Park. Bauer cut across the "park" in the 1930s to get to St. Thomas School, and he was often chased. He was young and strong and could run fast, but if he was worried, he would go into the railroad station and ask Mr. Mynning, a friend of the family who worked in the mail office there, to escort him to the bridge.

World War II put a stop to most hoboing, since able-bodied men who weren't drafted could enlist or find a factory job. When Betty Gillan Seward began working at the train station in 1941, there were only a few hoboes left, she recalls, and "they slept, whenever they could, in boxcars, but never in the station. Usually they slept on the banks of the river behind the station."

The hoboes never left altogether. In 1976, when photographer Fred Crudder took his now wife, Sally, on their first date, he suggested going to Hobo Park, by then officially called "Broadway Park." She thought he was kidding, but when they arrived, sure enough, there were some people sleeping under newspapers there. For years after that, early morning walkers sometimes found homeless people camped in Broadway Park, and one latter-day hobo maintained a wood-and-canvas shack in the woods above the Argo millrace in the 1990s.

The new Riverside Park north of the river was started for the same reasons as the original one: to clean up a blighted area that by then was being used as an unofficial dump. The new park, too, was pieced together parcel by parcel, although in this case city officials were more successful in persuading people to sell or donate their property. In a nine-year period from 1925 to 1934, the parks commission, under the leadership of Eli Gallup, acquired sixteen parcels of land totaling eight acres located between the river and Canal Street.

During the Depression, Gallup enlisted workers from the federal WPA jobs program to clean the site, remove piles of rubbish, and tear down old buildings. To fill in the low, marshy floodplain, Gallup used waste material from construction projects, like ashes and rubbish. He had the WPA workers remove the topsoil--which was of good quality though quite stony in places--throw it into ridges, and fill in the resulting trenches with any available material. After the land was raised, the topsoil was replaced and the park developed. Gallup put in a regular supervised playground--much appreciated by residents on the north side of the river--two tennis courts, and a baseball field. For drinking water, he ran a pipe out from the Donovan School.

The third park abutting the Broadway Bridge, Argo Park, was the last to be completed. In 1907 the city bought the land just north of the present Argo Pond canoe livery for a municipal beach. The rest of the tract, including the dam and the millrace, was not acquired until 1963. Detroit Edison first invited the city to buy its holdings along the Huron River, including the Argo, Barton, and Geddes dams, in 1959, but the purchase had to wait until 1962, when voters approved a bond issue to finance it.

Today DTE (Mich Con and Detroit Edison) is the last industrial user remaining near the Broadway Bridge, although they no longer produce power there. What will replace their building when, or if, they choose to sell is a topic of lively speculation. Housing is one perennial favorite suggestion. Though the idea would have seemed ridiculous a century ago, the gradual transformation of the surrounding area into attractive parks makes housing a very real possibility.

Riverside Park, once slaughterhouses and factories, is now the "green sward" that Copeland envisioned. During the school year, St. Thomas and Gabriel Richard schools use the park as a practice field, while in the summer numerous teams enjoy the baseball diamond. Argo Park, linked with Riverside by a pedestrian bridge, provides an attractive hiking area right in the city with the river on one side and the millrace on the other.

As part of the recent Broadway Bridge project, the city cleaned up the original Riverside Park on the south side of the river and put in benches, plantings, walks and lights. Finally, a hundred years later, Mayor Copeland’s vision is coming true.

[Photo caption from book]: A hobo cooks dinner near the Broadway Bridge during the Depression. For years, the city park behind the rail¬road station was known as "Hobo Park." “Courtesy Bentley Historical Library”

[Photo caption from book]: Before Eli Gallup created Riverside Park in the 193O's, the river’s north bank was a maze of small work shops and impromptu dumps. “Courtesy Al Gallup”

On the eve of World War I, German Americans Built a virtual Palace of ethnic solidarity

The Schwaben Halle at 215 South Ashley was sold several years ago, but the Schwaebischer Unterstuetzungs Verein (“Swabian Support Association”), the group that built it, is still alive and kicking. Better known simply as the “Schwaben Verein,” the club was founded in 1888 by recent German immigrants. Although the local German community is by now pretty well assimilated, the Verein survives, in large part because of the fun the members and their families have sharing their common ancestry. “Eat, drink, and dance. What else do Germans do?” laughs member Walter Metzger. At the spring Bockbierfest, says president Art French, “the food is different, but we still eat and drink and dance. Any excuse for a party.”

Swabians, who take their name from a medieval kingdom in southern Germany, began immigrating to Ann Arbor as early as 1825, usually when there were economic or political problems in Germany. The 1880 immigrants were escaping the effects of Bismarck’s rule, as well as an economic depression, choosing Ann Arbor because Germans from earlier migrations were already here. But although other Germans in town helped them get established, the new arrivals felt a need for mutual support in the new country.

Tailor Gottlieb Wild, who was born near Stuttgart and served a four-year apprenticeship before coming to America, brought the idea of a Swabian club to Ann Arbor. His story, as related in Samuel Beakes’s 1906 Past and Present of Washtenaw County, is like that of many other Ann Arbor German immigrants: “He came to America when but seventeen years of age, and made his way to Ann Arbor, having relatives in this city, who had come to the New World in 1835.”

In 1887 Wild moved to Toledo to work as a journeyman tailor. He became involved with a Swabian social group there, and when he returned to Ann Arbor the following year to open his own shop, he encouraged his fellow Swabians to form their own association. (Wild’s tailor shop, like the Schwaben Verein, proved impressively durable--it evolved into a popular campus-area men’s store that survived until 1988.)

