Riverside Park, Ypsilanti

Crisp fall day here. Seems like a good time to show off Riverside Park in Ypsilanti, which I wandered through today after a few hours at the YHS archive.

On my way over, I walked along Huron Road, which is lined with several historic buildings dating back well over 100 years. Ghosts galore, no doubt. Within a block or so, however, approaching the intersection with Michigan Ave, the historic buildings give way to a series of storefronts, which are perhaps 40% unoccupied at the moment. It feels vaguely seedy, though I don’t know anything about how long some of those places have been empty. Perhaps not that long; we’ve had a few years now of bad business conditions, after all, and this corner of Ypsilanti is almost entirely small businesses.

Ypsilanti does have its big-box store corridor, westward towards Ann Arbor along Washtenaw. There you’ll find the K-mart, for example. But the stores along Michigan Ave are smaller; antiques, restaurants, vintage clothes. Most of them are still open at 5:00 when I leave the archives, but the quietness of the whole scene, the lack of a town “buzz”, is intimidating. I feel like I’d have to explain myself if I went into a store, and it seems tacky for my reasoning to be that the lineup of porcelain angels seemed worth a photo (actual restaurant window, yes) and not that I actually had any desire to eat there.

It gets philosophical from there. To take a photo is to objectify. So, how to objectify in a way that’s fair? Etc, etc. This went through my head as I rounded the corner on Michigan Avenue and didn’t take pictures. I passed a group of middle-aged couples bedecked in blue and yellow (excuse me, maize) Michigan gear; there’d been a game earlier in the afternoon, and I guess they’d been watching it from one of the restaurants.

Michigan Avenue crosses over the Huron River. Unidentified waterfowl pass under the bridge.

Anyway, Michigan Ave crosses the Huron River, and this is the southern end of Riverside Park. A red metal stairway leads down to the park from the road. I watched some sort of hybrid duck-goose flock (looked like ducks, acted like ducks, but sized like geese) float downstream on the rapid current.

First leaves changing color. The Huron River is to the right, almost out of view behind the dip in the lawn.

The park follows the river up to the next bridge, at Cross Street. The paths running through it are in fairly good shape, but it was a blustery day and no one really seemed to want to linger outside; I passed one group of four people, talking together in a huddle, and the other park visitors I saw were walking alone determinedly towards some destination. I probably didn’t look too different, except for when I brought my hands out of my pockets to take a photo. (Mostly overexposed, despite the excellent natural lighting; must check my camera settings.)

the one more travelled by

I’d suspected something about US-12 for a while, and finally got definitive proof today at the Ypsilanti archives. See, the thing about numbered highways is, there’s nothing really magical about the road quality or the age of the route (although there does tend to be a correlation with more-trafficked roads getting more attention and care, which tends to then persist over the decades). But at the end of the day, US-12 is just a series of interlinked local roads, each of which only gets the US-12 designation because someone in an office somewhere decided it made sense to mark it as such.

These designations have changed over the years. US-12 didn’t always go all the way to Washington state. I knew this. But it turns out that a lot of smaller adjustments have been made to the route as well, and I got my first hard evidence of this today.

1957 map of Dixboro. From the Ypsilanti Historical Society.

Dixboro is a cute little village just north of Ann Arbor. All I know about it, really, is that it’s home to Roger Monk’s, which has an amazing cocktail menu. I learned today that US-12 also used to go right through it. Actually, it went through Ann Arbor as well, along what is now known as Plymouth Road.

So what about Ypsi, right? Well, they had something called 112 at that point, which sort of entangles itself with another local road numbered 17. Locals will recognize 17 as the proto-Interstate, which in fact came through about three years after this map was drawn.

US-112 and state road 17 in Ypsilanti, 1957. From the Ypsilanti Historical Society.

M-17 is no longer in that location; the number is now associated with Washtenaw Avenue (which actually is labeled as the 17 “business route” on that map, so I guess it is sort of there already; the “real” 17 of 1957 follows the 112 bypass route around Ypsi, where I-94 runs today). And as for the old US-12 in Dixboro, it later became M-14, and today doesn’t have a number at all (M-14 moved a few blocks north).

Obviously, there’s a big part of me that loves going through these old maps. But all this new information also raised a difficult question: what does this mean for this fledgling project of mine? I could spend years just detailing all the old US-12s in the Ann Arbor-Ypsi area. Lord knows what awaits me in Chicago, then, and I still don’t even really know what to make of Indiana in the first place.

