People Are People, So Why Should It Be?
The Old Fourth Ward Association’s archived newsletters provide a look at the neighborhood group’s activities over the years (as well as 1980s Printshop graphics as rendered on a dot-matrix printer.)
- 1988: equating would-be OFW homeowners deterred by ads promoting rentals with the victims of racist lending policies.
“Whatever old habits or attitudes have contributed to such undesirable OFW advertising, the end result is still the same: REDLINING…An increasing number of singles, couples and families wish to live in the downtown area, and it appears as though they are routinely steered away from this neighborhood.” And then there’s this priceless anecdote: “Someone even said to me recently, ‘I didn’t know people resided there (The Old Fourth Ward.) I thought there were only students.’”
- 1991: opposing mixed-use development — not just in particular cases, but as a concept.
“Mixed-use zoning sounds like a great innovation for creating an urban ambiance…There is, however, one problem: It doesn’t work…Creeping commercialization destabilizes neighborhoods. People can’t predict what the nature of their streets will be, the prospect of maintaining the residential character becomes increasingly weaker, and the whole street becomes commercial.”
- 1992: taking a stand against buses.
“Bus Route Removed from Ann Street at Our Request…The AATA was very responsive to our concerns and in April re-routed the Number 4 bus line to Huron Street…At present only the Number 3 bus line to Ypsilanti is using Ann Street. Are OFW residents happy with this situation or would you rather have NO bus routes on Ann Street (or Catherine for that matter)?”
Hmm. I wondered why there were still AATA signs around my place, but the only buses I ever saw were UM-Medical. The more you know.
I really would like to get together a drunken group one night to tear down all of the “Old Fourth Ward” signs they recently put up ’round the neighborhood. Honestly, I understand that real-people (as opposed to student-people) live in the neighborhood, but it’s almost a slap in the face somehow. Damned if I can put my finger on exactly why - I think I’m just beginning to resent the whole “you’re just a student” attitude with the association. Yep, I’m just a student. A student who is paying an absurd amount of money to live in your neighborhood and risk life and limb to cross Huron since the light at Fletcher was changed to a blinking yellow and no one gets what the pedestrian crossing at Ingalls means…
I’d join the association for fun, but I have studying and such. It costs the same as the ACLU student membership ($5), but I bet it doesn’t come with a fun letter every month telling me to donate more money. Who knows, maybe it does.
posted by Anonymous on May 2nd, 2005 at 1:34 pmThere you go again, Big Brother, using your fancy “internet” technology to access OFW documents and worse, using your so-called “blog” to spread anti-people propaganda. We people have enough trouble with student oppression as it is. Why can’t you and your other student friends leave us alone to enjoy the UM campus without you? Assholes.
posted by Anna on May 2nd, 2005 at 2:15 pmwow, keep going … this is hilarious. I love the anti-bus stand. How principled!
posted by Fred Zimmerman on May 2nd, 2005 at 2:15 pmMy loving memory of the old 4th ward is as a student living in a Campus Rentals/Rip-off apt at 214 N Thayer. Paid my last month’s rent in one dollar bills put loose in a paper bag and shook up. Made the bastards count it out in front of me. Bank tellers were happy to oblige once I explained why I wanted $300-some bucks in ones. Of course that was over a decade ago and I bet the dump goes for double and is as shitty if not worse.
posted by Thomas Cook on May 2nd, 2005 at 3:58 pmOK, here goes (donning flame-proof outfit):
The OFW has a pretty interesting background. I think most folks on this blog assume it is full of NIMBY elistists, but actually, it is mostly student housing owned by absentee slumlords, not the people who live there. If you have a beef with your landlord, your neighbors are not to blame.
For all the criticism of some of the lamer initiatives of OFW leaderhip, (the couch ban sticks certainly comes to mind), many of the people who have been involved with the OFW have been instrumental in preserving these quirky historic neighborhoods. Say what you will about the historic preservationists, but this part of town (the oldest part of the city) would have been bulldozed and turned into a commuter-friendly grid to get move cars in and out of the city “efficiently” just as recently as a few years ago during the Broadway Bridges planning.
At one time (late 70s I think, before my time) there was an urban renewal proposal to raze most of the OFW and particularly North Central to build the Packard-Beakes bypass, a Stadium Boulevardesque beltway around the city. At the time, the OFW and North Central were also predominantly black neighborhoods before gentrification forced up prices and changed the character of both neighborhoods. This is due more to landlords/speculation and the profits student housing reaps for these folks than it is to “snobby OFWers.” Hell, alot of these folks bought these houses and fixed them up themselves over a period of years (myself included). You can’t blame them for having a stake in the neighborhood and trying to make it better.
