Arbor Heights

Three plats, one name

Arbor Heights went up in stages at the start of the 1950s, at the edge of a city that was pushing west along Miller Avenue. The Ann Arbor News flew over the site in the fall of 1951 and, in a photograph published that November 21, captured Home Realty Co.'s 100-home Arbor Heights subdivision No. 2 under construction at the upper left, Bruce and Duncan streets entering Miller Avenue, and Fritz School over on Maple Road — Fritz had been taken into the city school district in June 1949, a sign of how fast the northwest side was filling in. By 1953 and 1954 the ranches along Bruce Street were finished, and Haisley School was going up just west of Duncan between Miller and Dexter avenues.

The name kept being extended as more ground was platted. On the city's plat map the original Arbor Heights plat is the band along Miller; Sub No. 2 sits north of it on the west and No. 3 north of it on the east. A house at 1801 Miller Avenue is recorded in Arbor Heights Sub No. 3, which puts the name at the east end of the frontage, toward the ravine that is now the Miller Nature Area. In July 1956 the News described the area as still in the rough, raw building stage: S. Circle Drive, a new street starting at Miller Avenue west of the Arbor Heights subdivision, curved past Haisley School to Maple Road, and Prospect Hill Construction Co. was building 68 houses along it as the Westaire subdivision. The paper's aerial that month shows Haisley School flanked by the newly started Westaire, Bruce and Duncan reaching Miller, and Martin Acres Nos. 1 and 2 beyond. Westaire is the western neighbor, and it is why the houses get a little newer as you move toward Maple.

The practical consequence of three recorded plats is that Arbor Heights, Arbor Heights No. 2 and Arbor Heights Sub No. 3 are three separate legal instruments. Each carries its own recorded restrictions and easements, and a restriction recorded with one plat does not necessarily bind a lot in the next. The plat name for any given parcel is on the city's assessing record, and the plat itself is on the city's plat map.

The homes

These are early-1950s ranches and story-and-a-half Cape Cods, built mostly between 1950 and the mid-1950s. One of the first houses in the neighborhood, at 603 Duncan, is a 1950 Cape Cod with hardwood floors, plaster walls and built-in shelves; a typical example on Bruce Street from 1954 is a ranch with a full basement and a two-car detached garage. The Miller Avenue frontage kept filling in longer: the house at 1801 Miller dates to 1960. The stone has a local story too: after 1950 the ravine east along Miller was worked as a gravel pit that supplied stone to the houses going up nearby, and these were the houses going up.

Seventy years on, the houses range from largely original to fully redone. The 1801 Miller house, for instance, was renovated top to bottom with new sewer and water lines, roof, windows, insulation, and a carport. That range is what makes the neighborhood interesting to price, and it is also what a buyer should be reading for. The era items are the usual ones for a house built before 1960: galvanized supply pipe, lead paint, asbestos floor tile and pipe wrap, and a sewer lateral that may still be the original clay or Orangeburg unless someone has replaced it.

The Miller Nature Area along the way

Twenty-two acres of city woods sit between Miller Avenue and Arborview Boulevard, with the entrance at 1705 Miller, east along Miller from the subdivision. The land was logged in the 1800s, farmed, and then worked as a gravel pit after 1950 — the pit that supplied stone to the houses being built nearby — before the city bought it in 1976 from Philip and Clara Seymour and Charles and Rita Gelman and annexed it from Ann Arbor Township in 1978. Today the trails wind through old-field remnants and woods with some large elms, and it is a good spot for birds and butterflies in spring and summer.

Paths enter from Arborview and from Miller. There is no dedicated parking, which is an understated advantage for the streets around it: the people using the trails are mostly the people who live nearby. Hunt Park, a hilly seven-acre neighborhood park bordered by Spring Street, Sunset Road and Daniel Street, is farther east along Miller, and Hollywood Park, three acres beside Abbot Elementary along Sequoia Parkway, is out past Maple; the city acquired it in 1961 as the subdivision around it was built.

Schools

Arbor Heights is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools, and the neighborhood school went up alongside the houses. Haisley Elementary, at 825 Duncan Street on ten acres at the west edge of the subdivision, was dedicated in August 1954 and named for Otto W. Haisley, superintendent of the Ann Arbor schools from 1924 to 1953. It opened as a walk-to school. Its first principal, Louise Ritsema, came over from Fritz School when the old Fifteenth District was annexed in 1954, and she stayed 25 years; three additions between 1963 and 1967 brought the building to 26 classrooms. Listings here often describe the neighborhood as Arbor Heights/Haisley for that reason.

Assignment is set by address. The Ann Arbor Observer's guide to the Haisley area puts the older neighborhood closest to the school at Haisley Elementary, then Forsythe or Slauson middle school, and Skyline High.

Getting around

Miller Avenue is the spine. It runs east into downtown and west to Maple Road, and TheRide's Route 32 Miller–Maple connects the Blake Transit Center downtown with Pauline and South Maple. For the freeway, Miller Road meets M-14 at Exit 2 west of Maple; the Miller/Maple interchange was rebuilt in 2007 with roundabouts at Maple Road, and M-14 connects west to I-94 and east around the north side of the city to US-23.

The trade-off is that Miller carries real traffic, and houses fronting it live differently from houses on Bruce or Duncan. Walk both on a weekday afternoon.

The other Arbor Heights

This is the subdivision, not the condominiums. The Arbor Heights Condominiums are 48 stacked-ranch units built in 1980 in a courtyard plan at 4190–4218 Packard Road, off Packard east of Carpenter and near the Arborland center at Carpenter and Washtenaw — in Pittsfield Township with an Ann Arbor mailing address, not in the city. Search results, tax records, and even some agents run the two together. If the listing describes a condominium association or Buhr Park, it is the other one.

Buying or selling in Arbor Heights

The comps here are era comps, adjusted for what has been done to the house. The houses went up within a few years of one another, so the shells are similar; the spread comes from renovation depth, from whether the basement has stayed dry, from the garage or carport, and from position — a lot nearest the nature area, a lot on a quiet block of Bruce or Duncan, and a lot fronting Miller are three different products. I read sales block by block and by plat, and I check which plat a house sits in before I say anything about what an owner may build or fence.

For buyers, the diligence is the standard pre-1960 list plus one local item: get the history of the sewer lateral and the water service, because some houses here have had both replaced and some have not, and the difference is a real one. Ask for permits on the kitchen, bath, and any finished basement. For sellers, a clean record of system replacements is the most valuable document you own — the buyer coming to a 1953 ranch is trading age for location and a yard, and a house that can show its roof, furnace, plumbing and lateral dates removes the argument before it starts. The story is worth telling too: the 1951 aerial, the gravel pit that became 22 acres of woods, the school built beside the houses in 1954. Ask me what has sold here and I will show you how the three plats have actually traded.

Not to be confused with

• Arbor Heights Condominiums · Ann Arbor
• Hollywood Park · Ann Arbor
• Water Hill · Ann Arbor