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Category: Architecture

Homage to Ypsilanti

ArchBlogger's father once pointed out -- and A.B. thinks this is largely true -- that some of the handsomest towns in Michigan are the wealthy-farmer towns along the Detroit-Chicago rail line. Why wealthy? Because they had easy, cheap access to transport for their goods.

These were the towns, or so the story went, where farmers whose land might be way out in the boonies built impressive, freestanding "town houses" near the city center.

Whether this social history is entirely accurate, there's no doubt that the towns strung along that east-west railroad line tend to be handsome: think Manchester, Chelsea, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, to name just a few close-in examples.

Of these, Ypsilanti has the grandest houses and churches, a reflection of that city's heightened stature in the late 1800s compared to today, when it sits in the shadow of that snooty university town just to the west.

Grand and graceful, and this 19th century Ypsi mansion is built of the same handsome orange bricks one sees in most of the buildings on Ann Arbor's Main Street. [All photos by ArchBlogger.]

On Oak Street, a home that's just about as pretty as it could be. Most of these photos, by the way, were taken in Ypsi's north end.

Yet, to return to the comparison at hand, for all Ann Arbor's historic charms, there's really no contest between the grand old houses in parts of Ypsi to the fewer, smaller old examples in Ann Arbor.

A.B.'s not sure when A2 ("a-squared," as some locals style it) passed Ypsi in the wealth and status department, but it doesn't appear to have happened until the 20th century.

This handsome Ypsilanti neighborhood reminded ArchBlogger a bit of the old nickname for Brooklyn, NY -- "the borough of homes and churches."

First Presbyterian Church on the north side, a twin-towered, handsome pile.

A remnant from a more genteel age.

Admirable rustication on an old home.

A 19th-century commercial row in Depot Town, amusingly painted.

Marvelous sign on a small commercial street. Note nice brickwork around the windows.

A bit of "Addams Family" Victorian architecture rises above the trees.

Back to Depot Town -- the scene one evening outside Sidetrack's bar & restaurant. That's the old-car museum in the background, by the way, with the "Hudson" signs.