The Schwaben Verein’s official purpose was to provide a primitive kind of mutual health and life insurance: members paid a $1 initiation fee and 30¢ a month in dues, and in times of need the group would help out with hospital or burial expenses. But from the beginning, the real attraction was the camaraderie. “It was a way to be with people who spoke their language, followed their customs, who had the same outlook on life,” explains president French.

The group’s first meeting was held June 22, 1888, on the second floor of Wild’s tailor shop. Business was conducted entirely in German, a tradition that would continue for nearly a century. Many of Ann Arbor’s retail establishments were owned and run by Germans, so as the group grew they easily found other places to meet. They moved from Wild’s shop to rooms in Michael Staebler’s hotel, the American House (now the Earle, at Washington and Ashley), and when that in turn proved inadequate, to rented rooms above Arnold’s Jewelry Store on Main Street.

In 1894, just six years after its founding, the group was financially secure enough to purchase a building, the former Wagner’s blacksmith shop on Ashley between Washington and Liberty. All seven members of the executive committee signed the mortgage. They reserved the second floor for their meetings and rented the downstairs to blacksmith Henry Otto (who was better known locally as the leader of Otto’s Band).

In 1908 the Schwaben Verein bought a second property: the Relief Fire Company Park, south of Madison and west of what is now Fifth Street, then on the outskirts of the city. (Since 1888 the fire department had been changing over to professional firefighters, and volunteer companies were phased out.) The park was used for open-air events. “Parades and picnics were memorable occasions,” the Ann Arbor News reported. “Entire families turned out, the children to enjoy games and sports while their elders talked on and on about the ‘old country’ and the occurrences in their lives in their adopted land.”

Hardware store owner Christian Schlenker, who was president of the Verein at the time, is credited with spearheading the construction of a permanent headquarters. “Entirely due to his persistence and influence, they decided to build the new Swabian Hall,” W. W. Florer states in volume 1 of Early Michigan Settlements (1941).

The key was a deal between the group and Mack & Co., then Ann Arbor’s largest department store, at 220–224 South Main. Walter Mack agreed to rent most of the planned structure, including the two upper floors and part of the basement. Mack, though the son of a German immigrant, was not a member of the Verein (“Mr. Mack was never affiliated with any fraternal organizations but has concentrated his energies and attention upon his business interests and family life,” writes Beakes), and he did not help with construction costs. However, he agreed to build a steam heating plant, pay fire insurance for the whole building, and provide water for the sprinkler system.

Construction of the Schwaben Verein, 1914.

In May 1914 the blacksmith shop was torn down, and construction began on the new building. Local historian Carol Mull, who has done extensive research on the building, finds it probable that some of the brick from the blacksmith shop was reused in the new building. Architect George Scott designed the Schwaben Halle, and Julius Koernke, a German immigrant who had settled in Ann Arbor in 1890, served as contractor.

Enclosed walkways connected the third and fourth floors with Mack’s Main Street store, and the buildings’ basements were joined by a tunnel. Mack used the basement for storage and the upstairs for a dining room, a beauty shop (the holes from the plumbing were still there when the Verein sold the building), and a big toy display at Christmas. The Ashley Street storefront was rented to Hagen and Jedel Men’s Clothing.

The Verein reserved the second floor for its own activities. A large front room was used for dancing and banquets; it had a stage at one end for plays and performances. There was a dressing room behind the stage and beyond that the bar and kitchen. Beautiful woodwork, tin ceilings, a fireplace, and a stained-glass front window with the Schwaben name on it all added to the hall’s beauty. In 1988, to celebrate the Verein’s hundredth anniversary, some of the members donated stained glass for the side windows and transoms.

During World War I, when other German groups were fading out or switching to English, the Schwaben Verein kept meeting and didn’t experience any overt harassment. “The society subscribed to war loans throughout the war and helped in every deserving war charity brought to its notice,” wrote the Ann Arbor News in 1922. While admitting a little defensively that the group was “still carrying its German name,” the paper insisted that “the organization is essentially American and stands for everything which is American.”

The war and subsequent anti-immigrant fervor, as well as Prohibition, cut into the activities of many German groups, but the Schwaben Verein emerged stronger than ever. Helping German war victims from the Württemberg area gave it an additional reason for existing. And although Prohibition lowered attendance at the park, the club met the challenge by selling the land and using the proceeds to help pay off its Ashley Street building.

Member John Hanselmann bought the park and divided it into house lots. The club continued having picnics at Hanselmann’s Grove on Waters Road off Ann Arbor–Saline Road or at members’ farms, such as Walter Aupperle’s property on Frains Lake Road. (The German Park organization on Pontiac Trail is a different group, although there is some overlap in membership.)

In 1922, just eight years after finishing the Halle, the group was able to celebrate paying off the mortgage. “On the eve of Thanksgiving day a gathering of 100 men stood in a darkened room of the Schwaben hall and in hushed stillness watched the mortgage on the building disappear in flames,” reported the Ann Arbor News. “The flickering light of the flames showed up solemn faces and glimpses of the Star Spangled banner which decorate the room. As the last shred of paper fell and the flame died out lights flooded the room and 100 voices rose in acclamation.”

The Verein paid off its mortgage just in time to be ready for the next wave of immigrants. “They came from the very same villages as the men of the eighties and of former decades,” writes Florer. “A revival of interest in plays, concerts, and other social activities began and has continued ever since.”

One of the 1920s immigrants was Gottlob Schumacher, who until his death in 2001 was the group’s oldest living member. Schumacher first visited the Schwaben Halle three days after his arrival in Ann Arbor in October 1923. Staying at the American House, Schumacher was introduced to a fellow Swabian named Gottlob Gross, who brought him over to the club. In a 1988 interview Schumacher recalled that since it was Sunday the hall was supposed to be closed, so the men went up the back stairs from the alley. They rang a bell, and the barman looked through a sliding window before letting them in. Although it sounds like a scene from a Prohibition-era movie, Schumacher insisted that the bar offered nothing stronger than hard cider--although even that was illegal during Prohibition.

