Burns Park
Turn-of-the-century streets around a fifteen-acre park that was once a county fairground and a half-mile horse track — the elms still trace the oval
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About Burns Park
Burns Park is the neighborhood a lot of people picture when they picture Ann Arbor: broad, canopied streets of houses built between the 1890s and the 1930s, laid out on a grid with service alleys running behind the blocks, wrapped around a park that gives the whole place its name. It sits just south of central Ann Arbor, close to the University of Michigan's Central Campus, Michigan Stadium, the medical campuses, and the South University shops, and it has held its shape for a century — houses here are renovated far more often than they are replaced.
The park at the center was not always a park. Around 1890 the ground held the Washtenaw County Agricultural and Horticultural Society fairgrounds and the Ann Arbor Driving Club's half-mile horse track, and the perimeter of shady elms in today's park is a remnant of that oval. That kind of layered history is the neighborhood's real signature — the street names, the alleys, the odd pockets of open space behind certain houses, and the trees themselves all record what the ground was before the houses arrived.
- —The park's perimeter elms are remnants of a half-mile horse track from around 1890
- —Pre-automobile platting — service alleys behind the blocks and detached garages at the rear
- —Burns Park Elementary occupies the 1923 building that opened as Tappan Junior High in 1925
- —The Burns Park Run, a volunteer 5K and 10K held every year since 1979
- —The Burns Park Players, staging one community musical a year since 1984
Two neighborhoods sharing one name
Buyers are often surprised to learn Burns Park is usually described as two distinct areas rather than one. Lower Burns Park sits toward Packard, Dewey, State, and Stadium. North Burns Park occupies the ground between Hill, Washtenaw, Ferdon, Granger, and Forest, closer to campus, and it has an active association of its own.
The distinction matters more than it looks. The two areas differ in how close they sit to the University, in the mix of owner-occupied houses and rentals, and in what a given block feels like during the academic year — North Burns Park's proximity to Central Campus means more of its housing has been converted to rental over the decades, while Lower Burns Park skews more consistently owner-occupied. Neither is better; they are different products, and a buyer should walk both before deciding which one they actually mean when they say Burns Park.
Some of the neighborhood's history is legible in the names. Baldwin Avenue carries the name of the first official landowner in what became North Burns Park. The service alleys behind many blocks — a feature of pre-automobile platting that most later Ann Arbor subdivisions dropped — are why so many houses here have detached garages set at the rear of the lot rather than attached ones facing the street.
The homes
The bulk of Burns Park went up between the 1890s and the 1930s, and the range of styles is wider than the uniform first impression suggests: Queen Annes, Georgian and Dutch Colonial Revivals, Tudor Revivals, American Foursquares, Spanish Mission houses, and a great deal of handsome vernacular building that does not belong to any single style. Lots vary from modest to substantial, and the tree canopy is old enough to close over many streets.
Because the housing stock has been maintained rather than replaced, original material survives at a rate that is unusual for a neighborhood this close to a major university. Quarter-sawn oak floors, built-in cabinetry, plaster moldings, leaded and stained glass, and deep front porches are common rather than exceptional. Renovation here tends to be additive and careful — kitchens and baths updated, systems replaced, third floors finished — rather than the wholesale gutting that changes a house's character.
That also sets the terms of the transaction. A century-old house is a century-old house: the roof, the sewer lateral, the electrical service, the boiler or furnace, and the basement's water history all matter, and knob-and-tube wiring still turns up. Many of these houses have had additions, finished attics, or converted spaces added across a hundred years of ownership, and whether that work was permitted is a records question worth answering early.
The park itself
Burns Park runs to fifteen acres and functions as the neighborhood's shared back yard. It holds baseball and softball diamonds, soccer and football fields, a basketball court, three tennis courts, two dedicated pickleball courts, and — unusually for a Michigan city park — a pétanque court. There is a playground, an enclosed shelter available for rental, picnic tables and grills, restrooms, two rain gardens, and a warming hut for the winter skating season. It is open from six in the morning until midnight.
