Orchard Hills / Maplewood
The 1960s colonials, ranches and Cape Cods north of Plymouth Road around Thurston Elementary and its nature center — not the two small Orchard Hills plats on Geddes Avenue where Frank Lloyd Wright's Palmer House stands
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About Orchard Hills / Maplewood
Orchard Hills / Maplewood is the northeast-side neighborhood north of Plymouth Road, with Green Road on its north and east and Nixon Road on its west, and Thurston Elementary School and the Thurston Nature Center in the middle of it. The name is shared by a homeowners association, the Orchard Hills-Maplewood Homeowners Association, and by the City of Ann Arbor, whose utility records number the ground as neighborhood 2, Orchard Hills-Maplewood. Inside that line sit several separately recorded plats — Orchard Subdivision, North Campus Heights and its numbered additions 2 through 4, Forest Hills and Forest Hills No. 2, Smokler Bolgos, and the commercial Plymouth Professional Park along Plymouth Road — and the streets the city's water records name are Prairie, Briarcliff, Aurora, Ardenne, Georgetown, Lexington and Antietam. The Bromley Park and Cedarbrook subdivisions and Nadia Court adjoin the association's area and take part in its events without belonging to it.
Here is the thing that trips people up. There are two recorded plats in the city actually named Orchard Hills — Orchard Hills and Orchard Hills Number One — and they are nowhere near Plymouth Road. They are a narrow pair of plats along Orchard Hills Drive on the north side of Geddes Avenue, across Geddes from Ann Arbor Hills, between the Highland Terrace and Hillwood plats, a little over two miles south of the neighborhood the city calls Orchard Hills-Maplewood. Frank Lloyd Wright's Palmer House, at 227 Orchard Hills Drive, stands inside Orchard Hills Number One. So when someone says Orchard Hills in Ann Arbor, the first question is which one: the 1960s neighborhood north of Plymouth with a swim club and a nature center, or the small Geddes plats beside Nichols Arboretum. They are different products at different price points, and a search on the name alone mixes them.
Tell me which one you mean, and I will pull the sales for that one and not the other.
- —The City of Ann Arbor's utility records carry the ground north of Plymouth Road as neighborhood 2, Orchard Hills-Maplewood, and the Orchard Hills-Maplewood Homeowners Association serves it
- —Thurston Elementary was built in 1963 and opened in 1964; the Thurston Nature Center followed in 1967 on 23.96 acres around a seven-acre pond
- —City water mains here date from April 1961 to November 1969, with Orchard Subdivision's main laid in May 1981
- —Two recorded plats actually named Orchard Hills lie on Geddes Avenue across from Ann Arbor Hills, and Frank Lloyd Wright's 1952 Palmer House is inside one of them
- —The Orchard Hills Athletic Club, a volunteer-run nonprofit, co-owns the nature center with the school district and runs two pools
- —Smokler Bolgos, at the north end, also appears in listings as Maplewood Smokler Bolgos
Two Orchard Hills, and which one people mean
The name Orchard Hills appears on the City of Ann Arbor's records in two different places. On the city's utility map, neighborhood 2 is Orchard Hills-Maplewood, and every water main entry the city carries under that label sits north of Plymouth Road between Nixon and Green — on Prairie, Briarcliff, Aurora, Ardenne, Georgetown, Lexington and Antietam, on Plymouth Road itself, and on the school parcel where Thurston Elementary stands. That is the neighborhood most people on the northeast side mean, and it is the one the homeowners association serves.
On the city's recorded plat map, though, the plats actually named Orchard Hills and Orchard Hills Number One are on Geddes Avenue. They run north from Geddes in a strip roughly a block wide, with Highland Terrace on their west and the Hillwood plats on their east, and the city's utility records put them in a different neighborhood altogether — number 13, Geddes Arboretum. Ann Arbor Hills, the collective name for the plats between Geddes and Washtenaw, begins directly across Geddes from them. The Palmer House, which Wright designed for U-M economics professor William Palmer and his wife Mary and which was built in 1952, is the Usonian house at 227 Orchard Hills Drive; it has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1999. If a listing says Orchard Hills and the street is Orchard Hills Drive, you are on Geddes, not Plymouth.
