An end to "dead man's alley"?

When the Ann Arbor Farmers' Market opened in 1919, the vendors brought in their produce by horse and wagon and displayed it around the old courthouse. Little could they have dreamed that someday their celebrations would be handled by an advertising agency, or that a national expert would be called in to advise on their market's future. But in the twenty-first century, that's exactly what's happening: the market's eighty-fifth birthday party this month is being planned by Steppe Solutions, and a master plan is being developed by Johnson Hill Land Ethics, (JHLE) with input from David O'Neil, a Philadelphia-based expert on farmers' markets.

In the late 1930s, WPA crews constructed steel sheds for the market in the old Luick Lumberyard between Fourth and Fifth avenues. The market has hardly changed physically since. With vendors' fees covering basic maintenance and the manager's salary, it has operated fairly independently under various city departments, more recently the city treasury, with some additional oversight by a market board.

That changed in 1999, when the city's parks and recreation department took over the market. Parks staff began looking for ways the space could be improved both as a farmers' market and as a community resource. For example, says planner Jeff Dehring, "we could utilize it the times when the farmers aren't here or rent it for other festivities such as Earth Day or music fests." (The market has hosted Earth Day for the past two years.) Besides making better use of the space, Dehring says, renting the market would bring in revenue that could lessen the economic burden on the vendors.

The one remaining house on the market property was razed after its last occupant, Mary Kokinakes, died in 2002. (Kokinakes and her husband had sold it to the city many years earlier, with the provision that they could live out their lives there.) The time seemed right for reassessing the market's situation.

For the last year and a half, JHLE principals Mark Johnson (son of a cofounder of JJR) and Chet Hill (formerly with the city parks department) have been working with project manager Jamie Brown to develop a plan to use the new space. David O'Neil, who is also working on plans for Detroit's Eastern Market and the Toledo Market, has visited twice. Several of his suggestions--based on his theories that customers like to shop in a circular pattern and that markets need a clearly defined entrance--have been incorporated into the phase 1 plan.

Vendors had assumed that the land where the Kokinakes house stood would be used to extend the market's middle "leg." Because that leg ends in the middle of the market unconnected to anything else, some shoppers avoid it--it's been nicknamed "dead man's alley." But instead, JHLE has suggested that part of the house site be turned into a "bioswale," a planted basin used to collect and filter storm-water runoff from the market. JHLE would solve the problem of "dead man's alley" by removing it, using the space for parking, and replacing the lost stalls with a partial row along Fourth Avenue.

The new layout is supposed to encourage customers to circle the entire market, as well as making the market more visible from Fourth. JHLE proposes equipping the new spaces with the latest market amenities--radiant heat, electricity, water, and phone lines for authorizing credit card payments, as well as deeper parking stalls and wider aisles--and says the changes would result in a net gain of six stalls and five parking spaces.

Other suggestions include adding a historic-style brick entry at both ends of the Detroit Street row, rain barrels at downspouts to collect water for farmers' plants, and customer pickup spaces on Fourth and Detroit. The cost for these improvements, estimated at $400,000 to $500,000, would be paid from un-earmarked park funds, with grant matches if possible. The parks staff also plans to organize a "Friends of Farmers' Market" group that would sell bricks to help raise money.

Later phases could include another twenty or thirty stalls along Fourth Avenue to complete the loop. Another improvement, at present still in the realm of dreams, would be to remove the central parking area and turn it into a parklike space--but only if alternative parking can be found. Asked whether the farmers don't need the parking space, Jamie Brown replies that many markets function fine with a drop-off system. He points out that the vendors on the Detroit Street side already drop off their produce--and that area is considered the best location at the market.

A more immediate change will be the arrival of a new market manager. Louise Wireman, who took over from longtime manager Maxine Rosasco, stepped down in July after two years on the job. A Toledo resident (she was formerly in charge of the Toledo Market), she says that at this point in her life she prefers to work where she lives. "I've attained my goals. I improved the operating systems, hammered out ground rules," she says.

Longtime vendors rent stalls by the year, but assigning coveted "daily" rentals can be tense. Wireman says that she reduced conflicts between farmers and artisans over the daily stalls by listing them strictly on the basis of seniority. At press time, the city parks staff was interviewing potential successors.

The next step is to get input from those directly affected--the annual vendors, the daily vendors, the artisans, the neighbors, Kerry town-area merchants, and the general public. The first group to see the phase 1 plan, the annual vendors, were not overjoyed with it. "I like the existing market as it is," says Alex Nemeth, who has been coming to the market for seventy years. He thinks the main objection was to moving the stalls from the middle aisle to Fourth Avenue.

The market's Eighty-fifth Birthday Bash on August 14 (see Events) will include displays explaining the phase 1 plan and asking for input, as well as a booth to "sell" fund-raising bricks. Live radio coverage is planned, and visitors will be able to view archival photos, listen to live music, and take part in old-fashioned activities, such as making Mr. Potato Heads with vegetables from the market. If all goes well, work on phase 1--or some modification of it suggested by the stakeholders--could begin as early as this winter.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Eighty-five years of the market (counterclockwise from lower right); vendors outside the old courthouse on Fourth Avenue; the current market sheds under construction in the 1930s; grower and customer in the 1950s; JHLE's phascil proposal, which includes a "bioswale" and a new, circular layout.

"Not too many in Ann Arbor lived such a life," says Molly Hunter Dobson of her great-aunt and great-uncle, Carrie and Harry Boyd Earhart. The Earharts' 400-acre estate along the Huron River included a small golf course for "H. B." to practice his swing, forty acres of woods where he went horse­back riding, and formal gardens and a greenhouse where Carrie indulged her love of flowers. Today, most of the estate has disappeared, swallowed up by Concordia College and the Waldenwood subdivision. But the stone-walled mansion the Earharts built in 1936 still stands on Geddes Road near US-23. Newly renovated to serve as Concordia's administrative center, the man­sion and adjoining gardens will reopen with public dedications on June 16 and 22.

