Lower Town, more like Upper Town! Hey-O!

Ground was officially broken this week to make way for the the Broadway Village at Lower Town. This is a big step toward the redevelopment of Lower Town, and might be able to spur development in an area that has been under duress for the past 50 years.

Lower Town is the area of Ann Arbor across the Huron River. It is anchored at Plymouth and Maiden Lane. Lower Town has played an important role in the history of Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor was founded on the hill above the Huron River in 1824, settlers began to arrive in Lower Town in 1826. Most of the town was planned by a developer named Anson Brown. He planned out streets and named them after those in New York (Broadway, Canal, Maiden Lane). In 1830 he built a general store (now St. Vincent De Paul store) which is the oldest surviving commercial building in Ann Arbor.


Anson Brown envisioned Lower Town becoming the main commercial district of Ann Arbor. He even managed to get the post office moved to lower town. This was a big deal, because at that time you had to go to the post office to pick up your mail, and mail was very important in 19th century life. But Brown died in 1834 and the development of Lower Town halted. While Ann Arbor was home to U of M and wealth, Lower Town became an industrial area with slaughter houses and mills. In the 1950's U of M started buying the row houses in Lower Town to use as parking lots for the medical campus and annexes. In the last decade fire burned down one of the businesses at Plymouth and Maiden Lane, and the Kroger that was at Broadway and Plymouth went out of business.

Now the land that the Kroger was sitting on is the center of a planned re-development. The project has been in talks for the past 9 years, which made many skeptical that it would ever happen. Although currently it is a 7.3 acre brownfield, by 2010 it should be 773,000 sq feet of retail, medical and residential space. I had heard that the site was going to be anchored by a large department store, but is now going to have a upscale gym instead. I hope this will go a long way to turning lower town from the eyesore it is today to a gentrified downtown area.

Here is an artists rendering of the project:


It looks pretty nice, and along with the Kellogg Eye Center expansion project, Lower Town is on the way up. Reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons where Milhouse was wearing flood pants on the same day there was an actual flood. Milhouse's reponse to this situation was "Looks like everything is coming up Milhouse!". Maybe thats the same for Lower Town.