Two things sit inside or against the park that shape daily life around it. The Ann Arbor Senior Center occupies the southeast corner, and Burns Park Elementary School borders the west side, which means the park absorbs school-day recess, after-school games, city recreation programming, and senior center activity across the same fifteen acres. Beyond the neighborhood, Nichols Arboretum and the Huron River trail system are a short distance north, adding several hundred acres of woods, gardens, and river frontage within easy reach.
Two neighborhood institutions
The Burns Park Run has been an Ann Arbor tradition since 1979 — a volunteer-organized 5K and 10K that serves as a fundraiser for Burns Park Elementary. It draws well beyond the neighborhood and has become one of the fixed points of the local running calendar.
The Burns Park Players began in 1984, when a small group of parents led by Alan Dengiz went looking for a way to raise money to send their children to camp. It has grown into a nonprofit community theater company that stages one musical a year at Tappan Middle School, with ten to twelve performances and a cast of around 170 — roughly a hundred of them Burns Park Elementary students, performing alongside adults from the school community. Proceeds go to students across Ann Arbor Public Schools through the AAPS Educational Foundation, Rec & Ed scholarships, and private instrumental music lessons for students who could not otherwise afford them; the group has raised more than $245,000 to date. For a residential neighborhood to sustain an annual musical of that scale for four decades tells you something concrete about how organized this one is.
Schools
Burns Park is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. Burns Park Elementary borders the park on its west side, and the building has a history worth knowing: construction began in 1923, and the first students walked in on February 2, 1925 — as Tappan Junior High School. When Tappan moved to its current building on East Stadium Boulevard in 1951, the original structure was rededicated as Burns Park Elementary, which is what it has been ever since. Tappan, now a middle school, and Pioneer High School serve the area from their own campuses nearby.
Getting around
Location is the practical case for Burns Park. The University's Central Campus and the medical campuses are minutes away, Michigan Stadium sits just southwest, and downtown Ann Arbor and the South University district are close enough that many households here run most daily errands without getting on a highway. Packard, Washtenaw, and State carry local traffic out toward the rest of the city.
For regional trips, US-23 and I-94 are each reachable in roughly ten to fifteen minutes, putting Detroit Metro Airport within a half hour. The trade-off of sitting this close to campus is the academic calendar: football Saturdays fill the streets, and the rhythm of the neighborhood shifts noticeably between term and summer. That is worth experiencing on both a game day and a quiet weekday before committing.
Buying or selling in Burns Park
The first thing to get right is which Burns Park you are actually in. Lower Burns Park and North Burns Park do not price identically, and the difference is driven by distance to campus and by the mix of owner-occupied and rental housing on a given block. A sale two streets over can be a poor comparable if it sits on the other side of that line. When I run comparable sales here, I am reading block by block rather than neighborhood-wide, and paying attention to tenure — a house surrounded by long-term owners and one surrounded by rentals do not perform the same way, either at sale or over the years a buyer holds it.
For buyers, the practical work is in the house rather than the location, because the location largely speaks for itself. Get the systems documented: what has been replaced, when, and by whom. Find out whether additions and finished spaces were permitted. The alleys and rear garages are a genuine asset — off-street parking on a pre-automobile grid is not a given — but garage structures here are often as old as the houses, and their condition varies enormously.
For sellers, originality is what the buyer is coming for. The oak floors, the leaded glass, the built-ins, and the porch are the reason someone chooses a 1912 house over a newer one elsewhere in the city, and a listing that presents those honestly reaches the buyer who values them. It also pays to tell the neighborhood's story properly: the fairgrounds and the horse track, the elms tracing the old oval, the Run, the Players, the school in a building that opened in 1925. Houses in Burns Park have a habit of selling quickly and sometimes quietly, which is exactly why a seller wants the widest possible pool of prepared buyers seeing it — not just the first one who happened to hear.
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.