Angell
The hillside east of Central Campus that climbs from the fraternity blocks on Hill and Washtenaw up Geddes Avenue to the gates of Nichols Arboretum — College Hill to the old-timers, Oxbridge to its association, Angell to the school district
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About Angell
Angell is the neighborhood that begins where the University of Michigan's Central Campus ends. It starts in the dense student blocks between Hill Street and Geddes Avenue, just east of Washtenaw, and stretches uphill along Geddes toward the 123-acre Nichols Arboretum, which slopes down to the Huron River. The Ann Arbor Observer describes it as two neighborhoods in one, and that is the honest way to put it: the lower blocks hold the Oxford Houses, brick apartment buildings, and a majority of the University's fraternity and sorority houses, while the streets farther up Geddes turn into winding, wooded boulevards of one-of-a-kind houses, many of them built in the decades on either side of World War II, with newer custom homes perched on the slopes above the river. The name comes from Angell Elementary on South University, and the neighborhood association calls itself Oxbridge, after its two central streets, Oxford and Cambridge Roads.
This is where the confusion starts, so let me be precise. South of Geddes Avenue and east of Oxford Road is Ann Arbor Hills, a separate neighborhood that runs to Huron Parkway and down to Washtenaw; the broadest realtor definitions of Angell sweep it in, and even the Michigan Daily has called Angell 'sometimes referred to as Ann Arbor Hills,' but the two are different places with different housing and different associations. West and south across Washtenaw and Hill is Burns Park, platted by Olivia Hall beginning in 1890 on the fruit farm J.D. Baldwin sold her family in 1876. Angell proper is the ground in between: the Greek houses, the 1920s brick and stucco on Oxford and Cambridge, the mid-century houses north of Geddes, and the Arb at the top.
If you are trying to decide which of these three neighborhoods you actually mean, or where a given block falls, ask me. I walk these streets and I can tell you house by house where the students end and the faculty begin.
- —Oxbridge is a blend of Oxford and Cambridge Roads; the same hillside was historically called College Hill
- —Nichols Arboretum, 123 acres opened in 1907, drops nearly 200 feet from the Geddes gates to the Huron River
- —The Palmer House at 227 Orchard Hills Drive, completed 1952, is the only Frank Lloyd Wright residence in Ann Arbor
- —The Delta Upsilon house at 1331 Hill, an Albert Kahn Tudor Revival finished in 1903, is on the National Register
- —Angell Elementary opened in September 1922 as the South University School and was renamed for U-M president James B. Angell
- —The Oxford Houses opened in 1963 and house about 350 students a six-block walk from Central Campus
College Hill, Oxbridge, Angell: three names for one hillside
The area was historically called College Hill, a name that came from its position beside the University and from the fraternity and sorority houses that colonized the big houses on Hill Street and Washtenaw Avenue in the early twentieth century. The intersection of Washtenaw and Hill was the focus of many of the grandest houses built in Ann Arbor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; before that, the area seemed far from town and was farms and fruit orchards. J.D. Baldwin, a fruit farmer from Baldwinsville, New York, built his house here in 1848, and in 1876 he sold 78 acres to Olivia and Israel Hall — the land Olivia platted became Burns Park.
The neighborhood association took the name Oxbridge, a blend of Oxford and Cambridge Roads, the two central streets of the residential blocks east of Washtenaw. The Oxbridge Neighborhood Association is registered with the City of Ann Arbor, covers part of Ward 2, and describes its territory as the residents east of Washtenaw Avenue between Angell Elementary School and Berkshire Road. Geddes Avenue, the spine of the whole hillside, carries the name of John and Robert Geddes, brothers who arrived in Washtenaw County in the 1820s and whose sawmill on the Huron River grew into the milling hamlet of Geddesburg, founded in 1832.
Angell is the name the school district gave it, and the one most buyers use. Homes served by Angell School run the full range of this neighborhood, from fraternities and student apartments near campus to the residences of prominent University and medical school faculty on the wooded streets to the north and east. When I say Angell, I mean that whole run from Hill Street up to the Arb, and I am careful to say Ann Arbor Hills when I mean the streets south of Geddes.
The homes
Angell holds three distinct housing eras stacked up the hill: Queen Annes from the 1880s, Tudors from the 1920s, and ranch houses from the 1950s, with newer custom-built houses on the slopes overlooking the river, many of them mid-century modern in style. The lower blocks near Hill and Washtenaw are where the grand houses became Greek houses. The Delta Upsilon house at 1331 Hill Street, a Tudor Revival designed by Albert Kahn, begun in 1902 and finished in 1903, is the oldest fraternity house in Ann Arbor still used by the organization that built it; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995, nearly destroyed by fire in 2008, and restored and reopened in 2012. The Phi Delta Theta house at 1437 Washtenaw, a Georgian Revival finished in 1903, is another of the tour stops on this corner.
The Oxford Houses belong to the University, not the market, but they define the middle of the neighborhood. The complex opened in the fall of 1963 as a new concept in University housing — cooperative units, suites, and apartments for 353 women, built for $2.5 million — and today houses around 350 students in seven small apartment houses, a six-block walk from Central Campus. The private houses around Oxford and Cambridge are the 1920s brick and stucco Tudors and Colonials that give Oxbridge its look, and the blocks north of Geddes, east of the Arb, are lined with one-of-a-kind houses from the decades on either side of World War II.
