I

n his article for Geo-
graphical Review, geog-
rapher Blake Gumprecht

posits the American college town
as “a place apart, a unique type of
urban community shaped by the
sometimes conflicting forces of
youth, intellect and idealism that
have been a critical but underap-
preciated part of American life.”

I have a hard time agreeing

with the second part; the image
of a youthful, crafty, idealistic
American is practically a ste-
reotype in my book. As for the
idea that college towns present
a unique set of questions to the
geographically-minded
person,

that is something I can get be-
hind.

It should be no surprise that

Gumprecht talks about Ann Ar-
bor in his article. He writes about
the leafy neighborhoods, the pro-
liferation of bookstores all within
walking distance of each other
and the effort to launch a “re-
search park” just outside the city
in the early 1960s.

Since arriving here from my

home of Washington, D.C., it has
been a privilege to learn about
the geography of Ann Arbor
throughout my years at the Uni-
versity of Michigan. I have always en-
joyed exploring the town on long walks from
Central Campus to far-flung locations like
the Eberwhite Nature Area, Bandemer Park
and even the Matthaei Botanical Gardens.

One day, however, as I was walking across

East Huron Street toward the Diag, it oc-
curred to me that I was crossing a border. Of
course, there were no signs or immigration
officials to stamp my passport as I left the
off-campus world and stepped back on Uni-
versity property. It was a crossing I had made
many times before, but this time I thought
about it geographically.

According to the National Geographic So-

ciety, geography is “the study of places and
the relationships between people and their
environments.” In other words, geography is
more than just people fiddling around with
maps; it is a way of seeing the world that em-
phasizes how the spaces where we live shape
us, and how we, in turn, shape them.

This article, then, is one student’s attempt

to think about Ann Arbor geographically.
To me this is a fascinating subject, but also
a serious one. Growing up in Washington,
D.C., I formed ties with both the people and
the land that will last for my entire life. The
physical spaces of the city — the streets on
which I walked to school, the parks where I
played as a child and the buildings that kept
me warm — are always with me, even when
I am not there.
T

he first issue is to demarcate the
boundaries of the University’s
Central Campus. State Street, from

the Ford School all the way to the corner of
the Diag, forms the western border. Many
landmarks populate this busy thoroughfare,
including the Law School, Angell Hall and
the newly-renovated Michigan Union.

On the eastern border, the University has

respected the border of South Forest but
pressed as far as possible into the northeast
corridor with its dormitories and health
system. The Mary Markley Residence Hall,
for example, is on the doorstep of the Nich-
ols Arboretum, whereas the hospital enjoys
sprawling views of the Huron River.

The northern and southern borders, how-

ever, are a different case. To the north, East
Huron Street provides a substantial buffer
between town and gown. The majority of
cool bars and restaurants are further down,
so it is not a place frequented by under-
graduates, and further west, the architec-
ture devolves into an unsettling mix of lavish
high-rise apartments and austere industrial
buildings.

Hill Street, however, has quite a different

feel from its northern counterpart. It is clos-
er to popular study spots such as the Ross
School of Business and the Law Quad. In the
evenings — even, unfortunately, in the mid-
dle of a pandemic — Hill Street comes alive
with throngs of people going to and from
the bars on South University Avenue and the
many fraternity houses.

Now, there are lots of examples of Uni-

versity buildings that fall outside of this neat
geographical abstraction. To make things
more concrete, imagine our campus as a pip-
ing hot Reuben sandwich from Zingerman’s
Delicatessen, where the two slices of rye
bread represent East Huron and Hill streets;
yes, there are little pieces of sauerkraut and
corned beef that fall off the sides, but right in
between those two slices is where the action
happens.
S

peaking of Zingerman’s, I will now
shift my focus to one of the most
well-known
northern
neighbor-

hoods in Ann Arbor: Kerrytown.