Born in 1870, H. B. Earhart made his fortune in the gasoline business. He was the Detroit agent for the White Star Refin­ing Company, a faltering oil company based in Buffalo, New York. Earhart bought the company in 1911 and moved its headquarters to Michigan--just as the automobile industry was taking off. Under his direction, White Star grew into a major enterprise, with a chain of gas stations and its own refinery in Oklahoma. Earhart eventually sold out to Socony Vacuum, later Mobil.

Four years into his retirement, at age sixty-six, Earhart decided to replace the farmhouse where his family had lived since 1920. Earhart's correspondence with his landscape consultants, the famous Olmsted firm of New York, reveals that Carrie Earhart had doubts about the proj­ect. Though she eventually went along with her husband's desire for a big house, she insisted that it be functional rather than gaudy or ostentatious. Their extended fam­ily would use every inch of it, from the basement pool room to the attic theater.

The mansion was designed by Detroit architects Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls, with input from the Olmsted firm. Its clas­sic, simple proportions were enhanced with elegant details that included a slate roof, copper eaves and detailing, and a Pewabic ceramic fountain. Outwardly traditional, the house incorporated the latest in modern technology. Beneath the limestone exterior (hand-chiseled to simulate age), its struc­ture was steel and concrete. It boasted what is believed to be the first residential air-conditioning unit outside of New York City, showers with ten heads, and vented closets with lights that went on when the door opened. There were bells every­where--Carrie Earhart never had to go more than ten feet to summon a servant.

The Earharts and their four children moved to Ann Ar­bor in 1916. "I always un­derstood that we did so be­cause Mother liked small town living, and Ann Arbor at that time had a population of only about 28,000, not counting the university," daughter Eliza­beth Earhart Kennedy explained in her 1990 memoir, Once Upon a Family.

The Earharts initially rented a house on Washtenaw Avenue. But within a year, they bought a historic dairy farm on Ged­des Road known as "the Meadows." Be­fore they could move in, World War I in­tervened. Feeling he should be closer to his business, H. B. moved his family back to Detroit for the duration. They used the farmhouse for vacations and getaway weekends until 1920, when they moved to Ann Arbor permanently.

By then, the three older children, Mar­garet, Louise, and Richard, had left for college. Elizabeth attended Ann Arbor High, but because the family lived so far in the country, she had to be driven each day by her mother's chauffeur. Embar­rassed, she had him drop her off two blocks from school so she could arrive on foot like everyone else.

H. B. Earhart kept the farm active, but he did promptly tear down the old barns, which according to Kennedy's memoir, "were too near for mother's fastidious nose." He had them rebuilt on the other side of Geddes at the corner of what would soon be renamed Earhart Road.

While vacationing in North Carolina the first year they lived at the Meadows, Elizabeth fell in love with horseback rid­ing. When they returned home, her father bought a pair of horses. Like his daughter, H. B. Earhart enjoyed riding, and although Carrie Earhart did not share their enthusi­asm, she contributed to their pleasure by having daffodils planted in the woods, which spread and naturalized. "She was to daffodils as Johnny Appleseed was to ap­ples," says her grandson, David Kennedy. Even today, residents of the Earhart subdi­vision tell of buying a house in the winter and being pleasantly surprised when the daffodils bloom in the spring.

H. B. and Carrie Earhart were both inter­ested in gardening. They established a for­mal garden behind the house and built a greenhouse behind the garage. To superin­tend it all, they lured to Ann Arbor a prizewinning horticulturist, James Reach. Born in Scotland, Reach was working on an estate near Philadelphia when the Earharts met him at a flower show in New York.

The late Alexander Grant began work­ing as a gardener for the Earharts in 1929. In an interview before his death in Janu­ary, Grant admitted that when he first came looking for work, he didn't know "a daffodil from an ice cream cone." But when Reach discovered that Grant had grown up near Edinburgh, his own birth­place, he hired him anyway.

Carrie Earhart was herself a serious gardener. She won prizes at national gar­den shows, served as president of the Michigan Federated Garden Club, and was cofounder of the Ann Arbor Garden Club. For two years in a row, she and Reach re­created part of the Meadows' garden on the stage of the Masonic Temple for the Ann Arbor Flower Show.

While the new house was being built, near the site of the old farmhouse, H. B. and Carrie went on a round-the-world cruise. Returning, they settled into their new home. H. B. filled the library with history books. On the walls of the library the Earharts displayed their art collection, which included origi­nals by Velazquez, Picasso, Millet, and Goya. Carrie enjoyed music, so the living room was dominated by a grand piano. She often hired members of the Detroit Symphony to perform for guests.

The house was decorated with treasures the Earharts had picked up on their travels. "They traveled more, and to more exotic places, than was then common," remem­bers great-niece Molly Dobson. Two huge oil portraits of the Earharts were displayed on the stairwell leading to the second floor. (The portraits hung in Ann Arbor's YMCA for many years, commemorating the Earharts' funding of the Y's residential wing, and are now in the conference room of the Earhart Foundation.) Upstairs, H. B. and Carrie each had a bedroom complete with dressing room and bathroom.

Two of the Earhart children, Richard and Elizabeth, lived on property adjoining their parents' estate. Richard farmed a piece of land just to the north known as "Greenhills." (The school of that name is now on part of his property, as well as Earhart Village Condominiums.) Eliza­beth, married to lawyer James Kennedy, lived west of her parents in part of an or­chard originally owned by Detroit Edison. The southern part of the orchard, running down to the river, was owned by H. B. Earhart's nephew, Laurin Hunter.

Hunter, who worked for Earhart, had originally planned to build a house on his property and had even hired an architect. But one day in 1935, Earhart rode up on his horse while Hunter was working and offered to give him the old farmhouse if he would move it. Although Hunter's property was close enough to be seen from the Earharts', it took three months to move the house--the hard­est parts were turning it at a ninety-degree angle and get­ting it over a ravine.

The Earharts enjoyed having family around and encouraged the younger generation to visit. A room in the basement was fixed up as a playroom, and the pool room--reached by a secret door in the library that looked like part of the bookcase--was a big draw. Grandson David Kennedy re­members having a lot of fun upstairs, too, in the attic theater, which included a stage at one end and a movie projection booth at the other. "We would play in the theater, just goof around," he recalls, "or watch family movies of kids hamming it--not Hollywood movies because there was no sound system."