So, with the larger picture in mind, I’m making a big cut to the scope here. I’m following the US-12 of 2011. I still want to learn about its history, in a big way, but I will definitely get mired in details (a favorite pasttime of mine, as it were) if I attempt to chart the story of every bend that the route took between its trailblazing and the modern day.

This means that there are towns along the old US-12 that will not be part of the story. Dixboro is one of them. Sorry, folks.

Also, I am determined that this will be the first and only reference to “The Road Not Taken” that this blog ever, ever mentions. Here’s the whole poem. I actually love Frost, but I’m trying to get this out of my system early so it doesn’t get obnoxious.

the old Chicago Road

Most Saturdays, I spend a few hours at the Ypsilanti Historical Society’s archives doing various volunteer tasks. It’s a small group running the place, so I sort of have to round up my own projects, but this works out pretty well, I think, because I was just able to get the official “sure, go ahead” sign-off on my new initiative to inventory the archive’s map collection.

This is one of those things that, I realize, sounds to most people like something you’d be assigned to do as punishment, but for a map enthusiast, it’s pretty exciting.

Ypsilanti is, of course, one of the towns that US-12 runs through (as Michigan Ave, though a lot of people at the historical society also recognize it as “the old Chicago Road”, since that’s how it appears in so many historical records). And, sure enough, in a surveyor’s map from 1869, written in careful swooping script, “Chicago Road” runs diagonally across the plot of “Morse’s Addition to Ypsilanti”.

Photocopy of the original surveyor's map, from the Ypsilanti Historical Society archives.

One of the things that I love about these old maps is that the scale is given in the very-archaic “chains” to the inch, as the surveyor noted in the Morse Addition map. (He also, helpfully, noted that two chains was also equal to 132 feet. I imagine the “chain” was, quite literally, a 66-foot chain that surveyors used to measure distance at that time, though I haven’t researched this at all.)

The map looks to have been photocopied out of an enormous notebook belonging to the surveyor (in this case, one George S. Capwell), which the Ypsilanti archive unfortunately does not have. Tracking this down is a new side-side research project, maybe, mostly just because I’d love to see the thing.

Anyway. This was just a blip in my day of map-inventorying, since the US-12 project only lightly intersects with my volunteer project at the archives. But it’s always fun to find the road deep in the historical record.

just slightly lost

The last leg of my weekend trip was the long haul through most of southern Michigan to get from New Buffalo back home to Ann Arbor. Despite the fact that I’d already been on the road for hours, I thought I’d continue my US-12 journey, swearing I wouldn’t stop anywhere but would simply soak in the view and make mental notes of places to drive back to another weekend.

I learned two things from this decision:

1. Cruise control is awesome.
2. Detour routes are not to be trusted if you actually have a specific destination in mind.

I passed through Edwardsville, where the road was lined with banners proclaiming that the town was “Michigan’s best-kept secret”. Is that so, I thought, bemused. Doesn’t really top “Refining the heart of community,” though.

I got a few miles down the road when I encountered a sign indicating that a bridge was out four miles ahead. Looking at the map now, I’m guessing this could be the bridge at Mottville, which is apparently somewhat celebrated as a rare style of bridge called a concrete camelback—and on top of that, it’s the longest bridge of that type in Michigan.

Now that I know about this bridge, I’m wondering—so, did the St. Joseph River flood? Did the bridge collapse? Is this even the bridge the sign was referring to? In short, it’s an investigative road trip I’ll have to take someday.

In the meantime, for travelers approaching from the west, a US-12 detour sign directs you to turn left, to the north up Calvin Center Road. This is what I did, and the Detour signs were posted promisingly every couple miles on this road. It’s a rural area, and my view from the two-lane road consisted of fields and barns virtually the entire time. I reached M-60, a state highway, and a final US-12 detour sign indicated that I should turn right, to the east. I did this, and never saw a trace of a detour sign again.

My route from where I initially turned onto Calvin Center Rd, meandered east on M-60, and then eventually gave up and turned north to hop on I-94. US-12 runs near the state border and continues through White Pigeon and Sturgis before angling northeast.

Now what? I thought. Eventually M-60 took me to the cute small town of Three Rivers, which I immediately disliked for its lack of signs pointing towards US-12. At this point I was still operating under the illusion that US-12 was probably just a few miles away, but this idea died as soon as I checked the map on my phone. To get back to US-12 from Three Rivers, I would have to take a series of country roads due south—as the sun was beginning to set—and would add at least another hour to my travel time overall.

Or, I could take route 131 due north and hop on I-94. And this is what I did. I didn’t like giving up on US-12, and I felt even more conflicted about the whole thing when I hit a small bird while driving along 94.