The boundaries of Kerrytown were con-

sistent across practically every map I con-
sulted and every person I asked: Depot
Street to the north, South Division Street to
the east, East Huron Street to the south and
South Main to the west.

When looking at historical maps of Ann

Arbor, I was surprised to find that the area
surrounding modern-day Kerrytown was
for a long time the densest part of town. One
surveyor’s map from 1854 clearly shows that
most of the occupied lots at the time were
located on the western side of the town be-
tween Second and Fifth streets. Off to the
east sits a lonely square titled “Michigan
State University” (University of Michigan li-
brarians assure us that this was an error on
the part of the surveyor).

Though a casual observer may not notice

it, there are pieces of history hiding in plain
sight all over Kerrytown. To explore this his-
tory, I talked on the phone with Grace Sin-
gleton, a managing partner of Zingerman’s,
who informed me of just one such piece of
local lore.

“The Kerrytown district is interesting.

Where the deli is is actually where the origi-
nal plaque for the city was located,” Single-
ton said. “When Ann Arbor became a city,
Kerrytown is kind of where the downtown
was. (Zingerman’s) was one of the first build-
ings, so it’s all historic.”

In addition to the historic value of the

neighborhood, Kerrytown is also known for
its diverse cultural and artistic offerings. In a
typical non-pandemic year, there are numer-
ous festivals, including the Kerrytown Book-
fest, the Ann Arbor African American Down-
town Festival and Edgefest, which is hosted
at the Kerrytown Concert House. Thankfully,
the weekly gathering of the Ann Arbor Farm-
ers Market has only been partially disrupted
by pandemic conditions. People can still
shop for fresh produce and interact with the
growers, though social distancing guidelines
necessarily limit the scope of these interac-
tions. In our interview, Singleton expressed
her admiration for this mix of activities.

“There’s little pockets of residential inter-

spersed with all these shops, and I just think
it makes it a really unique, diverse area,”
Singleton said. “There are also still a lot of
shops where people live above them. And

there’s museums and venues for music and
shopping, and all that. But then there’s like
residents right next door.”

There are a lot of undergraduates who

live in the area, but Kerrytown is also a popu-
lar neighborhood for graduate students and
young professionals. I talked with Tasha
Thong, a third-year PhD candidate at the
School of Public Health and Chelsea Rich-
ards, who works for Michigan Medicine.

Thong had lived on Geddes Avenue on the

east side of campus while completing her
Master’s degree at the University (though
she was clear that she much preferred Ker-
rytown, saying, “I have lived in other places
in Ann Arbor and this is definitely my favor-
ite by far.”)

Richards, on the other hand, said she

had recently moved to Ann Arbor. Her fa-
vorite part about Kerrytown was having
access to the various natural surroundings.

“I love that you can walk to the river

and there’s a nature trail that goes along
it where you can easily get on the Border-
to-Border trailhead to bike,” Richards ex-
plained. In fact, if you look at a map of Ann
Arbor, there is a much larger concentration
of greenery on the northern edges, close to
the Huron River, when compared to South
Campus.

When I asked them about their percep-

tions of the south side of campus, they re-
ferred to its inhabitants as “the younger
crowd.” And I think for the most part, they
are correct. Though as I will soon explain,
the southern side of campus also exhibits
diversity of ages, albeit of a much more
pronounced range.
I

f you ask the average undergradu-
ate what lies below Hill Street, they
would probably talk about the pre-

dominantly student-populated streets of
Church, Greenwood, Oakland, etc. These
pockets of student life are scrunched up
in the corner underneath State and Hill
streets, though they border a much more
established neighborhood called Burns
Park.

I did not talk about the borders of Ker-

rytown because all the available maps I con-
sulted and the residents I talked to offered
the same streets. Burns Park, on the other
hand, is a bit of a mystery.

My belief is that Google Maps’s outline of

Burns Park is just plain wrong. For some rea-
son, it includes areas east of Washtenaw Av-
enue inside its boundaries of the neighbor-
hood, including a section much further east
which is completely cut off from the rest.
Even the Diag is a part of Burns Park accord-
ing to the Google folks out in Silicon Valley.