Outdoors, they could swim, play tennis, or even golf. The area around the house was carefully landscaped. Grant recalled that the gardens included a peony-lined walk, a rose garden, a grape arbor, a gaze­bo, and a lily pond. Grape ivy grew along the back porch and espaliered apple trees were cultivated along the wall to the east of the porch.

Carrie Earhart died in 1940 at age sixty-eight after a short illness. A private fu­neral  was held in the home. Dobson remembers that the living room was filled with a great profusion of Easter lilies from her greenhouse and that Burnette Staebler, soloist at the First Presbyterian Church and a friend of the younger generation of Earharts, sang "I Know That My Re­deemer Liveth." A front-page obituary talked of Carrie Earhart's many contribu­tions to the community.

H. B. Earhart stayed on in the house af­ter his wife died, keeping busy with his many interests and charities. With more time on his hands, he would frequent the greenhouse lounge, reading or talking to Grant, who had become the greenhouse manager after Carrie Earhart's death. Grant described Earhart at this time as a "tall, stately man, very upright, very delib­erate in what he said, and what he said he meant. He wasn't a man who spent time gossiping, he was very serious."

When Earhart had visitors, he often brought them to the greenhouse. Over the years Grant recalled being introduced to many prominent citizens, including Henry Ford, society people, and a physicist from Stanford who was working on the atomic bomb. One day when Grant was edging the driveway, he heard sirens approaching. He looked up to see a police motorcade escorting then Michigan governor Kim Sigler, who was coming to visit Earhart. 

Earhart was involved in many charity works as well. Although he was a member of the First Methodist Church, he took an interest in the nearby Dixboro Methodist Church, where he was friends with the minister, Loren Campbell. Campbell re­membered that when the church needed an addition, Earhart offered to match the con­tributions made by the congregation.

Although much of his charity was not publicly known, Earhart was very re­spected in the community. Campbell re­called in an interview before he died that when Earhart and his sister (Josephine Hunter, who lived with her son Laurin) came to church in Dixboro, there would be a buzz in the community as if a celebrity were visiting.

H. B. Earhart died in 1954 at age eighty-three after suffering a heart attack. He was buried beside his wife in Botsford Cemetery on Earhart Road. His obituary, like hers, was front-page news. Among other accomplishments, the obituary mentioned his support for industrial education and his role as a prime mover in the cre­ation of the Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority, which is responsible for the string of parks still enjoyed today. The Earhart Foundation, which he started in 1929, is still in existence, mainly funding educational projects. After Earhart's death, his son Richard ran the foundation; it is now headed by David Kennedy.

In the early 1960s, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod bought the land for Concordia College from Richard Earhart and the house from the Earhart Founda­tion. The campus, designed by architect Vincent Kling in a 1960s modern style, was dedicated in 1963.

Over the decades, Concordia has grown from a two-year college to a four-year col­lege with an enrollment of 600 students. Now, thanks to a gift from Fred Schmid of Jackson, who donated the money as a memorial to his father, the college has the resources to restore the Manor, the name it uses for the Earharts' house. "We don't have to tear down a lot to bring it back to its former glory," says Chris Purdy of Archi­tects Four. Most of the design features, such as the Pewabic tiles in the bathrooms and the carved wood in the dining room, are still there. The room lay­out will remain the same except for the addition of an eleva­tor, necessary to make the house handi­capped accessible.

The downstairs rooms--the living room, dining room, and library--are be­ing adapted for public uses such as meetings, receptions, or wait­ing rooms. H. B. Earhart's bedroom will be the office of Concordia president James Koerschen, while Carrie Earhart's will be a conference room. The basement pool room will serve as another conference room. The third floor, left pretty much as it was as a theater, provides a perfect meeting place for the Concordia Board of Regents.

Restoration of the gardens is being planned by HKP Landscape Architects. At first it looked like a simple project of putting in plants that would have been used in the 1930s, but as more information surfaces from the Olmsted archive and from those who remember the gardens, a more authentic restoration is now possible.
 
Concordia plans to make the renovated Earhart Manor available to the community for events such as conferences, meetings, or weddings. "We're looking forward to giv­ing it back to the community in Ann Arbor to use and enjoy," says Brian Heinemann, Concordia's vice-president for finance and operations, who is in charge of the project. "It'll be the front door to the college as it was the front door for the Meadows." The work on the house is scheduled to be com­pleted in June. Public dedications are planned for the evenings of June 16 and 22, following church services.

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[Photo caption from original print edition]: H. B. Earhart with grandson James Kennedy Jr. He was sixty-six and already retired from the gasoline busi­ness when he built his dream house. He looked up to see a police motorcade escorting then Michigan governor Kim Sigler, who was coming to visit Earhart.

Ann Arbor's 19th-century showpiece recalls the time when fire was an ever-present peril

When Ann Arbor's 1882 firehouse opened, it was the most elegant and expensive building the city owned. That was fitting, because the greatest danger facing Ann Arbor in the nineteenth century was fire.

As late as the Civil War, Ann Arbor was still built almost entirely of wood--even the storefronts and sidewalks downtown. A spark was never far away because the city was lit by candles and oil lamps and heated by fireplaces and parlor stoves. Homes and businesses went up in flames so often that in 1865, a U-M student matter-of-factly referred to helping volunteers fight "the first fire of the winter."

Fires were also much more devastating then. In the early 1840's alone, fire destroyed Klinelob's distillery, S. Denton's ashery and soap factory, and the Michigan Central Railroad depot. The Michigan Central fire took out three neighboring properties as well, one of them a mill warehouse containing nearly 20,000 barrels of flour. Firemen couldn't even save their own buildings. In 1875, fire completely destroyed the Lower Town engine house, which had been erected just two years previously.

In Ann Arbor's first decade, the village's main fire-fighting strategy was simply to keep the town pump in good repair. That was vital because citizens responding to the call of "Fire!" needed plenty of water for bucket brigades. In 1836, responding to public pressure, the village council appointed fire wardens and other officers in each of the town's two wards, and men in both wards soon organized themselves into volunteer fire-fighting companies. The following year, the village bought its first fire engine, a hand pump on wheels that the firefighters dragged to the scene of a fire and filled by bucket brigades from the Huron River or nearby wells.