Schumacher officially joined the Schwaben Verein three months later. One of his favorite activities was acting in plays the group wrote and performed in Swabian dialect. Walter Metzger, whose parents emigrated from Swabia, recalls that a huge crowd always attended these plays, put on near Christmas. “They filled up the Schwaben Halle, sitting in folding chairs and the benches around the side,” he says. The programs would consist of two or three short, sitcom-like sketches: “There would be a married couple. They would bicker and make fun of each other,” Metzger explains. “Then others would come in--neighbors, relatives. They were humorous. You had to laugh the entire time.” In between the plays, the audience could buy sandwiches and beer at the bar.

The cast were all amateurs, just members who enjoyed that sort of thing—Schumacher, Anton Vetter, Hans Meier, Martin Rempp. Bill and Fred Wente, who worked at Herz Paint Store, did the sets. Bill Staebler, who owned a beauty shop, did the makeup, and members’ wives sewed the costumes. Metzger was just a boy then, but he was put to work with his older brother Hans, who could drive, delivering advertising placards to outlying towns such as Manchester and Bridgewater that had large German populations. Metzger also served as a curtain puller and once even had a nonspeaking role.

In 1938 the Schwaben Verein had been in existence for fifty years. One hundred and fifty members and guests celebrated the anniversary at a banquet at the city’s biggest hotel, the Allenel (where the Courthouse Square apartments are now). After dinner they reconvened at the hall for a program that included music by the Lyra Männerchor (men’s chorus), followed by dancing and a radio program of Swabian folk tunes and songs--broadcast live via shortwave from Stuttgart especially for the occasion.

The plays stopped during World War II, but the group weathered the war, just as it had survived World War I. It no doubt helped that many of the young men leaving to fight the war were themselves of German ancestry. Although local German Americans were firmly on the Allied side, they didn’t forget their relatives in Germany. “We had our own CARE program, helping individually in areas we knew about,” explains French.

The war triggered one last influx of German immigrants. The Schwaben Verein continued a full schedule of activities, including Kirchweihe (literally a church dedication festival, observed as a harvest festival, with strings of radishes, beets, turnips, and cabbage serving as decorations), a children’s Christmas party, an anniversary dinner, and the Bockbierfest, featuring a special beer traditionally made for Lent. For years a group of women, headed by Karoline Schumacher, who was chef at the Old German when she and her husband owned the restaurant from 1936 to 1946, would make and serve such German specialties as liver sausage, roulades, goulash, spaetzle, sauerkraut, and German potato salad. And of course beer was the drink of choice for most events.

German bands from Toledo or Detroit with names like Langecker’s Wanderers, Tyrolers, Dorimusikanten, or Eric Nybower provided the music for dancing. Sometimes the Schuhplattler, a group affiliated with German Park, would perform traditional German dances. For its centennial in 1988, the Verein imported a band from Germany named Contrast.

People who regularly attended these functions became very close. Art French met his wife, then Kathy Rempp, at a Schwaben event. And Kathy’s parents, Mina and Martin Rempp (who, like his son-in-law, was a long-term president), met at a Schwaben event in Toledo.

“We still call each other our extended family,” says Marianne Rauer. “We are our own psychiatrists.” Fritz Kienzle, the group’s flag bearer, once dropped out for three and a half years but missed it so much he went back. “You’ve got to have that gravy on your potatoes,” he explains.

The Schwaben Verein has changed as the local German community has become more assimilated. Originally members had to be from Swabia, but later the group accepted anyone who spoke German. Today, members just have to have some German connection.

Most in the group now are American born, although there are still fourteen German-born members. “The meetings were mostly in German until about twenty years ago,” says French. “There are less and less who can converse in German, so we have to keep translating in order not to keep them out. But we still open and close the meetings in German.”

Though the Verein is still officially an all-male group, in the 1970s, with no change in the rules, women started coming to the hall during meetings. Wives of members who drove their husbands to the meetings, or who just didn’t want to be left alone at home, came up and waited in the bar area, visiting and playing cards until their husbands finished the meeting and joined them.

After Mack & Co. closed during the Great Depression, the first floor was rented to other tenants, including a bar called Mackinaw Jack’s, which left the facade covered with fake logs. Most recently, Hi-Fi Studio, an electronics repair business, packed the space with old TVs and stereos. Even the second-floor meeting room was rented out when the Verein wasn’t using it. Over the years it’s hosted everything from the local Jewish congregation (in the early 1920s) to sports clubs, sister city events, and weddings and other private parties.

French says the group currently has seventy members, of whom twenty or twenty-five regularly attend bimonthly meetings. The average age is about fifty. “Lots join with their dads,” explains Harriet Holzapfel, whose husband, son, and father-in-law were all members. “There’s an age gap,” says Rauer, “but once they are married and have kids they come back. They want their kids to have the Christmas party and family events.”

But the group’s desire to keep the large hall waned, especially since the rest of the building wasn’t producing the rental income it once had. Art French says he’d been looking for a long time, but “I couldn’t get tenants. Everyone wanted to buy—no one wanted to rent.” So in March 2001 the Schwaben Halle was sold to Bill Kinley of Phoenix Contractors and Ann Arbor architects Dick Mitchell and John Mouat.

The new owners removed the fake log-cabin siding from the front of the building and restored the facade as closely as possible to its original look. Inside they made changes to meet current standards, such as wider, fire-code-compliant stairs and an elevator for handicap access.