The most famous house in the neighborhood is the William and Mary Palmer House at 227 Orchard Hills Drive, the only Frank Lloyd Wright residence in Ann Arbor. Wright designed it in 1950 and it was completed in 1952 — a Usonian house laid out on a grid of equilateral triangles, built of Tidewater red cypress and 'Cranbrook brick' on a two-acre hillside near the Arb, with a garden house designed by Wright's protege John Howe added after Wright's death. Visitors can stay overnight in it. One block-level detail from the Observer tells you what the ordinary houses are like: a family who arrived in 1977 bought a 1930s three-bedroom built by Viggo Nelson, a 1920 U-M football player, and their children walked to Angell Elementary — that is the scale of most of the owner-occupied stock here, not the mansion scale of the Greek houses.
The Arb and the cemetery
Nichols Arboretum is the reason the top of this neighborhood feels the way it does. Walter and Esther Nichols donated farmland in 1906; landscape designer O.C. Simonds, who also designed parts of Chicago's park system and Graceland Cemetery, laid out the plan, and the garden opened in 1907. It has since grown to 123 acres, and the site drops nearly two hundred feet from the iron gates on Geddes Avenue — the highest point in the Arb, with the commanding views — down to the Huron River. There are three entrances, at Geddes, Washington Heights, and Nichols Drive, connected by roughly three and a half miles of trails, and the W.E. Upjohn Peony Garden, planted in 1922 and opened to visitors five years later, is the largest collection of antique and heirloom herbaceous peonies in North America, with room for some 800 plants of roughly 230 cultivars. The Arb is a University property, so it is a landscape you live beside rather than a city park you pay for.
The neighborhood also borders Forest Hill Cemetery, 65 acres at 415 Observatory Street on the hilly Taylor farm south of the old Observatory. It was founded in 1857 by a group of Ann Arbor businessmen and University professors, dedicated May 19, 1859, and designed by civil engineer James Lewis Glenn in the rural, garden-cemetery style of the period; a 1998 inventory counted more than 1,800 trees and large shrubs of 64 species inside its walls. Flat along Geddes and Observatory and rolling inside, it is the other green edge of the neighborhood, and a large part of why the west end of Geddes is so quiet.
Schools
Angell is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools, and the neighborhood is named for its elementary. Angell Elementary on South University opened in September 1922 as the South University School — a two-story brick-veneered masonry building on a three-acre site that cost $280,000 including the land, enrolled 250 students at the start, and served as both an elementary and a junior high. Its first principal was Forest Averill. During the 1920s it was renamed for James B. Angell, the University of Michigan's longest-serving president, from 1871 to 1909.
Angell Elementary feeds Tappan Middle School, and Tappan feeds Huron High School, under the district's feeder pattern. Attendance boundaries are set by the district and can change, so I confirm the assignment for a specific address rather than assume it from the neighborhood name — particularly on the edges near Washtenaw and Geddes, where Angell, Burns Park, and Ann Arbor Hills addresses sit close together.
Getting around
Location does the work here. Central Campus is at the bottom of the hill, and many parts of the neighborhood are within walking distance of the shops on South University; students in the lower blocks can easily reach the Central Campus Transit Center and the Hadley Family Recreation & Well-Being Center, the largest recreational facility on campus. Hill, Glazier, and Fuller have bike lanes, and so does part of Geddes. The trade-off is real once you climb: north of Geddes, running errands means getting in a car.
The academic calendar is the other thing to plan around. The lower blocks are Greek-house territory, and the neighborhood's character shifts noticeably between term and summer. Long-time residents told the Observer the neighborhood had grown noisier with a higher speed limit on Washtenaw and some larger houses, but that the neighborliness had survived. Walk the block you are considering on a weekday in October and again on a Saturday night before deciding which part of the hill you belong on.
Buying or selling in Angell
The first question is which Angell you are in, and the second is which side of Geddes. The lower blocks near Hill and Washtenaw are dominated by fraternity and sorority houses and student apartments; the blocks around Oxford and Cambridge are 1920s houses with a mix of long-term owners and rentals; the streets north of Geddes and east of the Arb are faculty houses on large, wooded lots. A sale two blocks away can be a poor comparable if it sits across one of those lines, so when I run comparables here I read block by block and pay close attention to tenure — an owner-occupied street and a rental street do not perform the same way. And I do not use Ann Arbor Hills sales for an Angell house or the reverse without saying so, even though the broadest definitions of Angell run all the way to Huron Parkway.
Historic district review touches the south edge. The Washtenaw/Hill Historic District was adopted in 1980 with five properties at the intersection of Washtenaw and Hill and expanded in 1986 to the 1300, 1400, and 1500 blocks of Hill and one more building at the corner of Washtenaw — 21 properties in all. A third phase proposed in the early 2000s would have added more than 150 properties, but it was not adopted, so most of Oxbridge sits outside any local historic district. If a house is inside the 21, exterior work goes through the Historic District Commission; if it is outside, the constraints are zoning and the lot.
For buyers, the houses span 1880s to 1960s and beyond, so the diligence changes house by house: an 1890s Queen Anne, a 1920s brick Tudor on Cambridge, and a 1950s ranch north of Geddes have different wiring, plumbing, and roof histories, and many of the older houses have carried additions and conversions across a century of ownership — whether that work was permitted is a records question to answer early. For sellers, the story sells: the Arb at the top of the street, the Kahn fraternity house, the Wright house on Orchard Hills, a school that opened in 1922. Houses on this hill trade among people who know exactly what they are buying, which is why I want the widest pool of prepared buyers seeing yours, not just the first one who heard.
Not to be confused with
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