Lower Town
The 1832 rival to Ann Arbor across the Broadway Bridge — Manhattan street names, the city's oldest commercial building, an 1842 Underground Railroad house on Pontiac Trail, and the Argo Cascades at the bottom of the hill
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About Lower Town
Lower Town is the flat ground and the hill north of the Huron River where Broadway comes off the Broadway Bridge and climbs toward Plymouth Road, with Pontiac Trail peeling off to the northwest and Maiden Lane and Wall Street running east along the river toward the University of Michigan's medical campus. It sits in the City of Ann Arbor directly across the river from Kerrytown and the Amtrak station, and it is the southern, oldest piece of what is now called the Northside. The name is topographical and old: this was the low ground on the far side of the first wooden bridge, built in 1828 where the Potawatomi Trail crossed the river, and the label stuck even after the settlement's larger ambitions did not.
It is for buyers who want walking distance to Kerrytown, the medical campus, and the river without being on the campus grid — people who like an 1840s house next to a 1920s Craftsman next to a seven-story apartment building, and who are comfortable with a neighborhood still visibly being reworked at its edges. It is not the Broadway condominium complex up the hill, which shares the street name and nothing else. It is not Water Hill, which lies west of North Main, and it is not Kerrytown, which is on the south bank. Lower Town is the specific historic core; the Northside is the larger twentieth-century neighborhood that grew up behind it along Pontiac Trail toward Barton Drive and Plymouth Road.
If you are trying to decide whether a house on the Broadway hill or a street off Pontiac Trail is the right fit, ask me — I am glad to walk it with you.
- —Founded in 1832 by Anson Brown as a rival to Ann Arbor; the streets are named for Manhattan's Broadway, Wall Street and Maiden Lane
- —The Anson Brown Building at 1001 Broadway (1832) is the oldest surviving commercial building in Ann Arbor
- —The Guy Beckley House at 1425 Pontiac Trail (1842) was an Underground Railroad station
- —Broadway Historic District, adopted 2008, with 73 contributing buildings dating from 1835 to 2006
- —Argo Cascades opened in 2012; Broadway Park West, seven riverfront acres, opened September 2025
- —Ann Arbor STEAM at Northside occupies the 1939 Northside Elementary building on Barton Drive
The town that lost the argument
Lower Town began as a competitor to Ann Arbor, not a part of it. John Allen and Elisha Rumsey had founded the village near Main and Huron in 1824, and the 1828 bridge made the crossing to the north bank practical. Anson Brown, a New Yorker who had worked seven years on the Erie Canal, arrived with his money and became the principal landowner on the north bank. With his brother-in-law Edward Fuller he set out to make this side of the river the commercial center of the town, putting up commercial blocks on both sides of Broadway — including what was called the finest hotel between Detroit and Chicago — and in 1832 his Exchange Block. He named the streets for the avenues of the city he came from — Broadway, Wall, Maiden Lane, Canal — because he fully intended this to be the heart of a real metropolis.
He died in the cholera epidemic of 1834, and the plan died with him. The Panic of 1837 followed, the railroad arrived on the south side of the river in 1839, and the University opened in the upper village in 1841. Downtown settled in the upper village, and Lower Town settled into being a distinct neighborhood with its own school, industry, and a small business row.
The evidence is still standing. The Anson Brown Building at 1001 Broadway, built in 1832 as a general store, is the oldest surviving commercial building in Ann Arbor and today houses the St. Vincent de Paul store. From 1841 the Rev. Guy Beckley and Theodore Foster published the abolitionist Signal of Liberty from Lower Town. Up the hill at 1327 Jones Drive, the Northern Brewery started in 1872 under George Krause; Herman Hardinghaus took it over in 1884 and put up the brick building in 1886. It housed the Ann Arbor Foundry from 1922 to 1972, was bought and restored by the architects Fry/Peters in 1978, was listed on the National Register in 1979, and since 2009 has held the Tech Brewery startup space.
The homes
Some of the oldest houses in the city are here, and they are mixed in with everything that came after. The Rev. Guy Beckley House at 1425 Pontiac Trail, at the corner of Argo, dates to 1842: a New England Georgian that was a station on the Underground Railroad, run by a Methodist minister who had arrived from Vermont in 1839. Houses went up slowly through the nineteenth century on Broadway, Maiden Lane, Wall Street, Traver, and Pontiac Trail, and the Observer's guide credits the neighborhood with some of the city's oldest surviving houses.
The Broadway hill is where the stock reads most clearly. The Broadway Historic District, adopted in 2008, takes in Broadway, Jones, Cedar Bend, Moore, and Traver, plus Plymouth Parkway Park, which links the Traver–Moore branch to Broadway across Plymouth Road. Jones turns off Broadway at the bottom of the hill and Cedar Bend near the top. Its houses date from 1835 to 2006, the great majority between 1845 and 1940, and the styles run Greek Revival, Italianate, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Craftsman, and International. Broadway itself is a two-lane street under mature trees with sidewalks on both sides and varied setbacks; on Jones, Cedar Bend, and Moore the houses sit close to the street on consistent setbacks. The district counts seventy-three contributing buildings, twenty-six non-contributing ones, and one contributing site.
Behind the historic core, the streets off Pontiac Trail carry the Northside's twentieth-century build, which is why the Observer calls the whole area an eclectic mix. Down on the flats, the twentieth century was less kind: single-story commercial strips, parking lots, and University buildings replaced much of old Lower Town, and many of the older homes on Maiden Lane and Wall Street gave way to U-M facilities. That flat ground is now filling in with the Beekman on Broadway apartments at Broadway and Maiden Lane, built on a long-vacant brownfield site.