Meanwhile, the Schwaben Verein members meet just down the street at Hathaway’s Hideaway. “We’re still active, still accepting new members, we still have the activities. We just don’t have a building,” says French. For big events they rent space at either Links at Whitmore Lake or Fox Hills golf course on North Territorial.

Many in Ann Arbor’s German community were sad to see a building that encompassed so much of their past sold. “It was like the soul of the German community, such a beautiful place,” says Marianne Rauer. But Fritz Kienzle points out that the Schwaben Verein was always more that just a building. “People said when you sell you lose all your heritage,” he says. “But the heritage is in you, in your memories.”

In the years before the Civil War, a handful of local abolitionists helped fugitive slaves make their way to freedom in Canada.

A few days since we had the rare pleasure, in connection with many of our friends in this place, of bestowing our hospitalities upon six of our brethren, who tarried with us some sixteen hours to refresh themselves, on their journey to a land of freedom.
--Signal of Liberty, May 12, 1841

The Signal of Liberty was the weekly newspaper of the Anti-Slavery Party of Michigan. "This place" was Ann Arbor, where editor Guy Beckley produced the paper from an office on Broadway. The Signal of Liberty was one of a series of Michigan papers that in the years before the Civil War called for the abolition of slavery in the United States. On May 12, 1841, it also provided a rare glimpse into Ann Arborites' practical efforts on behalf of escaped slaves: an article by Beckley and Theodore Foster recording an escape on the Underground Railroad.

An issue of the Signal of Liberty, Ann Arbor's abolitionist newspaper.

"Believing as we do that it is morally wrong to continue our fellow beings in involuntary servitude, it is with the utmost pleasure that we aid and assist them in their flight from southern kidnappers," Beckley and Foster wrote. They described the fugitives as "from twenty-one to thirty years of age--in good health and spirits and apparently much delighted with the prospect of a new home, where the sound of the whip and clanking of chains will no longer grate upon their ears and mangle and gall their limbs."

According to a follow-up story on May 19, the escaped slaves successfully completed the final leg of their journey to freedom in Canada. "We take great pleasure in announcing to our readers that they have all landed, as we intended they should, safe on British soil," Beckley and Foster wrote. Today's Canada was still a group of British possessions then, and slavery had been abolished in all British territories eight years earlier, in 1833. In Michigan, slavery was illegal, but slaveholders still had the right to apprehend escapees; in what is now Ontario, however, the attorney general had ruled that any person on Canadian soil was automatically free.

That promise made Canada the destination of choice for blacks who escaped slavery in the South. The Underground Railroad was a network of sympathetic northerners who helped the fugitives on their way once they reached the free states. There are several stories about the origin of the Underground Railroad's name, but all point to situations in which slave hunters had been hot on the trail of fugitives, only to have the prey disappear as completely as if they had gone underground. Extending the metaphor, the escapees were referred to as "passengers" or sometimes "baggage," while the helpers along the way were "conductors" and the stopping points "stations."

Susan Hussey, the daughter of Battle Creek conductor Erastus Hussey, explained in a 1912 interview, "Passengers over the Underground Railroad were of one class--fugitive slaves. They traveled in one direction--toward Canada. There was no demand for return trip tickets."

Two of the railroad's "lines" crossed in Ann Arbor, and from the Signal of Liberty article and other sources we know that fugitives passed through here on their way to Canada. But beyond that, there is much we do not know and probably never will.

Of the millions of slaves held in the southern states, only a tiny fraction escaped to freedom. There is no record of how many reached Canada; the generally accepted figure is about 40,000. Yet this comparative handful of people played a critical role in bringing the tensions between North and South to a head. It was one thing for northerners to know in an abstract way that southerners kept slaves. It was quite another to be compelled by federal law to send fellow human beings back into servitude.

"Worse than horse thieves"

A very early act of the U.S. Congress, in 1793, set down procedures for identifying escaped slaves and returning them to their “owners". As the abolitionist movement gained strength in the North, a number of states passed laws intended to hinder enforcement of the federal "fugitive slave" law. Nonetheless, helping a slave escape remained a federal crime until 1864.

Presumably for that reason, Beckley and Foster were vague about where the "six brethren" stayed and exactly who assisted them. Had the helpers been caught, they would have faced fines or jail sentences. The fugitives would have been returned to slavery in the South, where they would probably have been severely beaten in a warning to other slaves.

Beckley and Foster also knew that their neighbors in Ann Arbor were divided over abolition. An Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1836, and some religious groups, particularly Quakers and Wesleyan Methodists, were devoted to the cause. Ann Arbor's First Congregational Church was founded in 1847 by former members of First Presbyterian, who broke away in part because they wanted to take a stronger stand against slavery. But there was also a significant number who were not supporters of the cause.

"Our neighbors accuse us of being 'worse than horse thieves,' because we have given to the colored man a helping hand in his perilous journey," Beckley and Foster wrote. "We are also held up as transgressors of the law and having no regard for the civil authority."

As late as 1861, a speech by Parker Pillsbury, a noted abolitionist, was broken up by a mob. Speaking at a church at 410 North State Street (still standing, the building is now a private residence), Pillsbury had to escape out a back window, followed by his audience. The attack so unnerved other area churches that most of them closed their doors to another anti-slavery speaker, Wendell Phillips, when he came to town later that year. (The Congregationalists agreed to let him speak, but only after a special vote of the trustees.)

Despite those mixed feelings, no record has been found that Ann Arbor residents ever returned a fugitive slave. Slaves were in more danger from their former owners, and from bounty hunters, who sought to collect large rewards for their capture. The situation worsened after 1850, when a new Fugitive Slave Act was passed. It swept away all due process for blacks accused of being runaway slaves, increased penalties for helping escapees, and made it a crime for local law enforcers not to return slaves.