Neither the plat map nor the utility records carry a plat called Maplewood. The second half of the name lives in the listing services and the association's own usage, which treat Orchard Hills and Maplewood as two subdivisions, and the Smokler Bolgos plat at the north end also appears in listings as Maplewood Smokler Bolgos. When I search comparables here I search both forms, because an analysis run under one name silently drops sales recorded under the other.
How the ground was built
Until the 1950s the Millers Creek creekshed, which this neighborhood drains into, was mostly forest and farmland northeast of the city. Then the University of Michigan bought 800 acres to build North Campus, and by the 1960s Parke-Davis had moved onto Plymouth Road and the residential neighborhoods went in around it. The city's water mains tell the same story block by block: Aurora, Prairie and Briarcliff in April 1961, Briarcliff again in March 1962 and Ardenne in August 1962, Prairie in January 1963 and Nixon Road in September 1963, Georgetown and Lexington in May 1964, Antietam and Georgetown in March 1965, and a further set toward the Fleming Creek side in November 1969, with a main serving Orchard Subdivision added in May 1981.
The school and its pond came with the houses. Thurston Elementary was built in 1963, sat finished but closed for a year because the district was short of operating money, and opened in 1964; it is named for Lee M. Thurston, a school board treasurer and assistant superintendent who went on to be Michigan's Superintendent of Public Instruction and United States Commissioner of Education. Thurston Pond was made in the 1960s from an existing wetland during the school and subdivision construction. In 1964 Bill Stapp, the U-M professor credited as the founder of environmental education, recommended the site for a nature center; the Thurston Nature Center was established in 1967 and designated a Conservation Education Reserve by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources in 1968. The Orchard Hills Athletic Club dates from about the same years, roughly six decades ago, as a community pool for the northeast side.
The homes
The housing is 1960s single-family, colonials most of all. Across the association's area the stock runs mainly to colonials built in the 1960s, many of them remodeled, with two-story ranches, Cape Cods and tri-levels scattered through. The plats differ. North Campus Heights, off Plymouth Road near Huron Parkway, is brick ranches, tri-levels and two-story houses built from 1958 to 1967, roughly 980 to 2,600 square feet with three to six bedrooms on lots up to a third of an acre, within a walk of Thurston Elementary and Bromley Park. Forest Hills, north of Plymouth and east of Nixon, is more than 300 Cape Cod, colonial and ranch houses with attached two-car garages. Smokler Bolgos, at the north end around Sugarbush Park, was built from 1963 to 1973 and is mainly two-story colonials and Cape Cods.
The residential streets are zoned R1C, one of the city's single-family districts, with a planned-unit strip along Plymouth Road and an office parcel on Prairie. The ground drains three ways — most of the area to Millers Creek, the northern streets to Fleming Creek, and the Nixon Road edge to Traver Creek — which is worth knowing when you are reading a basement's water history, because two houses on the same block can sit on different sides of a divide.
A 1958-to-1973 build window carries a specific list. Single-strand aluminum branch-circuit wiring was substituted for copper in roughly 1.5 million American houses built between 1965 and 1973, so the later streets sit squarely inside that window and an electrician, not the decade, settles whether a given house has it; where it is present, it is an insurance question as much as a repair. Lead-paint disclosure applies to everything here. Asbestos turns up in floor tile, insulation and pipe wrap of the period, and Orangeburg sewer laterals were still being installed into the early 1970s. Layers of updates now sit over most of these original cores, and the permit file at the city is the record that matters, not the seller's memory.
Parks, the nature center and the swim club
Public and shared open space here comes in three pieces. Bromley Park, at 2785 Briarcliff Street near Nixon Road and Huron Parkway, is a neighborhood park with a play structure, natural play elements, a sandbox and a little free library in a grove of trees, with paved paths connecting Briarcliff on the west to Sheffield Court on the east. Sugarbush Park, at the north end inside the Smokler Bolgos plat, is 27 acres of wooded trails, playgrounds and sports courts. And the Thurston Nature Center, just north of Thurston Elementary and bounded by Prairie Street on the west, is 23.96 acres of woods and wetland around the seven-acre Thurston Pond — a natural area rather than a ball-field park, walked in summer and skated in winter, and the reason houses on that side have an outlook that is protected in a way an outlook across a private vacant lot is not. Across Plymouth Road to the south, the 1.67-acre Glacier Highlands Park at 3600 Larchmont Drive, given to the city by the developer in 1963, serves the Glacier Highlands plats and hosts Ann Arbor's Memorial Day parade.