The river, the Cascades and the parks
The Huron is the neighborhood's front yard, and almost all of it is public. Argo Park and Nature Area is twenty-two acres on the east bank with trails and the Argo Canoe Livery. Detroit Edison built the present Argo Dam in 1920 for hydroelectric power, stopped generating in 1959, and sold it to the city in 1963 — the purchase that started the park. The Argo Cascades opened in 2012: a bypass channel of nine short drops, rock chutes, and pools that carries paddlers and tubers about twelve feet down from Argo Pond to the river just above the Broadway Bridge. Across the pond on the west bank, Bandemer Park is thirty-eight acres whose boathouse is home to the University of Michigan and Huron High School rowing programs, with the Border-to-Border Trail running through it.
Downstream, Riverside Park runs fifteen acres from Maiden Lane to Broadway along the north bank, with a playground, a softball diamond, and an open field. Across the bridge on the south bank, Broadway Park at 800 Broadway is five acres with a 1.37-acre fenced off-leash dog area. And the newest piece is Broadway Park West at 841 Broadway: seven acres on a former Michigan Consolidated Gas coal-gasification site, cleared of 13,000 tons of contaminated soil and capped with 20,000 tons of clean fill in 2023–24, opened September 12–14, 2025, with a footbridge over to the Cascades. It is the first project of the Lower Town Riverfront Conservancy.
Up the hill, Plymouth Parkway Park is six acres straddling Plymouth Road just north of the Broadway–Maiden Lane junction, on land the city acquired in 1927, with a playground and a stairway down to Traver Road. Cedar Bend Nature Area, nineteen acres of steep wooded slope where the river bends from north to south, is one of the city's oldest parks; O.C. Simonds was hired in 1905 to lay out its drive. Northside Park, 5.2 acres at Pontiac Trail and Taylor, holds two ball diamonds, a basketball court, a tennis court, Project Grow community gardens, and the Northside Community Center run by Community Action Network.
Broadway Street
Broadway is the Northside's main street, and it has been the neighborhood's business row since the 1830s. The Northside Grill at 1015 Broadway opened in 1993 in the former Cloverleaf Dairy near the bridge, and the St. Vincent de Paul store anchors the 1832 block. Morningside, the Beekman's developer, bought the Broadway Retail Center across the street and has been renovating it.
The scale of what is coming is worth knowing before you buy nearby. Morningside's 2018 plan for the 6.4-acre Broadway–Maiden Lane site was a $213 million development with 530 rental units, an 86-unit condominium building, retail, and two parking decks in buildings of one to seven stories; the seven-story first apartment building is complete, a second followed, and Morningside has announced a third and final phase, with the 86-unit Nine99 condominium building still listed among its plans. East along Wall Street, the University's 725-space parking structure between Maiden Lane and Wall Street, near the Kellogg Eye Center, opened in July 2014 after five years of planning and complaints from Lower Town residents; it carries eight historical panels about Lower Town on its walkways.
Schools
Lower Town is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. The neighborhood school is Ann Arbor STEAM at Northside, 912 Barton Drive, which was built in 1939 as Northside Elementary, was renovated and expanded in 2009 to house K–8, and was relaunched in 2014 as a K–8 magnet focused on science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. The Observer's guide names Clague Middle School and Skyline High School as the schools most A2STEAM students go on to, with the exception of families in U-M North Campus housing, who are bused to Tappan and then Huron.
Assignment is set by address, and a magnet program adds its own enrollment rules, so families should confirm the current path for a specific house with the district.
Getting around
The Broadway bridges are the whole geography. There are two of them — one over Depot Street and the railroad tracks, one over the Huron — rebuilt in 2004 with a more pedestrian-friendly design and a reworked seven-way intersection at the south end. Kerrytown and the Farmers Market are a walk across, and the Amtrak station sits on Depot Street at the foot of the bridge on the south bank.
Plymouth Road carries you northeast to North Campus and US-23; Pontiac Trail runs northwest toward M-14. Barton, Pontiac Trail, and Wall Street have bike lanes, and Wall Street runs straight into the medical campus — the practical reason a lot of Michigan Medicine staff look here first.
Buying or selling in Lower Town
Comps here run by street and by era, not by neighborhood. An 1840s house on Pontiac Trail, a 1910 house on the Broadway hill inside the historic district, a twentieth-century house on a street off Pontiac Trail, and a new-construction unit on Maiden Lane are four different products that happen to share a zip code, and a sale in one tells you little about another. I also read the edges: a block that backs to the river parks prices differently from one that faces a University parking structure or an active construction site, and Lower Town has both.
For buyers on the hill, the Broadway Historic District is a real constraint and a real protection. Exterior changes need a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Historic District Commission, so know that before you plan a project, and get the history of what previous owners did. The oldest houses raise the usual questions about stone foundations, early wiring, and additions layered over 150 years; the later stock off Pontiac Trail is a simpler conversation. On the flats, read the environmental history of the specific parcel — this ground held a coal-gasification plant, a foundry, and a long-vacant brownfield, and the cleanup record for Broadway Park West is public.
For sellers, the story sells. This is the oldest commercial building in the city, an Underground Railroad house, a brewery turned foundry turned tech hub, and a riverfront that has gone from fenced-off contamination to Cascades, dog park, and a brand-new seven-acre park in a little over a decade. A listing that tells that story accurately, and shows the walk to Kerrytown and the medical campus honestly, reaches the buyer who is choosing Lower Town on purpose rather than settling for it.
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.