After the big fire at the Michigan Central station in 1845, the village bought its first hook and ladder wagon. It also started building cisterns at strategic locations around town to store rainwater for fire-fighters' pumps. In 1849, two new volunteer companies were organized: Eagle Fire Company No. One was a hose company with a hand-operated pump engine; Eagle Fire Company No. Two was composed of hook and ladder men. A year later, Ann Arbor levied a special tax to purchase ladders and new equipment for three more new companies: Deluge, Relief, and Huron.

Another new company was organized and named after their new pump engine, the Mayflower, just in time to fight a disastrous fire at the Clark School on Division Street in 1865. This fire led to a second cistern-building spree (a shortage of water was blamed for the severity of the damage to the school). Eventually there were cisterns at most major intersections, each about ten feet wide and fifteen to eighteen feet deep, protected with a manhole cover.

The volunteer companies were reorganized and renamed over the years, but there were usually four active at any one time, most divided internally into hose crews and hook and ladder teams. The different companies took turns being on call; for a big fire every firefighter in the city would respond.

After 1868 the firefighters were paid $5 a year (a ballot initiative to pay them $10 a year was defeated), but their real pay was the camaraderie they shared. Families felt connected to certain companies, and their sons would join when they came of age. (The tradition of fire-fighting families continues today: the son and grandson of Ben Zahn, fire chief from 1939 to 1955, joined the department, as did the son of Fred Schmid, fire chief from 1974 to 1985.) The companies met regularly for training and practice and to clean and repair their equipment. They sponsored balls and picnics, marched in parades, and toured fire departments in other cities to check out their methods--a practice so widespread that to this day, professionals on junkets are still sometimes referred to as "visiting firemen."

Having the proper fire-fighting equipment was a matter of civic pride. In 1870, when the city acquired a new hose, the whole town assembled to see which company could throw a stream of water the farthest. Using the cistern at the intersection of Main and Washington, the Protection company was able to shoot water 165 feet and 4 inches, beating the Relief company, who managed only 161 feet and 7 inches. In 1883, when the Vigilant hose boys got a new hose cart from Chicago, they showed it off by parading through town accompanied by a brass band.

Ann Arbor's volunteer firemen formed an enthusiastic lobbying group, most often convincing city council to make desired expenditures after major fires. The construction of the 1882 firehouse was their greatest success--and, it turned out, their last hurrah.

The new firehouse replaced an old one on the same site, a wooden structure not much bigger than a two-car garage, with a tower behind it to dry hoses. City council asked voters to approve an expenditure of $10,000 to build the new structure. It was an extraordinary amount at the time, and twice what was needed, according to an editorial in the Ann Arbor Courier. Nevertheless, voters approved it on the first ballot attempt. Choosing among four architects' submissions, council accepted a plan by William Scott of Detroit and hired local contractors Tessmer and Ross to build it.

The first floor of the new building was designed to store the hook and ladder and pumper wagons, while the second floor had a sizable hall for meetings and social events. The building was capped off with the bell tower, used to summon the volunteers (the number of rings indicated the ward the fire was in). Outside, a big cistern collected up to 300 barrels of rainwater. Architectural historian Kingsley Marzoff, in a 1970's article, described the building as a "modified Italian villa" and called it "a rare example ... of the nondo-mestic use of this type of design." He also compared the bell tower to those in Siena and Florence.

At the time the firehouse was built, there were 105 volunteer firemen (women wouldn't become firefighters until 1980) in four companies, which the 1881 county history lists as Vigilant, Protection, Defiance, and Huron. Each group had its own room in the firehouse, which it fitted up at its own expense. However, only Protection and Vigilant (which operated the town's only steam-powered pumper) kept their equipment there. Huron, which protected Lower Town (the part of Ann Arbor north of the Huron River), had a small station house north of the railroad tracks just off Broadway. Defiance's station was on East University, where the U-M's East Engineering building stands today.

The main fire hall's big upstairs room often served as a meeting place for other town functions. For instance, the Washtenaw Historical Society held their meetings there, and a very successful set of temperance meetings was held the year it was completed. The firemen celebrated the completion of the new hall with two major dances: a Thanksgiving dance, sponsored by the Vigilant Engine and Hose Company, and another on December 21--billed as "the dance of the season"--with the Chequamagon Orchestra, sponsored by Protection's hose company.

The volunteers didn't enjoy the use of the hall for long, however. The 1880's proved to be a pivotal decade for the city's fire-fighting efforts, and by its end, the citizen volunteers had been replaced by professional firefighters.

In 1885, the city's first piped water system was installed. It included 100 fire hydrants and largely solved the water shortage that had hindered fire-fighting efforts since the city's founding. Just three years later, Ann Arbor hired its first full-time firefighters. Responding to lobbying by volunteer fire chief Albert Sorg, city council hired Chris Matthews to live in the fire-house and William Carroll to be on duty nights. A year later, city council authorized a sixty-day trial period for a completely professional department, and Fred Sipley was hired as the first paid fire chief. The big upstairs room in the firehouse was divided into two dormitories and a recreation area. By 1893 the city had eight full-time firemen and five more on call.

Horses probably moved into the fire-house shortly after the firemen. Originally, the volunteers had pulled the equipment themselves, but as distances grew longer and the equipment heavier, horses became more desirable. They became an absolute necessity after the purchase in 1879 of the steam-powered pumper, which weighed so much it took more than a dozen men to pull it.

At first, horses were furnished by draymen, who would rush over when they heard the fire bell (the first to arrive got the job). For a short time the fire department paid the firehouse janitor, Jake Hauser, a biannual sum of $90 to use his horses whenever there was a fire. But when firemen threatened to quit if they didn't get their own horses, city council relented and purchased two in 1882, the same year work commenced on the new hall.