The Orchard Hills Athletic Club is the fourth amenity people attach to the neighborhood, and it belongs to a different tier. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit run by community volunteers with two pools, the OHAC pool at 2300 Yorktown Drive and the Dolfin pool at 2050 Prairie Street, and it runs swim and dive teams, water polo, lessons and adult lap swimming. It is also, with Ann Arbor Public Schools, co-owner of the Thurston Nature Center, and its Yorktown Drive pool is one of the nature center's two entrances; Prairie Street is the other. City parks are public land and do not depend on anyone continuing to fund them. A membership pool has its own finances and its own aging plant, and membership is a separate cost from the house, so before you treat the club as part of the property, find out how it is joined and what it costs.
Schools
Orchard Hills / Maplewood is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools, and the neighborhood guides place it with Thurston Elementary, Clague Middle School and Huron High School. Thurston, a K–5 school at 2300 Prairie Street, sits on a 24.75-acre site with the nature area on it. Clague, grades 6 through 8 at 2616 Nixon Road, was built in 1972 and is named for Ashley Hubert Clague, a businessman and civic leader. Huron High School, grades 9 through 12 at 2727 Fuller Road near the Huron River, opened in September 1969. Logan Elementary, a K–5 school built in 1977 at 2685 Traver Boulevard, stands just beyond the Nixon Road edge.
A school inside a neighborhood is not the same thing as a school assignment. Assignment is set by address, and attendance boundaries change over time, so settle the current assignment for a specific house with the district rather than assuming it from the building down the street.
Getting around
Plymouth Road is the neighborhood's front door, with Nixon Road on the west and Green Road wrapping the north and east. Huron Parkway meets Plymouth Road at the area's southwest corner and runs south to Washtenaw Avenue; there is a park-and-ride lot on its west side between Plymouth Road and Nixon Road. Nixon Road and Huron Parkway have sidewalks but no bike lanes, and there is a bus stop on Nixon Road at Bromley Park. Downtown Ann Arbor is about three miles away and the University of Michigan's North Campus about a mile, with sidewalks connecting directly from the neighborhood.
The University of Michigan's North Campus Research Complex at 2800 Plymouth Road — the former Pfizer campus, 28 buildings on about 174 acres, which the university bought in 2009 after Pfizer left town following fifty years of drug research in the northeast corner of the city — is within walking distance of the Smokler Bolgos blocks, which puts a large, durable institutional employer next door. The trade-off is Plymouth Road itself: the streets nearest it carry the corridor's traffic and its shopping, and the streets deep inside the plats do not. Walk a candidate block at a weekday rush hour before deciding how much that matters to you.
Buying or selling in Orchard Hills / Maplewood
Start with which plat the house is in. The city's Orchard Hills-Maplewood label covers Orchard Subdivision, four North Campus Heights plats, two Forest Hills plats and Smokler Bolgos, laid out from the late 1950s through the early 1970s by different hands, and a 1958 brick ranch in North Campus Heights is not automatically a comparable for a 1971 colonial in Smokler Bolgos. When I run comparables here I read plat by plat and street by street, and I search both the Smokler Bolgos and Maplewood Smokler Bolgos forms so nothing drops out.
Then rule out the wrong Orchard Hills. A house on Orchard Hills Drive off Geddes, beside the Arboretum and across from Ann Arbor Hills, is a different market from a colonial on Georgetown Boulevard, and a search on the bare name will return both. For a seller, stating the plat name and the Plymouth Road location plainly in the listing is the whole fix, and it widens rather than narrows the pool — buyers searching either form of the name find you, and none of them shows up expecting Geddes Avenue.
For buyers, the work is in the house. Get dated records for the electrical service, the supply piping, the roof, the furnace and the water heater; find out whether the 1960s core has been opened up and whether that work was permitted; and treat any aluminum branch wiring as an insurance and financing question rather than just a repair line. The recorded plat for each subdivision, held by the Washtenaw County Register of Deeds, carries the proprietors, the date and any deed restrictions in one document, and it is worth reading before you write an offer.
Not to be confused with
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