Abbot
Flat, tree-lined streets of 1960s ranches on Ann Arbor's far northwest side, named for a 1962 elementary school with an aqua aluminum fascia and a door from every classroom to the outdoors
An email on days a home here lists, changes price, goes pending or sells.
About Abbot
Abbot is the neighborhood that grew up around T.C. Abbot Elementary on the far northwest side of the City of Ann Arbor. The Ann Arbor Observer places it mainly between Maple, Dexter, and Miller roads, and the school itself sits at 2670 Sequoia Parkway, west of North Maple, inside the Hollywood Park subdivision that surrounds it. The streets are flat, wide, and shaded, and they are laid out so that the through traffic on Maple, Miller, and Dexter stays on the arterials while the residential blocks behind them stay quiet. Most of what you see is a smaller mid-century ranch, with Cape Cods, tri-levels, and colonials mixed in, built in the 1960s with a few 1980s houses added later.
It is a different product from the neighborhoods people tend to lump it with. Water Hill, to the east along Miller, is the older neighborhood on the northwest fringe of downtown, bounded by Miller, Brooks, Sunset, and the railroad tracks; Walnut Ridge, north of M-14 beside Skyline High School, is a 2002–2007 subdivision of large houses in Scio Township, outside the city limits. Abbot is the postwar middle between them, and the one inside the city on 1960s streets: a single-story, sidewalk kind of place, with Veterans Memorial Park, two grocery stores, and an M-14 interchange at the corner. Buyers come here for a house they can walk into without stairs and a school that sits inside the subdivision.
If you want to know which blocks back to the woods at Hollywood Park and which back to Maple Road, ask me — the difference matters more here than the map suggests.
- —Abbot Elementary opened in September 1962: 20 classrooms by Perkins & Will, an aqua anodized-aluminum fascia, folding partitions for team teaching and an outside door from every classroom
- —Named for Theophilus Abbot, first principal of the Ann Arbor Union School in 1857 and later a twenty-two-year president of what became Michigan State University
- —The 1964 protests over bulldozing woodland at Hollywood Park and the Haisley woods led to the city's natural-areas preservation work
- —Veterans Memorial Park's 37 acres include the outdoor pool, the indoor ice arena and the 30,000-square-foot Ann Arbor Skatepark, opened June 21, 2014
- —Skyline High School opened on North Maple in September 2008 with a single ninth-grade class; Abbot, Forsythe and Skyline are all on the northwest side
The school that named the neighborhood
Abbot takes its name from its school. T.C. Abbot Elementary opened in September 1962 in what the Ann Arbor News then called the Maple Road–Miller Avenue area, a 20-classroom building designed by the Chicago firm Perkins & Will and dedicated in October of that year with a program in the school gymnasium. The News treated it as a school with new ideas: paired classrooms separated by folding partitions to allow team teaching, an exit from every classroom directly to the outdoors, and an anodized aluminum fascia in bright aqua wrapping the one-story brick building. It sits on 12 acres, which is a great deal of ground for an elementary school inside the city.
The name honors Theophilus Capen Abbot, who in 1857 became the first principal of the Ann Arbor Union School, later Ann Arbor High School, the first secondary school to serve the entire city. He left the following year for the State Agricultural College, now Michigan State University, where he was named president in 1862 and served twenty-two years. The school was built as the surrounding subdivision was going in: the developer gave the city the three-acre Hollywood Park next to the school grounds in 1961, and the Hollywood Park subdivision took its name from the park.
One episode from those first years is worth knowing because it shaped the whole city. In the spring of 1964 a city bulldozer began clearing understory from the woods west of Haisley Elementary, and a similar showdown followed at Hollywood Park beside Abbot School, where the woods were rich in plant and animal life. Neighbors objected, the cleared ground was planted in grass and the rest of the woods left alone, and the Observer's David Swain has called the fight that followed the controversy that changed the city's idea of what a park could be; the city's Natural Area Preservation unit descends from it. The wildflower path beside the school is one of the places that argument was fought.
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. 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. Abbot Elementary is the 1962 Perkins & Will building inside the subdivision. Forsythe, at 1655 Newport Road, opened September 8, 1960, on a 26-acre site and is named for Lewis L. Forsythe, who was principal of Ann Arbor High School for twenty-nine years. Skyline, at 2552 North Maple Road just north of M-14, opened in September 2008 with ninth graders only, adding a class each year until its first seniors graduated in 2012; it was built as the district's third comprehensive high school to relieve Pioneer and Huron.
All three are on the northwest side. Assignment is set by address, and boundaries do change, so a family buying for a specific school should confirm the current attendance area with the district before writing an offer.
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. It also helps to tell the story properly — the aqua fascia on the school, the classroom doors to the outdoors, the 1964 fight over the woods that started the city's natural-areas work, the skatepark down the street. Ask me what has sold on your block and against which model; that is how this neighborhood prices.
Not to be confused with
Community details reflect public records and local knowledge and can change — always verify what matters to your purchase. Explore more of Ann Arbor's neighborhoods, or browse active listings.