By 1888 the department owned five horses: three to pull the steam engine and two to pull the hook and ladder wagon. When the fire alarm rang, the horses knew exactly what to do. Released from their stable on the north side of the firehouse, they would stand in front of the wagon they were to pull and wait until their harnesses, which were held up by a system of pulleys and ropes, were lowered. On days when there were no fires, the horses had to be exercised, and there was a special cart for this, which was also used in parades.

The need to motorize the department was discussed in the early years of the twentieth century, especially after the devastating fires at the Argo Mill in 1903 and the high school in 1904. But the citizens were fond of the horses and resisted: as late as 1914, they voted against ballot issues to buy self-propelled fire engines. The voters finally relented in 1915, after a big fire at the Koch and Henne furniture store, but even then, the horses weren't replaced immediately. For a while the department used a combination of motorized and horse-drawn engines.

Barney, Duke, and Jim were the last three fire horses. Luckily for them, the chief at the time, Charlie Andrews, was an animal lover. According to his grandson, Bill Mundus, when the horses were no longer needed, Andrews sent them to the Heinzman farm west of town where they could enjoy their retirement years.

The stable behind the firehouse was converted to a workshop where firemen painted signs for the city between fires. Later it was converted to a garage, first used by the public works department to store their grader and dump truck and later by the fire department for the chief's car. Fred Schmid remembers moving the chief's car out onto the street so the firemen could play badminton there. The space is now part of the present fire station.

The fire department stayed in the 1882 building for ninety-six years. In 1978 they moved into the present main fire station, which had been built just north of the old building on Fifth Avenue.

"I didn't like the [old] building until I left," admits Schmid, the fire chief at the time of the move. "It was not easy to keep clean; there was a stoker boiler in the basement, high ceilings, the windows were rattlely, and the stairs were worn down." The old firehouse was also too small for modern equipment--one of the department's trucks didn't even fit and had to be housed at the substation at Stadium and Packard.

"Today, serious fires are few and far between," says fire battalion chief John Schnur. "We usually get them when they're small." In the past thirty years only a few fires have totally destroyed a building--Gallup Silkworth (a heating oil company) and the Old German restaurant in the 1970's, and the U-M economics building and the Whiffletree restaurant in the 1980's. So far in the 1990's, the most serious fires have been two abandoned fraternity houses.

"Houses just don't burn down anymore," says Schmid. He and Schnur list a number of reasons: earlier detection by smoke detectors and automatic alarms, faster response due to telephones and motorized vehicles (the average response time is now four minutes--less time than it previously took volunteers to reach the firehouse itself), sprinkler systems and unlimited water supply, and more fire-retardant building materials and techniques.

But with all these improvements, there are trade-offs. For instance, firefighters now wear more fireproof uniforms and use air tanks, but this means they can go deeper into a burning building and are closer to possible explosions. Also, according to Schnur, "Fires are smaller but more deadly." While in the nineteenth century most home furnishings were made of natural materials like wood or cotton, today there is a preponderance of synthetic materials, such as polyester and polyurethane, which give off gases when they melt. While the natural materials filled the firefighters' lungs with smoke, Schnur is worried that the chemicals they now breathe may be even more harmful to their future health.

With fires no longer the daily worry they were in the nineteenth century, fire marshall Scott Rayburn is concerned that the public has become too complacent. "It's a full-time job to keep the message out," he says. Today, with fewer fires to rush to, the 121-member fire department keeps busy being proactive: educating the public, performing fire inspections, and engaging in a constant schedule of training.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Nineteenth century fires were frequent and devastating. This 1899 blaze on Main St. destroyed a branch of the Mack & Co. department store.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: A horse-drawn hook and ladder rig. The city bought its first horses around the time the 1882 firehouse was built.

What do you do with a 104-foot antique?

The Bell Road bridge, which spans the Huron River a mile north of Hudson Mills Metropark, still has its original sign, "Wrought Iron Bridge Company, Canton, Ohio, 1891," clearly legible on the top bar of its Erector Set-like frame. One lane wide and 104 feet long, resting on a fieldstone foundation on an unpaved road, the bridge looks much as it did 100 years ago, when it carried loaded hay wagons from the nearby Bell family farm.

But a century of use has taken its toll, and the bridge is currently closed. Bob Polens, director of the Washtenaw Road Commission, explains, "It is in a deteriorating condition. The truss is deteriorated because of rust, one or more of the wing walls have capsized, and the fieldstone abutments also have cracks." A car crashed into an end post in late 1992, closing the bridge for part of 1993, and nearby residents complained about having to go miles out of their way for necessities such as groceries. The road commission then reopened the bridge, limiting traffic to vehicles under four tons, but when more stones from the abutment began falling into the river, they closed it again while they try to decide what to do.

Of the several options possible, the least likely one is to tear the bridge down. It is an official antique, designated as "historic" in a study jointly funded by the state highway department and the state bureau of history.

The chief consultant on the project, Charles Hyde, is a professor of history at Wayne State University and the author of Historic Highway Bridges of Michigan. According to Hyde, the Bell Road bridge is the state's third-oldest extant metal-truss bridge made by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company. One of the two older ones is also in Washtenaw County: the Maple Road bridge over the Huron, sometimes called the Foster bridge because it is closer to Foster Road on the south, dates back to 1876.

Washtenaw County has two other metal-truss bridges not mentioned by Hyde, both built in 1900: the Delhi bridge at Delhi Metropark (see the August Observer) and the Furnace Street bridge in Manchester. While these historic bridges add to the beauty of our landscape and to our understanding of the past, it's quite a challenge for the road commission to figure out how to make them meet modern load-bearing and safety requirements. The Furnace Street bridge is badly rusted and open only to foot traffic. The Delhi bridge collapsed in the 1917 tornado but was rebuilt using many of the original parts. Repaired many times, the Maple Road bridge is still in use, but only one lane at a time. Because it is limited to twelve tons, it is not safe for many vehicles, including school buses and fire trucks.

The commission has received dedicated funds to work on the Bell Road bridge, but because it is historic and federal funds are involved, it must go through an analysis by the state bureau of history before a final plan is accepted. As Kristine Wilson of the bureau of history explains, "They have to demonstrate they have looked at all the prudent and feasible alternatives. Could it be rehabilitated? Could it be moved? Could it be left and another bridge built beside it while it is used as a pedestrian bridge, or could it be used for one lane of traffic?"

