I knew Allen Creek by name. On the map, it crossed a part of Ann Arbor I thought I knew.
Under the streets
The city’s Historic Allen Creek map shows the old course and the enclosed route. The water still runs beneath much of downtown and parts of the Old West Side, almost entirely in concrete pipes.
The main branch runs north from the Pioneer High School area, alongside the railroad, and reaches the Huron River just south of Argo Dam. I had been thinking of it as a creek somewhere outside town. I was several streets off.
Before the pipes
A short history in the city’s 2007 Greenway Task Force report helped fill in the route. A flour mill, tanneries, a foundry, and breweries grew along the creek. In 1878, the railroad laid its tracks parallel to it.
By the early 1920s, the water was polluted enough that property owners wanted it put into a storm sewer. The report dates the piping of the main stretch to 1926, with lower portions of the branches following later.
I’d opened a map to find a creek. Now I had a reading list about the businesses beside it. This is usually how an evening goes.
The photographs
The city’s map links photographs from before and during the enclosure work of 1922–1926. Those are the ones I want to spend more time with.
I’m interested in the edges of the pictures: a crossing, the back of a building, the space between the water and the tracks.
First and William
The Greenway report puts a city parking lot at First and William among the sites it considered. That gives me one small area to work on instead of the whole creek at once.
I’ll start there, with the older photographs and a street map. I’d like to see what stood beside the water before it was covered, and what, if anything, I would still recognize.