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When Ann Street Reigned Supreme

Once a Street of Grand Houses, it's Slowly Reclaiming its Former Respect

Twenty years before the Civil War, wealthy citizens built their houses near the center of town, often at street intersections. From the County Courthouse east along Ann Street, elegant Greek Revival structures stood at successive corners: a bank president lived at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Ann; an attorney at Fifth Avenue and Ann; a judge at Division and Ann; and a founder of the U-M medical school at State and Ann.

After the Civil War, during the building boom that occurred all over the U.S., the blocks between the corner buildings on Ann Street were filled in. In 1866 James F. and Rhoda Royce paid $900 to the heirs of George Danforth for "a strip of land off the east side of Lot 2" and built the house tthat still stands at 311 East Ann Street.

The house is a perfectly preserved example of what is known as an Italianate cube. The cube part comes from the fact hat the roof is not a pointed gable but a four-sided hip roof, which sits atop a square structure. (Houses in previous periods had been more rectangular.) Italianate refers primarily to decorative details:pairs of carved ornamental brackets under the roof eaves; long, narrow windows, often with rounded tops (here only the door is rounded); and the exuberant scroll-sawn decoration on the porch.

James Royce was an old pioneer, having arrived in Washtenaw County in 1830 from New York. He was a skilled cabinet- and chair-maker who later owned a carriage manufactory. Those endeavors evidently did not leave him wealthy: in later years, he worked as a clerk in the Bach and Abel dry goods store at the comer of Main and Washington (later B. E. Muehlig's and today the law offices of Hooper Hathaway Price Beuche & Wallace).

Bach had been Royce's son-in-law (his first wife was Royce's daughter), so it seems appropriate that he provided work for Royce in his old age. Bach later became mayor (Bach School is named after him). In 1878, when Royce was seventy-two, Bach purchased the house at 311 East Ann and allowed the Royces to stay there for as long as they lived. This may have been a form of pension for a good employee, a dodge to avoid creditors left over from Royce's business ventures, or even a gift for a former father-in-law.Whatever the reason, the Royces were able to live in the style to which they were accustomed until their deaths. James died in 1883 and Rhoda died in 1889.

In 1892 the house came into the possession of two unmarried half-sisters, Harriet and Electa Knight, daughters of early Washtenaw County pioneer Rufus Knight,whose cobblestone house still stands at 4944 Scio Church Road. Harriet was sixty-three years old when she moved from the cobblestone house to 311 East Ann. She remained there until her death in 1910 at eighty-one. Electa was kicked by a horse in 1901 and was thereafter confined to a wheelchair and forced to rely on her sister, who was nearly twenty years older. Despite their afflictions, they "bore their suffering with fortitude," according to Electa's obituary in 1919.

By 1907, the sisters began taking in boarders. The first were children of relatives who took advantage of the sisters' Ann Arbor residence to send their children to the esteemed Ann Arbor High School, which at the time functioned as almost a prep school for the U-M.

In the early 1970's, when I lived at 311, a managed to find and interview one of these boarders, Edith Knight Behringer. Mrs. Behringer lived at 311 from 1907 to 1915. She was the great-niece of Harriet and Electa Knight, and the house passed to her mother, Clara Knight, when Electa died in 1919. Mrs. Behringer remembered seeing her first car when a suitor came to call on Miss Gertrude Breed, who lived next door. Her aunts preferred to take the air with their Shetland pony and pony cart.

Later on, her aunts' lodgers tended to be doctors and nurses working at University Hospital, then located on Catherine near Glen. Three bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs were rented out. Despite depending on roomers to make ends meet, the Knight sisters never lost their pride in their fine home. While Mrs. Behringer lived at 311, a U-M professor built a house next door at 305. Her aunts dismissed it as a "little snot of a house" because it seemed so small compared to theirs.