See, I thought, arguing incoherently with myself in the car, interstates mean the death of innocent living creatures! Never mind that the roadkill ratio on US-12 isn’t really notably lower than on any other highway (in fact, part of the reason I initially missed the entrance to the park in Indiana was because I was focused on swerving around an enormous dead animal in the road at that very moment).

In any case, it wasn’t an uplifting end to the trip; I abandoned the road, and a bird died. Hopefully a one-time occurrence. And I’m glad it wasn’t a bigger animal.

beachside in New Buffalo, Michigan

New Buffalo, Michigan, is basically the first town you hit when you enter Michigan from Indiana on US-12 East. It was about 2pm when I rolled in, and I was pretty hungry (a good thing, really, I didn’t climb that sand dune). In what I assume was some kind of weakened state, I saw a sign for a McDonalds—a mile up a road to the right—and some kind of primal mode took me in that direction until I snapped out of it.

I’m not sure I didn’t actually chastise myself out loud. Sally. Here you are in New Buffalo, a town you planned to stop in to look for a cute local lunch joint near the lakefront, and now that you’re here and it seems likely to be a town that will have exactly that sort of thing, you’re driving away from the lake and to a McDonald’s? 

McDonald’s is Interstate travel plaza sustenance. US-12 is in a different category. I turned the car around, immediately saw a strip of the blue lake on the horizon and the promise of several storefronts, and knew I was on the right track.

From the USGS 30x60 "South Bend" map; US-12 passes through New Buffalo and then veers to the east and becomes Pulaski Highway.

Parking was almost another challenge, but as I was there in the mid-afternoon, I had a stroke of luck: early beachgoers were beginning to pack up and head home, and I managed to snag a spot that had just opened up near the corner of Buffalo Road (a.k.a. US-12) and Whittaker Street, a busy central road that heads directly to the lake and was filled with slow-moving beach traffic.

Restaurants along Whittaker were mostly laid-back joints with inoffensive American-style food; it definitely had a beach town vibe. I saw one place with tablecloths; it seemed to be empty. The “fancy” option, no doubt. I opted for The Stray, mostly because I liked their iconic sign, and also because it harkened up memories of the Lost Dog Cafe in Arlington, VA, where I ate countless baskets of waffle fries as a teenager. The place was packed, but an upstairs patio for the over-21 set proved to be much calmer (albeit non-air-conditioned, and my hopes for a cool breeze from off the lake were in vain).

I’ve now learned that one major difference between “beach” towns on lakes and beach towns on the ocean is that only one of them can really offer a refreshing ocean breeze. It was another ninety-degree day when I was in New Buffalo—not even remarkably hot, really, for July in the Midwest—and the only real way to cool off is to actually get in the water.

Whittaker Street in New Buffalo, MI. The Stray is the building on the left with the red awning, its patio just visible above.

In any case, I had a good lunch at The Stray (their lunchtime pizza special is probably the best deal on the menu). I sat at the bar next to two guys in their 20s who were in the thick of some conversation about the girls they were seeing. I offered no advice, nor did they ask for any. A television behind the bar counter was tuned to ESPN, and at that moment was broadcasting a Nascar race, I think in Indianapolis.

From there I wandered down Whittaker Street towards the beach. A small, high bridge goes over the marina area; it’s just high enough above the water for small boats to pass under. I waved to a girl on one of the boats, passing under the bridge just as I crossed it, and she waved back.

The beach was busy, but not frantically so; I think the fact that only one road really takes you there keeps the traffic under control, and thus the stress. If the lots are full (as they were when I was there), they simply point you to an area where you can turn yourself around and head back into the main part of town. Amtrack trains whistled by a couple times; there’s a small, open-air station right next to the marina, where a few people were waiting. Not a bad idea, really, to take the train here; where the train lets you off is closer to the beach than most people end up parking.

The New Buffalo beach is at the base of a sand dune. On the left is the boat entrance to the marina.

I climbed up a small dune and took a few photos, sand creeping into my sneakers. The lake seemed calm; I saw a few people with surfboards, but I’m not sure what exactly you can do with them on a lake with minimal wave action. As I walked back through the parking lot back towards town, I heard a family talking as they packed up their car; they’d had a good day, and the mother concluded, “That’s the closest we’re going to get to the ocean for a while.”

Not long after my visit to New Buffalo, I went for my first appointment with an optometrist in Ann Arbor, and learned that he’d grown up in New Jersey. He wasn’t really a fan of lakefront beaches, admitting that he missed the ocean. I told him I’d just been to the lake and he winced when I said I’d been to New Buffalo; “It’s kind of scuzzy there,” he said. “If you’re going to go to the lake, Grand Haven is much nicer.”