Even free blacks, of whom there were 231 in Washtenaw County in 1850, were not safe from the slave hunters. Laura Haviland, an abolitionist from Adrian, wrote about one such case in her 1881 memoir, A Woman's Life. In the 1840s, Haviland writes, she helped a fugitive couple named Elsie and William Hamilton. The Hamiltons left Adrian after their former owner appeared and tried to recapture them, moving to several other places, including "a farm near Ypsilanti for a few years." According to Haviland, the Hamiltons had left Ypsilanti by 1850, but their former owner, believing they were still there, sent his son north to capture them. The son didn't find the Hamiltons, but he did find a family of free blacks, the David Gordons, who came close to the description he had of the Hamilton family. Claiming the Gordons were the Hamiltons, the slave owner's son demanded their arrest. Antislavery activists helped the Gordons confirm their freedom.

Paths to freedom

Most of the fugitives who passed through Michigan came from states directly to the south. (Slaves escaping from the more easterly southern states could go through Pennsylvania and New York, or on a ship along the coast.) "The fugitives came from various localities in the slave states, but most of those who passed on this line were from Kentucky, some were from Missouri and occasionally from the far south," reminisced Nathan Thomas, the conductor from Schoolcraft, south of Kalamazoo, in a letter he wrote in 1882. In another 1841 article, Foster and Beckley mention a fugitive "from the lead mines of Missouri."

The line Thomas was referring to went east and west across the state, roughly along the route of today's 1-94. Fugitives usually came north from Quaker settlements in Indiana to Cassopolis, near Niles, where there was another Quaker settlement. They then traveled east through Battle Creek, Jackson, and Ann Arbor. A north-south route came from Toledo (where James Ashley, founder of the Ann Arbor Railroad, was an active member) to Adrian, an important hub where Haviland and a group of fellow Quakers ran a school, the Raisin Institute, for students of all colors. Refugees traveled from Adrian to Clinton and thence through Saline to Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti. From Washtenaw County, fugitives went on to Detroit, where they would cross the Detroit River at night in rowboats. Later, when the Detroit River was too closely watched, the route shifted northward to cross the St. Clair River.

By the time the fugitives hooked up with the Underground Railroad, they would have done the hardest part by themselves: getting out of the South. "Their travel with some rare exceptions was entirely by night and generally on foot until they passed from the slave to the free state," wrote Thomas. "[They] generally received friendly aid to only a limited extent from persons residing in the slave states. But success depended mainly upon their own efforts. They obtained food at night from the Negro quarters during their passage through the south."

Once fugitives arrived in free states, help was easier to get, although they still had to avoid bounty hunters. "They did not bring much property with them; and their clothing was generally barely sufficient to cover them from suffering. The most destitute cases were relieved by their friends after their arrival in the free states," Thomas recalled. Stations were at intervals that could be covered on foot in one night, usually every fifteen or sixteen miles. There conductors could hide the refugees or arrange for others to do so, feed them, and see to their passage to the next station.

Slaves had been escaping during all of their captivity, but the number rose after the War of 1812, when returning soldiers spread the word about how close Canada was. According to Thomas, the line he worked on did not help its first fugitive until 1836. "The second [fugitive] in the fall of 1838 came from the far south through the Quaker settlements in Indiana," Thomas wrote. "He spent the winter with old father Gillet [Amasa Gillet of Sharon Township] in Washtenaw Co. and went to Canada the following spring. Others followed and the underground railroad was gradually established through the state." According to Thomas the line had no overall president, but the management was entrusted to one person in each area. He went on to list them, including Guy Beckley in Ann Arbor.

Erastus Hussey of Battle Creek, interviewed in 1885, explained that he was recruited as a conductor in 1840. He named the other major conductors on his line, including those in Washtenaw: "At Dexter we had Samuel W. Dexter and his sons. At Scio was a prominent man, Theodore Foster, father of Seymour Foster of Lansing. At Ann Arbor was Guy Beckley, editor of the Signal of Liberty, the organ of the Liberty party [an antislavery party that ran candidates in 1840 and 1844], who published the paper in connection with Theodore Foster. At Geddes, was John Geddes, after whom the town was named and who built a large flouring mill there."

Among the places slaves might have hid is Samuel Dexter’s mansion just outside the village of that name.

Turning to secondary sources, we can add more names to the list of participants. Starting in 1892, Wilbur Siebert, a professor of history at Ohio State, interviewed as many survivors of the Underground Railroad as he could find. His 1898 book, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, includes a list of stationmasters by county. For Washtenaw he lists, besides those already mentioned, Moses Bartlett, Ira Camp, Joseph Fowler, Jotham Goodell, Harwood, John Lowy (probably the afore¬mentioned John Lowry), and Ray. Chapman's 1881 History of Washtenaw County adds more: Asher Aray, Richard Glasier, James Morwick, Sylvester Noble, Russell Preston, and Eber White. Research by Carol Mull, underground railroad historian, has revealed that Rray” and “Asher Aray” were the same person.

Twentieth-century sources in newspapers, articles, and oral traditions include still more names and places, but many of these are not verified--and people's very fascination with the railroad is largely to blame. Its history combines the drama of life-and-death pursuit with reassuring images of interracial cooperation and white resistance to slavery. Because the idea of the Underground Railroad is so compelling, many stories have been told about it that appear to rest on little more than imaginative speculation.