At first the county road commission doubted that the Bell Road bridge could be rehabilitated with any amount of historic integrity, but Polens now thinks it is possible. He says, "While the bridge could never be brought up to today's [structural] standards, it could be renovated and used with weight restrictions, [because] traffic in the area is not expected to increase, since the Stinchfield Woods [owned by U-M] and the Huron Mills Metropark limit future growth." The counter argument to this solution is that the amount of traffic might not justify the cost of the renovations.

Another possible solution is to use the old bridge as a foot or bike path and build a parallel bridge or a new one upstream, maybe connecting Strawberry Lake Road with Stinchfield Woods Road. A third option is to do nothing, leaving the bridge closed and continuing to detour traffic via the North Territorial Road bridge to the south (heavier vehicles must use North Territorial even when the Bell Road bridge is open).

If the road commission decides on this option, they could give the bridge away. Under the terms of critical bridge funding, the money budgeted for demolition of an old bridge can be used to move and repair it. Historic bridges have successfully been moved in other communities. Just recently a Belleville bridge was moved to Kent County to replace a bridge the county had given to the village of Portland. The Bell Road bridge would not be suitable for a highway bridge but could be a beautiful and unique footbridge or bicycle path in any number of river parks in our area.

This fall, after the summer construction season is over, the road commission will turn its attention to the future of the Bell Road bridge, using input from nearby residents and the affected township governments in an attempt to find a solution that works for everyone affected--a process they figure will probably take several years.

[Photo caption from original print edition: Scenic and historic--but no longer safe for traffic--the Bell Road bridge is protected from demolition by state law. It may take several years to decide whether and how to repair it; if repair isn't feasible, it could be given away.]

Providing affordable housing for fifty-four years

Sunnyside Park, at 2740 Packard Road just east of Eisenhower, is the oldest residential trailer park in the county and probably the oldest in the state. It opened in 1940 and survives today as Ann Arbor’s only mobile home community.

Harold Kraft founded what he called the Ypsi-Ann Trailer Park as an adjunct to his business selling travel trailers. Kraft was a Grand Rapids native who had been transferred to Ann Arbor by his employer, Michigan Bell Telephone. According to his son, William, Kraft was worried that he wasn’t earning enough at Bell to retire on: “Dad was looking for something to get into. Trailers were a new business.”

Kraft started selling trailers part-time in the late 1930’s. He persuaded a good friend, Hob Gainsley, who owned a gas station on South University at Forest, to let him display a Palace Travel Coach there. Whenever anyone showed an interest, Gainsley would pass the name along to Kraft. At that time trailers were used primarily for camping, although a debate was raging about whether they might be suitable for permanent housing.

The trailer industry developed in the 1920’s, and campgrounds for the “tin can tourists” soon began popping up around the country. According to Allan D. Wallis, author of Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes, communities at first welcomed the trailer tourists and the money they spent. But during the Depression, some owners started using their trailers as permanent homes.

The trailer industry preferred to see their products used for travel and recreation, not as affordable housing. But as preparations for World War II started, they reversed themselves, arguing that they should be given access to scarce resources and labor in order to build housing for defense industry workers. A local example of such housing was the 960-unit Willow Court Trailer Project at Willow Run, which opened in 1943 to provide homes for workers at the nearby Ford bomber plant.

Michigan was the first state to take a stand in the debate: in 1939, it passed a law to deal with trailers used as housing. Under the Michigan Trailer Coach Park Act, the stationary trailer was considered a building and regulated as such, while the travel trailer remained under vehicular regulations.

The year after the Michigan law passed, Kraft made the big jump into full-time trailer sales and began his own trailer park. He located it in Pittsfield Township, on farm frontage on Packard, which was a dirt road then. He bought the land from Ethel and Everett Rose. According to Mary Campbell, who lived across the street at what is now Cobblestone Farm, the Roses had a tough time in the Depression and had to sell some of their farm to avoid forfeiting it for back taxes.

Even out in the country, there was opposition to the trailer park. Kraft remembers a woman from East Ann Arbor worrying that “trailer trash” would move in. But he says his father, who was a nondrinker, a member of Grace Bible Church, and active in the Gideons, “was a religious man. He wouldn’t allow that.”

Mary Campbell remembers that the Pittsfield Township clerk gave the necessary permission for the land use and then regretted it just fifteen minutes later, when she learned that most of the nearby residents had signed a petition against the trailer park. Campbell, who thinks she probably signed the petition herself, says, “We’d rather it wasn’t there--a lot of traffic, that sort of thing.” But she says there was no point in complaining after the trailers arrived, and in fact there were no grounds for complaints because Kraft did a good job of maintaining the trailer park.

Kraft put in dirt roads and blocked out the individual sites. Friends from the telephone company helped him put up poles for electricity. He built a cinder-block building in front for his sales office. It also had shower stalls, bathrooms, and laundry facilities, since many early trailers didn’t include these amenities. A patch of ground in front of the office became his sales display area.

William Kraft recalls that his father had no trouble filling the park. Campbell remembers that the park looked pretty bare at first, but that trees and flowers were soon planted. “Everyone kept up their little plot; there was competition for keeping it up nicely,” she says. She describes the early residents as “nice people, quite a few students, bomber plant employees.” Kraft recalls them as “working people, good people, families.” He remembers a cab driver and a man who worked for the police department.

Kraft sold several brands of trailers, including Palace Travel Coach made in Flint, and National Trailers from Indiana. (Today most mobile homes are still made in Indiana.) In those days banks wouldn’t finance mobile homes--for buyers or for park operators. Kraft had to pay for the trailers on delivery, and then he sold them to his residents on the installment plan and charged them for site rental and electricity. He protected himself from deadbeats by making sure the buyer had a job that paid enough to cover the payments.

In 1946 Kraft sold the park to Ruby and Sven Keenan, his wife’s niece and nephew-in-law. He continued trailer sales there for another five years. The Keenans changed the park’s name to Sunnyside and added a second story to the cinder-block building as an apartment for themselves. A 1951 ad boasts that the park is “away from the noise, yet conveniently located.”

