Ann Arbor Observed: Selections from Then and Now

The Broadway Bridge Parks

The Broadway Bridge Parks The area around the Broadway Bridge was once home to factories, junkyards , and hoboes. Its transformation into three riverfront parks is one of the city’s longest running sagas of civic improvement. The Broadway Bridge, connecting the central part of Ann Arbor with the north, spans the Huron River at a historically busy spot. Potawatomi trails converged to ford the river there. When John Allen and Elisha Rumsey came west from Detroit in 1824, looking for a place to found a town, they, too, crossed the river at this spot. The first bridge was built just four years later. Replaced and widened several times since, it was most recently redone in 2004. In 1830, Anson Brown, a pioneer who settled in Ann Arbor after working on the Erie Canal, dammed the river upstream from the bridge. Brown; his brother-in-law, Edward Fuller; and Colonel Dwight Kellogg used the flow from the dam to power a flour mill located just west of the bridge. Brown had grandiose ideas about turning the north side into the center of the city, but he died in the cholera epidemic of 1834, before his dreams could be realized. In 1839 William Sinclair purchased the property, repairing the mill and installing new machinery. His new setup worked so well that after the 1841 harvest he shipped to New York, via the Erie Canal, 8,112 barrels of flour—a record for Ann Arbor up to that time. Sinclair’s mill was destroyed by a fire in 1860, but he quickly rebuilt it and was back in business the next season. The next owners were the Swift family, first Franklin and then his son John Marvin. In 1892 the mill became part of a conglomerate. The Ann Arbor Milling Company , later called the Michigan Milling Company, bought it, along with several other mills in the area, and renamed it Argo. In 1903 they improved the mill and built a new dam, but again, fire claimed the mill. They rebuilt the mill, but with the development of cheaper steam power, water mills were increasingly hard put to compete. The dam and mill were sold in 1905 to the Eastern Michigan Edison company (later Detroit Edison), which was buying up all the water power along the river to generate electricity. Edison built a generating station that is still 166 there; though it no longer produces power, it is still used as a transmission substation. Beginning in 1866, the Sinclair mill also powered the Agricultural Works, on the east side of the bridge (power was transmitted through a tunnel under the bridge). Founded by Lewis Moore, the Agricultural Works made all kinds of farm implements—plows, seed drills, mowing machines, hay tedders (machines used in drying and curing hay), rakes, straw cutters, corn shellers—and shipped them all over the country. Finding a ready market in the days when most of the country’s population was farmers, the Agricultural Works expanded throughout the century until it covered three acres, with a main building, a wood shop, a machine shop, a painting building, a lumberyard, and a foundry near the river. As it grew, it supplemented water power with steam power; by 1896, the promotional Headlight magazine declared it “one of the most important manufacturing enterprises of the city.” But national manufacturers gradually took over the agricultural market, and the company closed in 1903. The Ann Arbor Machine Company, which made hay presses, occupied the premises for the next twenty years, using the same buildings. In 1924 Detroit Edison bought the site to build the garage and storage yard that are still there today. Recreation & Culture 167 A hobo cooks dinner near the Broadway Bridge during the Depression. For years, the city park behind the railroad station was known as Hobo Park. (Courtesy of Bentley Historical Library.) Mills and factories weren’t the only industries drawn to Lower Town, as the area north of the river was known. In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, six slaughterhouses were built on the floodplain between the river and Canal Street. (Canal, although called a street, was “really an alley,” according to Thelma Graves, who grew up nearby on Wall Street; residents of Wall used Canal to reach their back entrances.) Though the last slaughterhouse closed in 1915, the floodplain remained heavily industrialized. In the 1920s, it was home to a concrete company, David A. Friedman...