Rolling Oaks

What a cul-de-sac plan actually does

A subdivision laid out on cul-de-sacs rather than a through grid produces specific and predictable effects, and they are worth understanding as a set rather than as a vague impression of quiet.

Traffic is the obvious one: a cul-de-sac carries only the vehicles belonging to the houses on it, so through traffic is close to zero. That is the main reason people like them.

Lot shape is the less obvious one. Lots on a cul-de-sac bulb are pie-shaped — narrow at the street and wide at the rear — which means a small frontage and a large backyard. Lots on the straight run are conventional. Two houses of identical square footage on the same cul-de-sac can therefore have quite different usable outdoor space and quite different privacy, and that difference is worth looking at on the plat rather than from the curb.

The practical downsides are real and modest. Snow clearing on a bulb is awkward and the piles have to go somewhere, usually on somebody's frontage. Deliveries, refuse collection and larger vehicles all have to turn. And a single access point means a blocked road blocks everyone — worth a moment's thought where a household depends on getting out at a fixed hour.

Twenty-five years old

Completion across the late 1990s and early 2000s puts this housing at around twenty-five years, which reads as recent and is not.

Original roofs are at or approaching the end of a typical asphalt shingle run and many have been replaced once. Original furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters are past their expected service lives, and replacements installed in the 2010s are middle-aged now. Original double-glazed windows fail at the seal, which shows as permanent fogging between the panes and is a whole-house project rather than a repair.

Two era-specific items are worth identifying by name. Polybutylene supply piping was used in some construction into the mid-1990s, has a known failure history and can affect insurability. And hardboard or composite siding of the period performs well where kept painted and poorly where not, particularly at the bottom courses and around trim — inspect it close up rather than from the curb.

Grading is the third. Twenty-five years of settlement on ground that was farmland before it was a subdivision means a grade that fell away from the foundation at handover may not any longer, and a wet spring shows it better than a dry inspection.

City or township

Plymouth is two municipalities sharing one name. The City of Plymouth is roughly two square miles containing the downtown; Plymouth Charter Township wraps around it and is considerably larger. They are separate governments with separate taxes, separate services and separate elected officials.

A Plymouth address does not distinguish between them, and the difference is real: a different millage, township rather than city services, and the downtown as a drive rather than a walk. Neither is better — they are different products at different prices, and comparable sales drawn across the line without adjusting will produce a wrong number.

The town itself was settled in 1825, when Keziah and William Starkweather, farmers from Preston, Connecticut, bought 240 acres from the federal government on March 11 at a dollar and a quarter an acre. It was incorporated as a village in 1867 and became a city in 1932, which is why the two governments exist today rather than one.

Three high schools on one campus

Plymouth-Canton Community Schools runs an arrangement with no real parallel nearby. The Plymouth-Canton Educational Park puts three separate high schools on a single campus of about 305 acres: Salem, which opened in 1970, Canton, which opened in 1972, and Plymouth, which opened in 2002.

Each has its own building, name, colors and mascot — Salem's Rocks, Canton's Cobras and Plymouth's Wildcats — and each serves grades nine through twelve. But students can take classes across all three academic buildings, and facilities are shared rather than triplicated: one auto shop, one culinary facility, one robotics shop and one varsity football field, alongside three swimming pools and three soccer fields.

It is a structural fact about the district rather than a matter of opinion, and it regularly surprises people arriving from somewhere with a conventional single high school. Elementary and middle school assignment follows the home address, but the high school does not: students are assigned randomly among Canton, Plymouth and Salem. The district also reaches into Canton Township, Salem, Superior and Northville Township.

The park is named for the man who invented the center line

Hines Park runs through Plymouth as part of a seventeen-mile chain of Wayne County parkland following the Middle Rouge from Dearborn out to Northville — one of the more substantial pieces of continuous public riverside anywhere in suburban Michigan.

Edward N. Hines sat on the Wayne County Road Commission from 1906 until his death in 1938, having come to it from a Detroit printing business. In 1909 he was responsible for the first full mile of concrete road pavement in the world, on Woodward Avenue between Six Mile and Seven Mile. Two years later he had the idea of painting a line down the middle of a road to separate opposing traffic — the account has him watching a horse-drawn milk wagon leak a line down the street — and the first painted center line was laid in 1911 on River Road in Trenton, in this same county.

Around 1925 he set about building a parkway along the Middle Rouge. Acquiring the land and the money took years. In 1937, the year before he died, the Middle Rouge Parkway was renamed in his honor. Hilltop Golf Course is nearby too — eighteen public holes built in 1927, redesigned by Jerry Matthews in 1982, and run by Plymouth Township's parks department.

Windmills, then BB guns

Plymouth's industrial identity came from an unlikely pivot. The Plymouth Iron Windmill Company was formed in 1882 to make windmills, a business that did not prosper. What did prosper was a premium the company gave away with them, and in 1895 the firm renamed itself for it: the Daisy Manufacturing Company.

Daisy made millions of air rifles at its factory on Union Street, southeast of Main, and it was not alone — the Markham Air Rifle Company had been established in Plymouth in July 1886, and the Markham Chicago is generally credited as the first commercially successful BB gun. The Red Ryder, introduced in 1940 and familiar to a great many people from A Christmas Story, was originally made here.

Daisy left for Rogers, Arkansas in 1958. The Union Street factory was used as office space afterward and was occupied until it was demolished in 2005. The Plymouth Historical Museum holds the company's archives.

None of it is visible from a subdivision street today. It is worth knowing because it explains why a farming township on the Middle Rouge grew into a town with a downtown of its own rather than a crossroads, and why the street names and the museum are what they are.

Outdoor recreation around Powell Road

The western township's public recreation includes Hilltop Golf Course at 47000 Powell Road and Plymouth Township Park on Ann Arbor Trail. Golf, walking paths, a fishing pond and play areas offer different ways to spend time outdoors. Farther afield, Maybury State Park in the Northville area provides a larger trail destination. Trips toward downtown Plymouth lead to the shops and dining around Kellogg Park, including Compari's on South Main and the Penn Theatre on Penniman.

Buying or selling here

A consistent build across a short window and 156 houses is a workable comparable set, and the variable that most separates otherwise similar houses is lot position on the cul-de-sac.

For a seller, that is worth naming rather than leaving to a photograph: a pie-shaped bulb lot with a large rear yard is a different product from a straight-run lot, and buyers who want one usually know it.