By the 1920's, the automobile had taken hold in America, and many in the middle and upper classes moved to the suburbs, away from the decay that they saw throughout the central city (by then over fifty years old). The Ann Street neighborhood was no longer fashionable, and the area went into a decline. Both the bank president's house at Fourth and Ann and the attorney's house at Fifth and Ann became hotels. The former building survives (its biggest tenant is now Wooden Spoon books), but the latter—in its last years the Town House Hotel, catering to immigrants arriving from the South—was demolished in 1971 after part of the rear end collapsed on a neighboring house.

The doctor's house at Ann and State was moved across the street to 712 East Ann in the 1920's to make way for the Wil-Dean apartments. The judge's house at Division, now known as the Wilson-Wahr house, survived to become one of Ann Arbor's favorite historic buildings. Though less lovingly cared for, the Royce house at 311 also endured almost intact. It became a rooming house for U-M students in the 1960's: a rent roster from that era shows tenants from Thailand, Egypt, and Pakistan, as well as from all over the U.S.

Ann Street has begun to win back some of the respect its name once commanded. Beginning in 1977, a group of residents of the area began studying ways to protect the historic houses in the area. Eventually, two city ordinances were passed, establishing the Ann Street Historic Block (between Division and State) and the Old Fourth Ward Historic District, an association of owners of historic houses in the area east of Fifth Avenue to Glen and north from Huron Street to the river. Today, renovation is occurring all along Ann Street, from Main to Glen, and both owners and renters take pride in the rebirth of their historic neighborhood.


[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Above) In 1866, the neighborhood around tourney George Danforth's Greek Revival Mansion at Ann And Fifth began to fill in, starting with a fine "Italianate cube" at 311 E. Ann St.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Below) In this century, a much plainer house (at left) was shoehorned in at 305. The Danforth house was demolished in 1971, but the newer buildings both survive.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Harriet (left) and Electa Knight shared 31 with student roomers to make ends meet.

Christmas Past: Holiday Displays Downtown

As recently as the 1950s, the imposing line of storefronts along South Main Street was relieved by a peaceful patch of lawn and a handsome Greek Revival house. It was the home of shopkeeper Bertha Muehlig, and the site of a fondly remembered holiday display. Every year, Muehlig, owner of Muehlig's dry goods, worked with the Chamber of Commerce to set up a Nativity scene in her front yard.

Muehlig's home and creche are often mentioned when longtime Ann Arborites recall Christmas shopping downtown in the pre-mall era. Fay Muehlig, Bertha Muehlig's niece by marriage, remembers "a baby in a little crib with Mary and Joseph, two or three feet high." After Bertha died in 1955, the Nativity scene was put up in front of the courthouse on the comer of Huron and Main for a few years—until concerns about the separation of church and state ended religious displays on public property.

For most of this century. Main Street was lined with department stores that mounted special window displays to entertain holiday shoppers. Old-timers recall being especially enthralled by the moving displays: a revolving tree in Mack and Company's window, a Shirley Temple doll playing the organ at Goody ear's, and an electric train going around and around in the window of Muehlig and Lanphear's hardware store (co-owner Edward Muehlig was Bertha Muehlig's brother).

Mack and Company, on the comer of Liberty and Main, was the premier department store in Ann Arbor before the Depression. Former employee Mabel Sager remembers that the store's buyers would "go to New York and Chicago and buy real nice stuff for Christmas." The late Edith Staebler Kempft remembered in a 1982 interview that the store always had a live Christmas tree. 'They had a large music box imported from Germany," she said. "They put the tree in the middle. When the music was on, the tree moved. You could see it from the Liberty Street entrance." Helen Schmid remembers a Santa who roamed around the store, talking to children about what they wanted for Christmas.

On the other side of Main Street, Muehlig and Lanphear's hardware store would set up its electric train. "Kids would have their noses up to the window," Marian Zwinch remembers. "Trains were out of the range of most people's pocketbooks." Fay Muehlig agrees, remembering that it wasn't unusual to get "an engine one Christmas and a passenger car or freight car the next."