In fairness, most of the buildings in New Buffalo looked very new, and I thought the town seemed cute and nice, so it’s possible he was there during a different era of the town’s history. But the last beach town of any caliber that I was in probably would have been Coney Island, so my scuzz-meter may be a bit off.

a long way from easy street

On my trip down the early miles of US-12 in Detroit last weekend, I passed by Michigan Central Station, a giant abandoned building that was once an enormous train station. Every time I see it, I think of my first drive down Michigan Ave, when I parked in front of it on my way to eat at Slow’s. It was nighttime then, and the road was eerily quiet. It was too dark to really see the building at all, since it sits back some distance from the road, but I could make out its general outline.

It was spooky. There were no ghostly lights or anything, but something about the sound of the wind going around the huge tower, and the sprawling, dark surrounding grounds of Roosevelt Park, was unnerving. Such an enormous building, completely empty.

Even in daylight, the place is kind of creepy. All those gaping broken windows. “Save the Depot” is spray-painted across the top.

It’s almost sadder to see pictures from the inside of the station, which show scenes of amazing architecture and beautiful design succumbing to complete neglect. There are several buildings in similar condition along Michigan Ave as it passes through Detroit (many, in fact, that are far worse along).

Apart from Slow’s barbecue, the most consistently open-for-business ventures along this stretch of US-12 are strip clubs. Not sure why they’ve all flourished in this particular area.

“Flourished” may not be the right word. I doubt it’s been easy for anyone.

at the start

I drove into Detroit on 12 with the goal of seeing exactly where the road began. I knew a lot already just from looking at Google maps. I even knew, from extensive StreetView image perusal, not to expect a romantic “US-12 Start” sort of sign.

I think the original idea was to have these roads — I thought there were originally eight, but looking at the map I think I may be mistaken — radiating out like the spokes of a wheel. At the center of the spokes is Campus Martius Park.

I didn’t expect parking would be any problem in downtown Detroit — and indeed, it wasn’t. Just one of the strange things about Detroit today. Since the city was built to hold many, many more vehicles than it needs to now, thanks to the population shrinking, parking has never been something I worry about too much when I think about taking a trip to Detroit.

Michigan Avenue, in those blocks leading up to the park, is currently half-blocked off with orange construction barrels. I felt lucky that it was at least partially open, so I could still technically drive the full length. But it definitely isn’t a very inspiring sight with the road work going on.

Not exactly a full-throttled start to the 2,500-mile road.

I rolled into my parking spot on Griswold at just a little past noon. It was about ninety-five degrees, and there was virtually no shade for relief anywhere along the road I’d come here to see. Small parties of tourists were milling around here and there, mostly heading to the Lafayette Coney Island. (As a New York transplant, I will never quite know what to make of these restaurants. Apparently it’s a Midwestern thing to call a hot dog joint a “Coney Island.” I have not gotten used to it.)

The park beckoned, with shade trees and water fountains. There was some sort of event going on — moon bounces, dance music, and a tricycle race that I tripped into by accident. But there weren’t many people in the park enjoying it. A few kids, impervious to the heat, jumped around the moon bounce tent. Most adults picked a shaded chair and stayed there, around the perimeter of the park. A few volunteers wearing white shirts milled around the temporary play area; one bounced idly on a huge blue exercise ball. It wasn’t clear what they were there for; with hardly anyone attending the event that was staged, there simply wasn’t much for them to do.

Quiet Saturday downtown.

I would’ve asked, but frankly, the heat was already starting to get to me, and I wanted to get to the library.

Walking back up Michigan Ave, I was reminded vaguely of when I lived in the financial district in New York: a shining part of the city, with lots of interesting buildings and sculptures, that was always nearly-deserted on the weekends when the offices were closed. It creeped me out then to be in an empty part of the city, and I didn’t like the feeling on Michigan Ave either.

I felt like a lost tourist who’d meant to go up Woodward instead. I couldn’t really place the feeling; had it just been that long since I’d been in a city, or was there something really off about this part of town? In any case, I didn’t linger, guiltily driving up Woodward to park near the library.

Michigan Avenue, 1909

What surprised me most about the 1909 Biennial Report from the Michigan State Highway Commission was the number of photographs. Usually when I see photographs from that time period, it’s the stiff formal portrait variety; until now I’d never seen a printed book that included so many of them.

Most of the photos in the report are before-and-after shots of roads that have been regraded and resurfaced in counties across Michigan, and serve as convincing arguments for how badly Michigan’s roads need repair.