History and myth

In Ann Arbor's one-time black neighborhood north of Kerrytown, it's common to hear that the Brewery Apartments at the corner of North Fifth Avenue and Summit Street were a stop on the Underground Railroad. Twenty-five years ago, there was even an unsuccessful campaign to locate a museum there. Yet, no nineteenth-century evidence links the building to the railroad. The story appears to have arisen when neighbors noted the cellars extending from the building in the direction of the Michigan Central tracks, and speculated that they might have been dug to smuggle fleeing slaves to and from passing trains. Though escaped slaves occasionally traveled by train, the extensive cellars were built for a much more mundane purpose: storing beer.

There are many similar stories, in which a family tradition or a physical quirk in a building is cited as evidence of participation in the Underground Railroad. Most are probably groundless. When it comes to the Underground Railway, "unfortunately it seems very clear that there's a lot more mythical belief than reality," EMU historian Mark Higbee told the Ann Arbor News in 1996.

"The Underground Railroad is the sort of thing that in the 1880s and 1890s people liked to say they were involved in, or their parents were involved," adds another historian, John Quist. "It's just hard to find contemporary verification and there's a lot of embellishment going on."

The Underground Railroad did exist. Clearly, escaped slaves passed through Washtenaw County, and some were helped by people here. However, it is impossible to go much farther with definite details of when they came, who they were, where they went, how many there were, or where they ended up. Reconstructing the local Underground Railroad is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle when some pieces are missing and the remaining pieces can be put together in several different ways.

In evaluating the historical evidence, first-person accounts written at the time are assumed to be the most accurate source of information. Unfortunately, because of the railroad's clandestine nature, few records were kept. In rare cases, conductors kept notes and hid them, but none have been found in Washtenaw County except for some references in the Signal of Liberty, which are intentionally obscure.

Next in value are accounts written by participants after the fact, including those of Hussey, Thomas, and Haviland. Written many years after the events described, these tales may have been embellished in retelling, but there's nothing to suggest that they were made up out of whole cloth. It adds credibility that the three memoirs do not contradict one another.

Last in the order of reliability are stories passed on by word of mouth and deductions based on physical evidence. But while such stories in themselves prove nothing, they should not automatically be assumed false, either. Like Bible stories used to prompt archaeological digs, they can help direct research in useful ways, even if the original tale is not confirmed.

With specifics so cloudy, trying to assess the size of the Underground Railroad locally is largely guesswork. No nineteenth-century source tried to estimate how many fugitives were helped in Washtenaw County. The nearest number comes from Erastus Hussey, who claims in his memoir to have helped about 1,000 fugitives who reached Battle Creek.

Some of the people Hussey assisted presumably stayed in the free black communities of mid-Michigan. Most, however, would have continued east through Washtenaw County on their way to Canada. Since an unknown additional number arrived by the southern route, it seems reasonable to take 1,000 as a working figure for Washtenaw County as well.

The movement was at its peak from the mid-1830s to the mid-1850s. Dividing the 1,000 figure evenly over that twenty-year period suggests that an average of fifty escaped slaves a year may have passed through Ann Arbor with the aid of the Underground Railroad. But who helped them, and where did they stay?

Conductors on the railway

He was considered by many to be at least a very eccentric character, but as history has shown since, it was the entire American nation that was more eccentric than good, old John Lowry.
—Judge Noah Cheever. describing a Saline farmer active in the Underground Railroad

After the Civil War, many people wanted to claim connections with the Underground Railroad. When the railroad was active, however, only individuals with strong convictions and considerable courage were prepared to aid escaped slaves in defiance of both social convention and federal law. So it's wise to view the lists of local participants compiled after the fact by Siebert and the county history with some caution. Whether from boasting, forgetfulness, or confusion, some names on the lists may be inaccurate. At a minimum, though, they provide a picture of the people who were believed in the late nineteenth century to have been part of the Underground Railroad.

Dr. Charles Lindquist, director of the Lenawee County Museum, has done a lot of research on his county's role in the Underground Railroad. He suggests the best strategy to identify participants is to "find corroborating evidence--if they lived in places supposedly involved, if they were Quakers, if they subscribed to the Signal of Liberty, if they were active in the Anti-Slavery Society.

"It was definitely illegal, so they were very secretive," Lindquist adds. "It was impossible for there to be just one place [for fugitives to stay in each town]. They'd have to have different places, not a pattern, or they'd get caught." Lindquist also notes that it would have been easier to hide in the country than in town.

The list below is an educated guess about the local participants in the two Underground Railroad lines that passed through Washtenaw County, compiled through use of the Siebert and county history lists and Lindquist's rules of thumb.

The East-West Route

Amasa Gillet: When fugitives entered Washtenaw County from the west, Gillet's farm in southern Sharon Township may have been their first stopping point. Nathan says that Gillet sheltered the second person to pass down this line of the railroad. The 1881 county history calls him "an anti-slavery man" and concurs that "his house was known as a station on the 'Underground rail way.'" Gillet was active in the Anti-Slavery Society and was an important member of the local Methodist church.

Samuel Dexter: The founder and namesake of Dexter village is identified as a conductor by Erastus Hussey. Local Quakers enjoyed the irony that the Dexters could entertain visitors on the porch of their southern-style mansion while hiding fugitives inside. The Dexter house, known as Gordon Hall, still stands on Dexter-Pinckney Road just outside the village.

Theodore Foster: Foster's antislavery work is well documented. A schoolmaster and store owner in the hamlet of Scio, where Zeeb Road crosses the Huron River, Foster was an active member of the Anti-Slavery Society, was editor with Guy Beckley of the Signal of Liberty, and was named as a conductor by Hussey. In the 1950s. Foster's grandson, also named Theodore, set down a story he had heard from his father, Seymour, about a game of hide-and-seek when Seymour was a boy. "Some youngsters ran into the basement and attempted to tip over an oversize barrel or hogshead," Foster recounted. "Upon doing so, they were much surprised and frightened to discover a colored man squatting there. The frightened children ran to their mother with tales of their discovery and Mr. Foster's children became aware of the meaning of their father's night rides and calls by strangers at the back door. They often heard someone knock at the door after dark and their father would hitch up the horse and be gone most of the night." The Foster home is no longer there.