After his five years at Sunnyside expired, Kraft moved to 3770 Packard and continued to sell trailers from a Quonset hut. He was active in the Michigan Trailer Coach Association and for a while co-owned a trailer park in Belleville. In 1958 he moved back to Grand Rapids. The trailer business had done for him what he had hoped it would: given him enough money to retire comfortably. He owned stock and property and even a home in Florida. When he died in 1969, his obituary described him as a “pioneer in the house trailer industry.”

The Keenans owned Sunnyside for three decades before selling it to Margaret Jacosky, who in 1986 sold it to John Chin. The only structure left from Kraft’s original occupancy is the front office. All the trailers have been replaced (the oldest one still in use was built in 1960). The area once used for display has been made into a lawn, the roads have been paved, and the utilities have been upgraded and put underground.

According to Chin, today’s trailers are larger and much better built than they were in Kraft’s day. But economy, not mobility, is still the main reason people buy manufactured homes. How else, asks Chin, could someone get a brand-new two-bedroom house for $450 a month?

The Glazier Building was a monument to its builder's financial chicanery

When State Treasurer Frank Glazier started the Glazier Building at the corner of Main and Huron in 1906, he was forty-four years old and at the height of his power. He was the most important man in Chelsea, where he owned the Chelsea Savings Bank and the Glazier Stove Company, and had held every local political office from school board member to state senator. Now he was intent on making a similar impact on Ann Arbor.

Glazier spared no expense to secure Ann Arbor's most important corner for his edifice. According to the February 2, 1906, Argus-Democrat, he paid $26,500 just to buy the three buildings then on the site, making it "the biggest real estate transaction in the history of the city," before a single brick was laid. "Some of the interested parties didn't want to sell," the paper explained. "The price was finally set at such a figure that all objections were overcome."

His site obtained, Glazier set about planning the tallest building the city had yet seen. Glazier "had a passion for building," says local historian Lou Doll. His neoclassical Chelsea bank and sprawling red brick stove factory, with its signature clock tower, remain village landmarks to this day. Glazier modeled his Ann Arbor building on Detroit's fourteen-story Majestic, which when built in 1896 was that city's tallest building. Like the Majestic, at Michigan and Woodward, the Glazier Building had ornate bottom and top sections with a simpler brick area in between. Glazier's newspaper, the Ann Arbor News, proudly called it "Ann Arbor's First Sky Scraper." (Glazier's News was just one of several local progenitors of today's Ann Arbor News.)

By the time the Glazier Building was completed in 1908, its namesake had declared bankruptcy and been forced to resign his state office.

In the 1906 campaign for state treasurer, Glazier's opponent had tried to make an issue of Glazier's habit of depositing state money in his own bank in Chelsea. At the time, Glazier responded that he deposited treasury funds in 144 banks all over the state. But in fact, Glazier was guilty of massive fiscal chicanery.

Glazier's rise and fall is documented in detail in Lou Doll's recently published history, Less Than Immortal: The Rise and Fall of Frank Porter Glazier of Chelsea, Michigan. (The book is currently available at the Village Shoppe in Chelsea, and Doll hopes soon to have it in stores in Ann Arbor as well.) During the Panic of 1907 (an economic recession), he ran out of funds to pay his debts--including debts to his own bank that had been financed from state deposits. Glazier's 1910 trial for misusing state funds, Doll writes, revealed "a story of three-way bank, Stove Company, and state fund juggling that is amazing."

Glazier had not only been depositing state funds in his own bank; he had been borrowing huge amounts through what amounted to a shell game. He had used the same stove company stock as collateral for loans from eight different banks, including his own. The total exceeded $1 million, far more than the stove company was worth.

How was Glazier able to dupe both the state and his fellow bankers on so grand a scale? "A possible explanation is that he was Frank P. Glazier, wealthy manufacturer, state treasurer with the power of depositing or withholding state funds from banks, and possible future governor of the state, and they did not want to offend him," Doll writes. But once the extent of the debt became clear, Glazier was declared bankrupt in 1908.

Both the stove company and the bank went into receivership; though the bank survived under new ownership, the stove company, its products outdated by changing technology, soon closed permanently.

The money Glazier borrowed from the state was recovered. His other creditors were not so lucky. Most of his assets, including the Glazier Building, were sold at fire sale prices. According to Doll, Glazier had already sunk $130,000 of his own money into it, plus another $80,000 borrowed from the Chelsea Savings Bank. It sold for just $77,000 to the Goodspeed brothers of Grand Rapids, formerly of Ann Arbor.

Glazier himself was sentenced to five to ten years in Jackson State Prison. He was pardoned two years later and spent much of his time living quietly at his home on Cavanaugh Lake. He died January 1,1922.

The Goodspeed brothers rented the street front to the First National Bank. The office space not needed by the bank was rented to various businesses, mostly lawyers who appreciated the location near the courthouse and other banks.

In 1928 the First National moved into its own skyscraper--the eleven-story First National Building, one block south on Main Street. The Ann Arbor Trust Company took its place at Main and Huron, where it has continued (with several changes in ownership and identity) to this day.

The trust company was started in 1925 by Russell Dobson and purchased in 1928 by Earl Cress and future Ann Arbor mayor Bill Brown. The investment partners had been in business together since 1921, with offices on the top floor of the Glazier Building. By the time they took over the lease on the whole building in 1928, their businesses included securities, real estate, mortgage loans, insurance, and property management. In 1939 the two men divided the businesses, with Brown taking the insurance and Cress the trust company.

In 1973, the Goodspeed heirs finally agreed to sell the building to Ann Arbor Trust. The next year, the trust company changed to a full-service bank. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, it is now part of Cleveland-based Society Bank; George Cress, Earl's son, continues to run it, along with Society's other Michigan branches.

After more than eighty years, the exterior of the building looks much as it did in 1908, except for two changes made during a 1969 remodeling: the top cornices were removed because they were in danger of falling off, and a small addition was built on the back because the fire marshall said a second stairway was needed.

