Dicken
Ranches and colonials of the 1950s and 1960s on the west side around the 1957 Carrie L. Dicken School, and the ten-acre woods the neighbors bought back from a developer in 2003
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About Dicken
Dicken is the west-side neighborhood between South Maple Road and West Stadium Boulevard, from Pauline Boulevard south to Scio Church Road, roughly two miles southwest of downtown in the City of Ann Arbor. The neighborhood association describes it as spanning Stadium, Pauline and South Maple; the city's own utility records label the ground DICKEN. Inside that line sit several recorded plats — Vernon Downs on the north side of Scio Church, Dicken Park along Maple, Sunnyside around Las Vegas Park, and Barnard Heights toward Stadium — each built on its own schedule. Dicken Elementary stands at 2135 Runnymede Boulevard near the middle, and Dicken Woods Nature Area fills the corner of Pauline and South Maple just north and west of the school.
It is a neighborhood for people who want a single-family post-war house on a shady street with a real woods at the end of it, inside the city and on the bus lines, without a historic district or a downtown address. It is not the Old West Side, and it is not Eberwhite, which lies north across Pauline. Two condominium communities, Walden Village off Pauline and Country Village off Maple, sit inside the boundary and share the school and the woods without sharing the single-family form.
Ask me what has sold here plat by plat; the answer differs more between Vernon Downs and Sunnyside than the street map suggests.
- —Dicken Woods: ten acres the city bought in October 2003 for $550,000, $50,000 of it raised by the Friends of Dicken Woods, after neighbors stopped a Crosswinds townhouse proposal
- —Dicken Elementary opened in 1957 as the Carrie L. Dicken School, named for a teacher and principal who served Ann Arbor's schools from 1894 to 1934; the half-acre Dicken Park on Maple carries the same name
- —Vernon Downs: 411 homes built in phases from 1955 to 1965 by George Airey, most of them ranches
- —Ward 4 council member Jack Eaton, a Dicken resident since 1998, was president of the Friends of Dicken Woods from 2008 to 2010
- —Dicken Elementary at 2135 Runnymede is a K–5 school and the polling place for precincts 4-37 and 5-48
- —The Pauline–Runnymede path is owned by Walden Village Condominiums; in February 2024 the city took up $140,000 for design and a state grant application, with a public easement to be negotiated
What Dicken means
Dicken is a school name that became a neighborhood name. The Carrie L. Dicken School opened in 1957 as one of three new Ann Arbor elementary schools that year, named for a teacher and principal who served the Ann Arbor schools for forty years, from her start in 1894 until her retirement in 1934. The half-acre park on Maple Road carries her name as well. The neighborhood grew up around the school in the same decade, and the neighborhood association, the nature-area friends group and the city all use the name for the ground between Stadium, Pauline and South Maple.
The ground inside it was recorded as separate plats rather than one subdivision. Vernon Downs, 411 homes built in phases between 1955 and 1965 by George Airey, fills the center and runs to Scio Church. Dicken Park runs along Maple, Sunnyside wraps Las Vegas Park south of Stadium, and Barnard Heights carries the neighborhood toward the Stadium corridor. Each plat was built on its own schedule, which is why houses a block apart can differ in age and form.
Water runs two ways from here: Dicken Woods sits at the headwaters of both the Allen Creek and Malletts Creek watersheds, so the northern streets drain toward Allen Creek and downtown while the southern ones drain to Malletts Creek. Which side of that divide a house sits on is part of reading its basement history.
The woods, and the fight that saved them
Dicken Woods Nature Area is ten acres of city-owned woods with a loop trail, bought by the city in October 2003 after neighbors organized to stop a townhouse development. In early 2002 the developer Crosswinds Communities proposed townhouses on the parcel, then owned by the Catholic Diocese of Lansing and long used by neighbors as an informal park. Residents formed the Friends of Dicken Woods that year, fought the rezoning through three rounds of plans at the Planning Commission, and lobbied the Parks Advisory Commission and City Council to buy the land. The city paid $550,000, of which $50,000 was raised by the Friends, and designated the property a nature area in February 2004.
The woods are bounded by Pauline Boulevard to the north and South Maple Road to the west, with Dicken Elementary and the houses on the south and east; the trail is entered from the end of Dicken Drive, and the school uses the woods as an outdoor classroom. The group that fought for it did not disband when the city bought the land. Jack Eaton, an attorney who has lived in Dicken since 1998 and has represented Ward 4 on City Council since 2013, was president of the Friends of Dicken Woods from June 2008 to March 2010 and co-founded the A2 Neighborhood Alliance, a network of residents from neighborhoods across the city. The people here organized once to save a woods, and then kept the organization.
For an owner, the open space next door is public land held by the city rather than a private parcel waiting for a buyer — the most durable kind of adjacency there is.
