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