Goodyear's, located in the next block of Main between Washington and Huron, eventually replaced Mack and Company as the most prominent downtown department store. In the 1950s, it was the first store to introduce free gift wrapping at
Christmas. "We hired young girls who sang carols as they wrapped," former Goodyear's manager Donna Moran recalls. "They were from the high school a cappella choir and wore cute little outfits." Their performance was a big hit, with long
lines, but after a few years they discontinued the singing because "it interfered with the wrapping," Moran recalls. "It was hard to sing and listen to what kind of paper the customer wanted."

On Kids Night, former Goodyear's employee Jean Brumley remembers, "We set up the cafeteria with different items, all low prices that the kids could buy for their parents. The mothers would bring them in and then go off."

For years, a highlight of the holiday season was seeing and hearing the doll in Goodyear's window "play" Christmas music on a pipe organ. "We always watched to see when they would put it in," Fay Muehlig remembers. "It was a fixture of Christmas." Speakers piped the music outside for passersby.

—Grace Shackman

"Watch out! Here I come!"

When kids could sled down city streets all winter long

Sledding down the middle of city streets? No parents in their right mind would let their children do that today, but in the 1920s and 1930s it was done with the blessing of the city. Every neighborhood had at least one steep street blocked off for sledding, and often there were several within walking distance.

"Oh, it was fun, really fun," recalls Walter Metzger, who sledded on three such streets: Koch from Third to Main, Division from Packard to Hill, and Eighth from Washington to Liberty. "The city blocked the streets with a big long [saw] horse. They also blocked the side streets, but they'd leave room for the residents to drive through. It was very safe. I never remember anybody having an accident with a car."

Al Gallup, who sledded down Highland and Awixa, recalls that the city brought out a sawhorse at the beginning of the season and left it at the side of the road except when the kids were actually sledding. Hills on Broadway and Felch were popular spots. Bob Ryan, who lived on Longshore, used to sled from the top of his street clear down to Argo Pond and, if possible, right out onto the frozen water. "There was no traffic," he recalls. "The only house was Mr. Saunders's of the canoe livery, and he knew to be careful [when driving]."

If there were no sawhorses, one of the kids would stand guard at potentially dangerous intersections, warning sledders when they needed to stop. Braking was done by dragging feet, swerving onto lawns, or, if all else failed, jumping off just before a collision. Harlan Otto, who used to slide down Koch Street, remembers they didn't necessarily stop even at Main. "We'd have someone at the bottom [of Koch] to look out. One time we went down and around the comer on Main all the way to Madison."

Flexible Flyers were the sleds of choice because "you could steer them," explains Coleman Jewett. "Others you had to lean on to guide." Brad Stevens recalls that Flexible Flyers came in different lengths: "The longer it was, the more prestigious." John Hathaway recalls that his Flexible Flyer (which he still has hanging in his garage) was purchased at Hertler's, and that as a special deal the Hertler brothers cut him a piece of rope to tie on the front.

"Not many had sleds," recalls Otto, so "we used to ride double. The bigger kids would get on the bottom and the little on top." Kids sometimes went down a hill on a number of sleds chained together, sticking their toes between the opening where the sled was steered. Occasional mishaps occurred, but the victims all lived to tell the tale.

Larger groups of kids rode on toboggans and bobsleds, the latter often homemade. Hathaway recalls that the bobsleds went a lot faster and could be dangerous if you left a limb dangling. Jewett says that a family in his neighborhood, the Bakers, had a toboggan that held twelve or fourteen kids. "It was fun. Just don't sit in front or back," he warns.

Sometimes kids would enhance their sledding routes by pouring water in the tracks. Metzger recalls that "Bob Muehlig used to take buckets of water and pour it on the curb to make runs for a bobsled." Ryan remembers pouring water on Longshore in new snow so toboggan tracks would freeze at night. "We'd go like the gun the next morning," he recalls.

The kids would come home sopping wet after sledding. "We all had coal furnaces with registers on the floor. We'd take off our clothes to dry off," Metzger recalls. "The adults hated the cold and snow, but kids loved it," says Jewett. That part is probably the same today.

—Grace Shackman

Photo Caption: John Hathaway still has the Flexible Flyer his parents bought at Hertler's.