Abbot

Flat, quiet streets behind the arterials

The neighborhood is laid out so the traffic stays on its edges. Maple, Miller and Dexter carry it; the residential blocks behind them are flat, wide and shaded, with sidewalks throughout. That is the daily character of the place — a walking neighborhood inside the city, where the through routes are close enough to be useful and far enough that most streets do not hear them.

The name comes from the elementary school at the center of it, which sits inside the Hollywood Park subdivision on Sequoia Parkway rather than across an arterial. Having the school inside the neighborhood is one of the reasons families look here, and it is worth walking the route from a specific house rather than measuring it on a map.

The homes

The bulk of Abbot was built in the 1960s, and the housing is what that decade produced in Ann Arbor: smaller ranches on flat lots, with Cape Cods, tri-levels, and colonials as the alternates. Realtor descriptions of the Hollywood Park subdivision list those four forms as the mix, with a few additional houses built in the 1980s. The Observer's description — smaller mid-century ranch homes on flat, quiet streets — is accurate for most blocks.

What that means in practice is single-level living in the ranches and, where there is a basement, sixty years of finishing at every level of quality. Kitchens and baths range from untouched to fully reworked, and the basement is where the story of the house usually lives — who waterproofed it, who finished it, and whether the finished space was permitted. Because the forms repeat across the neighborhood, a walk through several houses of the same model tells you quickly which owners maintained and which deferred.

The 1960s build date sets the diligence list. Aluminum branch-circuit wiring turns up in houses from the mid-1960s onward, lead paint applies to anything before 1978, asbestos was standard in floor tile and some insulation of the period, and sewer laterals from before 1972 can be Orangeburg. The scattered 1980s houses carry their own question — polybutylene supply pipe was in use from 1978 to 1995. None of this is a reason to avoid the neighborhood; it is the reason to know the age of the house you are looking at to within a few years.

Parks: three acres and thirty-seven

Hollywood Park is the neighborhood's own park: three acres along Sequoia Parkway beside the school, part woodland and part mowed lawn. The city describes the woods as high-quality, with one of the richest spring wildflower displays in Ann Arbor along a path through the trees, and Natural Area Preservation staff and volunteers have been removing invasive plants there for years. That work traces back to this ground: when a city crew began clearing understory here in 1964, neighbors objected, the cleared part was seeded to grass and the rest of the woods left alone, and the argument that followed changed how the city treats its natural areas. The mowed part holds a playground, and the border between the park and the school grounds is hard to find on the ground.

Veterans Memorial Park is the big one. It runs to 37 acres bounded by Dexter Road, North Maple Road, and Jackson Avenue, and it is one of the busiest recreation sites in the city: five baseball and softball fields, tennis courts, rain gardens, paved paths that are maintained through the winter, and a hill that fills with sleds after a snowfall. The pool and ice arena at 2150 Jackson Avenue runs as an outdoor pool in spring and summer — fan-shaped, with a zero-depth entry for toddlers and a 125-foot slide — and as an indoor ice arena in fall and winter. The park also holds the Ann Arbor Skatepark, a 30,000-square-foot facility that opened June 21, 2014, free and open to the public from six in the morning until ten at night.

Schools

Abbot is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools, and the Observer's neighborhood guide names the path: Abbot Elementary, then Forsythe Middle School, then Skyline High School. All three sit on the northwest side, and Abbot Elementary is inside the subdivision rather than across an arterial.

Buildings and programs change too, and what a school offered a few years ago is not necessarily what it offers now — worth asking the district rather than relying on anything written down, including this page.

Getting around

The corner of Miller and Maple is the neighborhood's front door. M-14 exit 2 sits right there, with a TheRide park-and-ride lot inside the interchange. TheRide's Route 32, Miller–Maple, runs along the two roads that frame the neighborhood and continues to Skyline High School, and Maple, Dexter Road, and Miller all carry bike lanes as arterials.

Daily errands are close. Maple Village, on North Maple between Dexter and Jackson, is anchored by Plum Market, which opened in the center's northeast corner in February 2008; ALDI is at 2340 Dexter at the corner of Dexter and Maple. Westgate, across Jackson, holds the Ann Arbor District Library's Westgate branch at 2503 Jackson, which reopened in September 2016 after an expansion to 21,000 square feet — it had started in Maple Village in 1977 and moved across Jackson to Westgate in 1983. The trade-off of the location is Maple Road itself, which is a busy arterial; the blocks that back to it hear it, and the blocks two streets in do not.

Buying or selling in Abbot

Comparable sales here are about model and condition, not address prestige. Because the neighborhood was built in a short window from a small set of plans, the same ranch or tri-level appears on many streets, and the spread in value between two examples comes from what has been done to them since the 1960s — the kitchen, the windows, the roof, the basement, the electrical panel — and from the specific lot: backing to Hollywood Park or the school grounds is one thing, backing to Maple Road is another. When I run comps in Abbot I match by form first, then by lot position, then by the systems that have been replaced.

For buyers, the practical work is on the house. Get the age of the house to the year, because the aluminum-wiring window and the Orangeburg window both fall inside this neighborhood's build period. Ask for the permit history on any finished basement and any addition, and pay attention to grading and downspouts on a flat lot, where water has nowhere obvious to go. The upside is real: single-level living inside the city, on sidewalk streets, next to a school and a wooded park, with two grocery stores and a freeway ramp inside a few minutes.

For sellers, the buyer for a well-kept 1960s ranch in Abbot knows exactly what they want and is comparing your house against three others of the same plan. Documented mechanical updates, a dry basement, and a clear permit file are what separate a listing that sells to the widest pool from one that sells to whoever turned up first. Beyond the house, the things worth naming are the ones a buyer can use: which way the lot faces, what it backs onto, and how far it is on foot to the school, the park and the shops. Ask me what has sold on your block and against which model; that is how this neighborhood prices.

Not to be confused with

• Hollywood Park · Ann Arbor
• Water Hill · Ann Arbor
• Walnut Ridge · Ann Arbor