Eber White: A farmer and one of the founders of Ann Arbor's First Methodist Church, White lived on what was then the western edge of the city. According to the county history, "in slavery days [he] was a prime mover in the underground railroad, and many a slave after reaching Canada has thanked God for the help given him by Eber White and his trustworthy friends." White's house at 405 Eberwhite (on the corner of Liberty) has been replaced by a modem house; the land he farmed is now the neighborhood around Eberwhite School.

Sylvester Noble: The county history says that Noble was a member of the Underground Railroad, as does his obituary, which states that "during the days of slavery his sympathies were strongly engaged on the side of the oppressed and his house was frequently made a station on the underground railroad." His home at 220 West Huron is no longer standing.

James Morwick: "During slavery days he was a prime mover in the famous Underground Railroad," according to the county history. An architect, Morwick lived at 604 East Washington, in a house that is now a student rental.

Robert Glazier: Glazier (sometimes spelled Glasier) "was considered one of the best 'conductors' on the route," according to the county history. "He has assisted in passing many a slave into Canada where they would be safe from their cruel master. His 'route' lay from Ann Arbor [east] to Farmington and on one occasion he made a trip to Adrian with William Lloyd Garrison." Supporting evidence is that Glazier was a member of the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society and a devout Quaker. Glazier's house, which began as a log cabin, still stands at 3175 Glazier Way.

John Geddes: Hussey names Geddes as a conductor. His role was challenged almost as soon as Hussey's 1885 interview appeared, however, when an Ypsilanti newspaper article asserted that Geddes "never had anything to do with it [the Underground Railroad]." Historian Quist, whose U-M doctoral dissertation looked at antislavery efforts in Washtenaw County, found no record that Geddes was an active abolitionist.

Besides Hussey’s mention, the main other evidence is that Francis Monaghan, who worked for Geddes as a farmhand and bought the property in 1885, passed on to his descendants stories he heard from Geddes about his involvement in the Underground Railroad. But in recent years, both Geddes’ letters and diary have come to light and people who have read them say they contain no references to the underground railroad or abolitionism or slavery or even radical politics.

Guy Beckley published the Signal of Liberty above his brother Josiah’s store in the Huron Block on Broadway.

Guy Beckley: Beckley published the Signal of Liberty from an office above the store of his brother, Josiah Beckely, on Broadway, across the street from the Anson Brown Building on Broadway (which today houses the St. Vincent de Paul store). His home, just a few blocks away at 1425 Pontiac Trail, is the Ann Arbor structure most identified with the antislavery cause; it's where school buses stop on historical field trips. A specific spot for hiding fugitives has never been found in his house, although a back part has been torn down. It's possible that because Beckley was so publicly identified with the Underground Railroad, fugitives were hidden elsewhere if a danger was perceived. An ordained minister, Beckley moved to Ann Arbor in 1839, remaining active in the abolitionist cause until his death in 1847.

Josiah Beckley: A farmer and brick maker, he was supposed to have played a less active role in the anti-slavery movement than his brother, helping mostly with funding. His two Ann Arbor houses are strong possibilities for Underground Railroad sites:

* 1317 Pontiac: Former owner Fran Wright says her deed research established that Josiah Beckley bought the land in 1835 and probably built the house the next year. Present owner Jack Kenny says that there is a hiding place at the back of a downstairs closet big enough for three or four people. Jerry Cantor, who grew up on the north side, said that when he was a boy he was told that fugitive slaves hid in the barn on this property.

* 1709 Pontiac: Former owner Deborah Oakley says that her deed research established that Josiah Beckley bought the land in 1827, the year he came to Ann Arbor, and built the house sometime between 1831 and 1843. Josiah probably built the house in the late 1830s, moving there from 1317 Pontiac. We know he resided there when he died in 1843. Present owner Martha Wallace says there is a false wall in the basement "made with brick the same generation as the house--old and crumbly" that may have concealed a hiding place for fugitive slaves.

The Southern Route

Prince Bennett of Augusta Township is not mentioned in any of the nineteenth-century accounts of the Underground Railroad, but a strong oral tradition suggests that he was a conductor. Barbara McKenzie, Bennett's great-granddaughter, says that she was told that "Underneath his front porch there was a trapdoor that led to a room where you could put runaway slaves." Bennett, whose home on Tuttle Road no longer stands, certainly was an abolitionist: a founder of Augusta's Evangelical Friends Church, he was active in the Anti-Slavery Association, and his obituary describes him as "a prominent anti-slavery man of olden times."

John Lowry: In 1899, Judge Noah Cheever, who had been in Ann Arbor since 1859, published a book called Pleasant Walks and Drives about Ann Arbor. Cheever recommended stopping at the farm of John Lowry [probably the John Lowy listed in Siebert], explaining that "Mr. Lowry's house was one of the stations to the underground railroad and he assisted a great many slaves on their way to Canada. ... Mr. Sellick Wood, lately deceased of our city, told me that when he was a young man he drove a number of loads of fleeing negro slaves from Mr. Lowry's home to the Detroit River and saw that they were safely carried across to Canada." Lowry's house, now gone, stood on the west side of Ann Arbor-Saline Road, near Brassow.