Michigan Avenue has its moment in these photos as well, and in fact is pretty funny:

From the Michigan State Highway Commission's Biennial Report, 1909.

This man is clearly not happy about the state of the road here, straddling the ruts to indicate just how deep the grooves are. There’s no mention of who he is or exactly when the photo was taken, but I like to imagine it’s Charles Kruger, who was the highway commissioner for Springwells township around this time.

From the Michigan State Highway Commission's Biennial Report, 1909.

Ahh! Much better! I’m sorry we don’t see Charlie again, though; one imagines he’s standing just off-camera, beaming. The caption for this photo reads, “Michigan avenue road, outside city limits of Detroit, after improvement by county road commission. Paved with vitrified brick laid on concrete base.”

Detroit Public Library, take 1

I hate being one of those people who blogs about bad service types of experiences, but I do want to keep notes of the libraries I visit, so I’ll say it: the library staffer at the Burton Historical Collection in the Detroit Public Library was incredibly unhelpful when I asked for information about the collection. I hate ratting out a fellow librarian, but she was really awful.

Technically I interacted with two staffers, and the first, I have no complaints about; I’d looked up three books in the collection’s card catalog, and since they were in a storage area he had someone pull them for me. Totally normal experience there.

They switched shifts at the desk at one point, and the second librarian sat reading a book while she was there (also not a problem… at least, when no one’s asking you questions). At this point, I’d gotten the information I wanted from the books I’d picked, but was beginning to wonder if I was really making the best use of this somewhat-rare collection. I mean, all I really did was use the card catalog; what if there was some sort of “early highway planning in Detroit” part of the collection that I hadn’t known to look for? That’s the sort of thing a librarian is usually ready to help with.

Not this lady, though. I approached her desk and asked something about the library’s historic collections and whether there was anything I should keep an eye out for while looking for highway-history stuff. She glared at me the entire time, suggested that I could also go to Lansing for information, and when I followed up with a question (admittedly a vague one) about the map collection, she just stated drily, “Yeah, we have a map collection,” and then started reading her book again.

It’s entirely possible she isn’t actually a librarian, and that the only thing they’re really trained for in that room is to help people fetch books from storage and then make sure no one walks off with them. But I don’t really think that excuses much. When I worked at the library in Ann Arbor, in a non-librarian role, I actually got in trouble with management if I answered reference questions at the circulation desk, but we never hesitated to help people find the reference librarian on duty or generally find their way around the library.

Anyway. Despite that sore point in my visit, the Burton Collection is a geneaologist’s dream. It’s housed in this lovely two-story area with all manner of records from towns all over the country chronicling the comings and goings of their residents. There are also apparently a lot of materials there related to the early days of Detroit and Michigan, such as the three books on early highway commission reports that I looked at. It’s really a nice spot to do research, and I imagine I’ll be revisiting it at least once. Before I do that, though, I think I’ll email them first to get a bit more direction; maybe their virtual reference support is a bit more helpful than the in-house.

a huge retreating army of serpents

There is a librarian in Flint I think I need to meet. His name is Tom Powers, and he has written maybe ten books, all about his home state of Michigan and with titles like Michillaneous. The one that I stumbled upon this evening at the downtown library was Michigan in Quotes, which delivers exactly what you’d expect: a series of quotes, ranging from earnestly philosophical in mood to outright sarcastic, divided with a librarian’s sense of order into subsections like “Cities,” “Counties,” “Rivers,” and “Weather.” (That last one is especially heavy on the sarcastic quotes.)

I didn’t plan on taking the book with me for further study, but he won points with me by having a section titled “Roads” and, lo, two quotes under the subheading “US-12.” This was actually the only instance I’ve encountered so far where “US-12″ actually appears as a term in the index. Clearly this Powers and I think alike (or, at least, whoever did the indexing).

Anyway, with thanks to Tom Powers, whose brain I hope to pick before he retires, some musings on US-12:

“(The Chicago Road) stretches itself by devious and irregular windings east and west like a huge serpent lazily pursuing its onward course utterly unconcerned as to its destination.” –An early 19th century description by an unknown traveler.

“The road from this point to Ypsilanti looks at certain times as if it had been the route of a retreating army, so great is the number of wrecks of different kinds which it exhibits.” –A Detroit newspaper description, 1836.

Okay, so the “serpent” thing definitely doesn’t sound like the way the road looks now, but no big deal, now I can run with “Chicago Road” as another search term. As for the second quote… huh, apparently Michiganders have always been reckless drivers.