The most inclusive definition of Burns

Park that still retains a semblance of accu-
racy has Hill Street as a northern border,
Washtenaw Avenue as an eastern border,
East Stadium Boulevard as a southern border
and State Street as a western border. When I
interviewed Dr. Gorman Beauchamp, a for-

mer professor of literature in the
English department at the Uni-
versity, this was the definition we
agreed upon as a starting point
for the discussion.

In 1995, Beauchamp pub-

lished an article in The American
Scholar titled “Dissing the Mid-
dle Class: The View from Burns
Park.” Beauchamp first moved to
Ann Arbor in 1965 as an under-
graduate and has lived in various
locations around the city. In the
article, Beauchamp examines the
psychology of his neighbors in
the predominantly middle-class,
family-oriented neighborhood of
Burns Park. He explores the ten-
sion and guilt that avowed liber-
als like him held for the “crass
materialism of their bourgeois
existence,” even as they contin-
ued to reap the material benefits
of middle class life. Beauchamp
writes in his article, “the truest
statement that ever heard about
my estimable neighborhood was
uttered by a colleague in the Eng-
lish Department: ‘Ah yes, Burns
Park — where they vote left and
live right.’”

I followed up with Beau-

champ, who still lives in the
neighborhood, to ask a few ques-

tions about the view from the Burns

Park in 2020. The area is still home to many
faculty and administration, and though
Burns Park does not lend itself to a catchy
demonym, Beauchamp said that residents
still exhibit a self-identification with the
neighborhood itself.

“Burns Park very much has a kind of self-

identification,” Beauchamp said. “But about
other places, I really couldn’t speak. I think
all of them have names in the real estate busi-
ness. They’ll have a house identifying what
part of town it’s in by a particular name, but I
don’t know how much those things translate
into real consciousness for people who live
in those areas.”

I think this is a major difference between

local residents and college students who
live south of Hill Street. The focal point of
the Burns Park neighborhood is the sprawl-
ing park and elementary school of the same
name. “The one thing in Burns Park, of
course, is the elementary school,” Beau-
champ explained. “Very highly rated, so
parents with young children will move into
Burns Park because that’s where they want
them to go to school.”

Thus, it is easy to see why local parents

and children would self-identify with the
neighborhood, whereas college students
might not. The children spend a majority of
their youth playing in the park and going to
school, and the parents bond over their chil-
dren’s experiences. For these reasons, the
park draws in the local crowd much more
easily than the college crowd.

For college students, the feeling is mutual.

I spoke with Jacob Feuerborn, a recent grad-
uate of the Ross School of Business who lived
on Greenwood Avenue, a mere five blocks
from Burns Park Elementary School. Feuer-
born loved his experience living on Green-
wood, but was unfamiliar with the name of
Burns Park.

“Oh, which one is Burns Park? Is that the

one by Jack’s Hardware?” Feuerborn asked
(that’s Forsythe Park). After a quick Google
search, he said he had actually seen the park
before.

“Ah, now I can see which one is Burns

Park,” Feuerborn said. “It’s interesting that
it’s considered the same neighborhood. I
would say there’s a big spectrum, where
down there it very much feels like a normal
suburb, whereas Greenwood, Oakland and
streets like that feel a lot crazier. A lot more
college.”

In fact, the existence of student neighbor-

hoods in the middle of the neighborhood
has seemingly fragmented Burns Park into
two separate Burns Parks: Lower Burns Park
and North Burns Park. These are much more
fiercely family-oriented areas; what some
might call the real Burns Park.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
14 — Wednesday, September 30, 2020
statement

Ann Arbor and the University of
Michigan: a geography

BY ALEXANDER SATOLA, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

COURTESY OF STEPHEN S. CLARK LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY

Read more at
MichiganDaily.com