The route to Canada

From Ann Arbor, the next stop to the east was Ypsilanti. A. P. Marshall's Unconquered Souls: The History of the African American in Ypsilanti, includes a discussion of the city's involvement in the Underground Railroad. Marshall says that George McCoy transported fugitives in wagons with false bottoms and gave them shelter in his barn, while Helen McAndrew hid them in either her octagon house or her barn. Both of these homes have been torn down. "The only house we can absolutely verify is the Norris house," Marshall says. Mark Norris lived at 213 North River Street and was a prominent early settler whose role in the Underground Railroad is documented in letters retained by his family. Others have suggested that fugitives were hidden in Ypsilanti's black church, but Marshall is doubtful. "The church was in an old livery stable and didn't have a basement. It's the first place [slave hunters] would look."

Going north out of Ann Arbor, up Pontiac Trail from the Beckley houses, or straight north from the Geddes and Glazier houses, fugitives would pass the hamlet of Salem. While no contemporary evidence has been found that Salem residents aided the fugitives, The History of Salem Township, published in 1976, lists seven possible Underground Railroad sites, based on older documents and stories told by local residents. The hamlet's support for abolition is indisputable: in the 1840 election it led the county in voting for the antislavery Liberty party, giving the abolitionists sixty-three votes, compared with fifty in Ann Arbor and twenty in Ypsilanti.

Guy Beckley's home at 1425 Pontiac Trail.

From Ypsilanti, the former slaves originally traveled east through Plymouth, River Rouge, and Swartzburg to Detroit. When that route became too closely watched, the line shifted northward, passing through a string of towns--Northville, Farmington, Birmingham, Pontiac, Rochester, Utica, Romeo, Richmond, and New Haven--on the way to the St. Clair River. Finally, the fugitives were smuggled across to Canada by boat.

Living legacies

It is estimated that 40,000 former slaves and their families were living in Canada at the time of the Civil War. About half of them eventually moved back to the United States. They came over a period of decades to rejoin family, to return to a warmer climate, or to pursue jobs or education. In her memoir, Laura Haviland mentions a former slave named John White who after emancipation "removed to Ann Arbor, Michigan to educate his children."

Many Ann Arbor families trace their descent to these black Canadians. The local black Elks Lodge, according to member William Hampton, "was formed by a group mostly from Canada." Several well-known historic figures, including Charles Baker, co-owner of the Ann Arbor Foundry, and Claude Brown, who ran a secondhand store in the Main Street building that now houses Laky's Salon, came to Ann Arbor from Canada.

At least three Ann Arbor families have connections with North Buxton, a remarkable settlement in the middle of southwestern Ontario, near Chatham. North Buxton was founded in 1849 by William King, a minister who married the daughter of a southern plantation owner. When King's wife inherited her family's fifteen slaves, King freed them, buying land in Canada for them to resettle. They became the nucleus of a black community whose residents grew a wide range of crops, owned and operated businesses, ran hotels, organized churches, and published a newspaper. Their schools were so good that white people from neighboring communities sent their children there. And they claimed a number of firsts, including the first black Canadian elected to public office.

Ann Arborite Ruth Spann's great-aunt came from North Buxton, and Lydia Morton's great-grandfather lived in nearby Fletcher. Viola Henderson's great-aunt, Mary Ann Shadd Gary, ran a school in Windsor for black refugees. After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made life more dangerous near the border, she moved inland to North Buxton, where in 1853 she became the first black woman in North America to edit a weekly newspaper. After the war, she returned to the United States, where she was the first black woman to graduate from Howard University Law School.

Dwight Walls, pastor of the Greater Shiloh Church of God in Christ in Ypsilanti, is descended from John Freeman Walls, a former slave from North Carolina, and Jane Walls, the white widow of his original master. The Wallses escaped the South, reached Canada by boat from Toledo, and settled in Puce, Ontario. Dwight Walls's grandfather moved to Detroit to work after World War II, but his family still has many Canadian connections. He reports that a number of black Ypsilantians have Canadian roots, including the Bass, Perry, and Kersey families, as well as the Grayer family of his mother.

Descendants of the original settlers still live in North Buxton, although only two families still farm and the children go into Chatham for school. Artifacts from the original settlement, including King's bed and many photographs, can be viewed in the Raleigh Township Centennial Museum. In Puce, Walls's cousins run the John Freeman Historic Site and Underground Railroad Museum, which includes the log cabin his ancestors lived in and the graveyard where they are buried.

Amherstburg, where many fugitives arrived by rowboat, honors their place in black history with the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Centre. These and several other sites--including the homestead of Josiah Henson, the man believed to be the model for Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin--form the African-Canadian Heritage Tour.

Sites in Michigan are harder to find. In Battle Creek, the store where Erastus Hussey once hid runaway slaves is gone, its place noted by a historical marker. Another marker tells the story of the Merritts, a Quaker family who hid slaves. In nearby Schoolcraft, Nathan Thomas's house still stands. Privately owned, it is periodically opened to the public. In Cassopolis, there's a historical marker on the former site of the Quaker meetinghouse, once a key center for fugitives entering from Indiana.

Researchers A. P. Marshall and Charles Lindquist, and Mary Butler, archivist for the Historical Society of Battle Creek, all speak of the frustration of working with such ephemeral evidence. But more information may come to light through a U.S. Parks Service project to identify and mark Underground Railroad sites on which the Guy Beckley home has been listed. The larger than expected attendance at the National Underground Freedom Center, which opened in Cincinnati in 2004, also shows that there is an increasing interest.

The period of slavery is an enormous blot on American history. The Underground Railroad was a heartening exception, in which people of all races worked together to help slaves to freedom. Retelling the story, we celebrate the courage and ingenuity of those who escaped, the kindness of both blacks and whites who helped them on their journey, and the ability of the fugitives to start life over in Canada--and, for many, yet again in the United States.