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.

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”

When thousands swam in Argo Pond

“It was a lot, a lot, of fun,” says Barbara Hepner Preston, remembering the summers she hung out at Ann Arbor’s municipal beach in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Now the boat launch at Argo Park, the beach was on the banks of the Huron River, just north of the canoe livery. Preston and her sister, Gerry Hepner True, lived on Pontiac Trail and would go to the beach every day in the summer. “We’d walk down in the morning, go home for lunch, then go back. Sometimes we’d even go back in the evening.”

The beach was a gift from Detroit Edison, which had bought the present Argo Dam in 1905 to generate electricity. In 1917, the company offered to develop the beach if the city would pay for its upkeep. The city accepted the offer, and Edison trucked in loads of sand and built a pier, three docks, and a beach house. The city paid a nominal rent of $1 a year before eventually buying the facility in 1938 for $100.

“On hot summer days you’d have to stand in line to get in,” recalls True. Former lifeguard Dick Tasch adds, “On a good Sunday or holiday you could have more than a thousand [people]. There was not that much room for sunbathing, but lots of room in the water. Some would come for half an hour or an hour. There was a continuous flow.”

Many of the regulars were from the north side (Lower Town), but kids from all over the city swam there. Some cut across Argo Dam from North Main, while others crossed the Broadway bridge and came up along the millrace. Although hoboes camped along the millrace, Tasch remembers only one bad incident. “Once a little girl came running out screaming with a hobo behind. We called the police and Red Howard showed up in a car.” Howard made sure the perpetrator and his closest cohorts were on the next train out of town.

The docks were placed in increasingly deeper water—the first at four feet, the next at about eight feet, and the last at twelve feet. Swimmers had to pass proficiency tests to go out to the deeper docks. “They could do any stroke--crawl, breaststroke--as long as they got out there and back,” recalls Bob Ryan, lifeguard in the summer of 1942. The last dock had a tall tower, about ten feet. Getting the courage to dive from it was a real rite of passage.

Regulars fondly remember the beach manager, parks department employee Joe Bowen. “He was a nice, pleasant man,” says Ryan, adding, “He didn’t take any guff from kids. If they acted up, they couldn’t come back for maybe a week.”

Bowen must have worked incredible hours; people remember him being there whenever the beach was open, seven days a week. He kept an eye on the whole operation but was usually at the front desk, giving out lockers and renting towels and suits (“cotton with purple stripes that you’d not be caught dead in,” Tasch remembers). Sometimes the Hepner girls helped at the front desk, just for fun.

Lifeguard Tasch usually sat at the end of the pier with the rowboat next to him, but on really busy days he would stay in the boat between the second and third docks. “Deep water is where the most trouble was,” he recalls. Although Tasch was a parks employee and the swimming teachers were hired by the recreation department, they worked together. The teachers spelled him every few hours, and he in turn coached the kids on their swimming when the beach wasn’t too busy.

The lifeguards and the kids who came regularly got to know each other pretty well. “They were a fine bunch,” Tasch recalls. “I had no trouble with rowdy or bad kids.” He dubbed them “the hillbillies” because most of them lived up the hill on Longshore (then called “Cedar”) or on Pontiac. Tasch sometimes brought his lunch, but often “the hillbillies would fight over who would go home and make me a sandwich. I liked that better.”

When people wanted a break from swimming, the beach had a volleyball court, horseshoe courts, a slide, and a grassy place under a willow for picnics (the tree is still there). Gerry True remembers bonfires on the beach, where she and her friends would roast marshmallows and hot dogs and drink Kool-Aid. The high point of the summer, remembered by almost everyone who used the beach, was the swimming races. True still has some of the ribbons she won.

No food was sold at the beach, probably because Bowen already had enough to do. For a time Ryan’s half brother, Don Blair, and Herb Wetherbee, who owned the land directly across the street from the beach, ran a pop and candy stand. But most of the time the kids went next door to what was then the Saunders Canoe Livery for pop, potato chips, or candy. Owners William and Gladys Saunders got to know the regulars so well that once a year they treated them to a cookout breakfast. “We’d take several, maybe six, canoes down the river about a half or two-thirds of a mile and build a campfire, and Mrs. Saunders would cook us bacon and eggs,” True recalls. “It was something to look forward to.”

In 1936, when Detroit Edison drained Argo Pond to repair the dam, the city took the opportunity to improve the beach, cleaning the river bottom of debris, deepening it, and bringing in clean sand. The next winter the city built an island dubbed “Clever’s Folly” after alderman Arbie Clever, who had pushed for the beach improvements. “They hauled sidewalk cement, sand, and gravel, and put it on the ice,” recalls neighbor Laurie Howley. “It dropped when the ice melted.” A lawn was planted on the island, and the older kids loved swimming out to lie on the grass in the sun. “An old gentleman mowed it,” recalls Tasch. “I’d take him out in the boat with a hand mower.”

When the beach closed for the season, employees would take down the docks and store them for the winter. Tasch remembers that the deepest dock was the hardest to put up and take down. He recalls almost losing Bowen one time. “Joe was on the third dock holding a crowbar when he slipped and fell in. When he didn’t come up, I dove in. I found him standing on the bottom, holding the crowbar. I told him, ‘If you’d let go of the crowbar, you’d have come right up.’ ”

Tasch recalls that in his time the water was pretty clean. If present standards had applied then, though, the beach would probably never have opened. Pollution control efforts have cleaned up the river tremendously in the past few decades, but even now there are times when the Huron’s bacteria count is too high for swimming.

Council minutes show that questions about water quality were raised in 1940, when the city was considering plans for a new beach house. The new structure was never built, and the beach closed for good at the end of the 1948 season. The buildings were demolished four years later.

Today, a small island in Argo Pond is all that remains of the municipal beach. Clever’s Folly is now totally overgrown, and birds nest where local teens once sunbathed.

[Photo caption from book]: Bob Ryan, Muncipal Beach lifeguard in 1942, from his commanding view at the end of the pier, could see
swimmers all the way out to “Clever’s Folly,” the artificial island. “Courtesy of Bob Ryan”