The homes
The housing is single-family and post-war: ranches first, then two-stories and tri-levels. The Ann Arbor Observer describes shady streets and classic suburban-style one- and two-story homes. In Vernon Downs the large majority are ranches, with a scattering of two-story and tri-level houses of 1,000 to 2,000 square feet, built 1955 to 1965, with hardwood floors, fireplaces and finished basements common. Sunnyside was built 1953 to 1969 in mid-century modern, 1950s ranch and colonial forms, with coved ceilings, arched doorways and built-ins in the earlier houses. Dicken Park runs from 1955 to 1993 in ranch, bi-level, tri-level and two-story colonial plans with attached garages, and Barnard Heights spans the 1930s to the 1980s. Two condominium communities break the pattern: Walden Village, 53 condominiums off Pauline, and Country Village, 22 duplex-style townhouse condominiums off Maple built in 1991 and 1992.
A house of the 1950s and 1960s comes with a known list. Galvanized steel supply pipe was standard before 1960 and corrodes from the inside; lead paint applies to anything built before 1978; asbestos turns up in floor tile, pipe wrap and some insulation; Orangeburg sewer laterals were in use through 1972; and the mid-1960s houses can carry aluminum branch-circuit wiring, a connections question rather than a rewiring one. Sixty to seventy years is also long enough for nearly every house to have been altered, so the permit record at the city building department matters here more than the original plan does.
Parks, a school garden and a path
Dicken Park, a half-acre park at 1905 South Maple Road at Tudor Drive, is named for the same Carrie L. Dicken as the school. Mushroom Park, an acre and a half between Waltham Drive and Saxon Street off Scio Church Road, takes its name from the small painted concrete mushrooms set among its berms. Las Vegas Park, just under two acres between Las Vegas Drive and Granada Avenue south of Stadium, sits at the center of Sunnyside with a soccer field, a softball field and a playground. Dicken Elementary adds the P.L.A.N.T. Garden, begun by a parent and volunteers as a twenty-by-twenty patch of cleared grass and grown into an outdoor classroom used by every grade through fall and spring.
One piece of infrastructure is privately owned, and it came before City Council in February 2024. The Pauline–Runnymede Path, which the council blog calls the RuPaul Path, connects the interior to Pauline Boulevard and its bus stops across a strip owned by Walden Village Condominiums. The condominium association had been told it would need to spend about $400,000 to fix the asphalt before handing the path over. Instead the council took up a $140,000 appropriation to design a rebuild to accessibility standards and prepare a state Transportation Alternatives Program grant application, with a public easement to be negotiated with the association — a route the public had until then used only at the association's pleasure.
Schools
Dicken is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools, and the elementary school is the one the neighborhood is named for. Dicken Elementary, at 2135 Runnymede Boulevard, is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade building that opened in 1957 and builds part of its program around outdoor education in the woods and the garden. Students go on to Slauson Middle School and Pioneer High School; Pioneer stands on West Stadium Boulevard about a mile east. The school doubles as the polling place for precincts 4-37 and 5-48, one in each of Wards 4 and 5, which tells you the neighborhood straddles a council ward line.
Assignment is set by address, and attendance boundaries change over time, so the district's current map for a specific house is the document that governs.
Getting around
The neighborhood is boxed by four bus-served streets. TheRide's Route 27, West Stadium–Oak Valley, runs along Pauline Boulevard, South Maple Road, Scio Church Road and West Stadium Boulevard, and Route 25, Ann Arbor–Saline Road, also uses Pauline, South Maple and West Stadium. Stops line South Maple at Tudor, Dicken Drive, Keystone Lane and Breckenridge; Pauline from Maple to Stadium; West Stadium at Greenview, Maywood and Stadium Court; and Scio Church at Waltham, Covington, Landmark Court, Mershon and Greenview. Interior streets carry local traffic only. West Stadium, Scio Church and Liberty carry marked bike lanes, and Pauline has buffered ones.
West Stadium Boulevard is the working connection to the rest of the city — Pioneer High School and the University's athletic campus lie east along it, and downtown is reached by way of Pauline or Stadium. On a football Saturday the Stadium corridor fills; the interior of Dicken, a mile west, largely does not.
Buying or selling in Dicken
Comparable sales here have to be read by plat, not by the neighborhood label. Dicken contains a 1955 ranch plat and a 1969 colonial, a half-acre park and a ten-acre woods, single-family streets and two condominium communities. A sale in Sunnyside is weak evidence for a house in Dicken Park, and a sale that backs onto the woods is weak evidence for one that backs onto Maple Road. When I run comparables here, I match plat first, then position relative to the woods, the school and the arterials, then era and alteration.
For buyers, the location questions are mostly settled — public woods, a school in the middle, bus lines on every edge — so the work is in the house: the year built for the specific address, the permit history for additions and finished basements, which watershed the lot drains to, and what the seller says in writing about water. Walk Maple Road at rush hour and Stadium on a game day before deciding which edge you want.
For sellers, the story is specific and worth telling properly: a neighborhood that organized to save its woods and kept the organization, a school garden, a park and a school that share a teacher's name, a city rebuilding the path to Pauline. The woods and the school are the two facts that separate a Dicken listing from Eberwhite to the north and Lansdowne to the south.
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.