Of course, “better” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. I personally do not agree with much of the OFW platform (I am for mixed-use, also for auxilliary units, I am anti couch ban, I live next to one of the many halfway houses in the neighborhood and have no problem with that), however, I don’t believe in a blanket condemnation of well-meaning people. For the most part, the OFW Association does a lot of good, keeping people up to date with city issues, organizing crimewatch programs with the police, putting on a pretty good party every June (free booze!) Sure, the association has its share of scolds, but so for that matter does this forum.
posted by OFWinsurgent on May 2nd, 2005 at 5:15 pmOh, and their main problem with students isn’t really about students…it is that they would like to see more people who own their homes in the neighborhood. They have been pushing that for as long as I have lived here. They are against the absentee landlords more than the students.
posted by OFWinsurgent on May 2nd, 2005 at 5:18 pmOh, and their main problem with students isn’t really about students…it is that they would like to see more people who own their homes in the neighborhood. They have been pushing that for as long as I have lived here. They are against the absentee landlords more than the students.
posted by OFWinsurgent on May 2nd, 2005 at 5:18 pmBack in East Lansing when I was there, the city’s most powerful neighborhood group was the Bailey Community Association, which claimed a territory that included many of the student and mixed neighborhoods on the east side of downtown.
In those days, the Bailey Association was considered a fairly liberal force in town. Bailey supported most of the same city council candidates that students did, and at one point two of the officers of the association (including myself) were college-age MSU students. That happened not because students were a big force in the organization (which was almost entirely homeowners), but because the organization’s leaders wanted to be allied with students.
And the great enemy of those days, which students and Bailey working together successfully defeated, was the Peripheral Route, a highway project which would have cut up the neighborhood.
Apparently things changed later on as East Lansing politics got more hateful and polarized, but I wasn’t there to see it.
It sounds like the OFWA has a similar history, with one significant difference. The OFWA is tiny, and a trivial force in city politics for matters beyond the few blocks in its territory.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on May 2nd, 2005 at 5:39 pmBulldozing quirky historic neighborhoods? Efficient traffic-moving grids? With great respect to OFWI — you live there, I moved away hurriedly, each to his own &c — when I lived in Ann Arbor I used to *daydream* about driving through those quirky historic slums in a Caterpillar.
posted by RJD on May 2nd, 2005 at 10:00 pmI keep hearing that the OFW and Fourth Avenue used to be African American. There was definitely no African American community anywhere in downtown AA by the time I arrived in 1990 — where did all of those folks go? Curiously, Anna
posted by Anna on May 2nd, 2005 at 10:00 pmAnecdotally, the far south east and far north corners of town, mostly. You can see the demographics for 2000 at http://www.socialexplorer.com/
posted by Scott T. on May 2nd, 2005 at 10:34 pmWhen I lived on 5th Ave. (moved there in 1989) I had a number of neighbors who were African American and there are still a few in the OFW and North Central. Ironically, there is a condo (built by Garnet Johnson) on Fifth Avenue named after Lettie Wickcliff, a black neighborhood activist in North Central who led the charge and stopped the Packard-Beakes bypass, and she would still kick it up at the OFW party now and again before she sold her house, moved to the old folks home and died shortly thereafter. She was quite a character.
posted by OFWinsurgent on May 2nd, 2005 at 10:49 pmScott T.: interesting site (socialexplorer.com). Part of the OFW and most of North Central are in section 400700 when you zoom into Washtenaw County
posted by OFWinsurgent on May 2nd, 2005 at 11:41 pmWow, that is an interesting site. I could spend all day there… check out the % public trans to work and % other means (walk/bike) at a fairly zoomed-in level. Ann Arbor’s a rarity, though Detroiters walk/bike more than you’d think (by necessity?). Also turns out that almost nobody who live in Royal Oak seems to work there (or they drive anyway).
posted by Brandon on May 3rd, 2005 at 12:27 am“Apparently things changed later on as East Lansing politics got more hateful and polarized, but I wasn’t there to see it.”
As a Spartan graduate who lived in East Lansing much later than you, Larry, I can say that the relationship between residents and students is acrimonious at best now. Perhaps that’s due to the riots, but the riots that occured on city streets, namely Spartan, Bailey and Gunson, didn’t occur in areas where there were a high percentage of permanent residents.
Still, the same problems that plague OFW and the EL “Student Ghetto” are the same reasons why I never lived in the latter place during my tenure at MSU.
posted by Anonymous on May 3rd, 2005 at 10:28 amI lived in the student ghetto in EL (Gunson, Bailey).
The OFW is not a student ghetto by any stretch of the imagination (in comparison to EL).
posted by OFWinsurgent on May 3rd, 2005 at 10:39 amOFWI, as far as I can tell, the OFW has one of the *more* grid/efficient street patterns in town. State/Division/Fifth/Catherine/Ann/Beakes make it much easier to get around there than, say, anywhere north of the river.
posted by Murph on May 3rd, 2005 at 11:25 pmI was talking about Casey, Detroit, Beakes and that 7 legged intersection at the foot of the bridge. The city engineers wanted to shitcan the whole area and make a winding Lombard Steet-like “walking path” (read: Park!) out of Casey Street (the street that slopes from North Division down to depot in front of the Gandy Dancer).
They were going to flatten and straighten Division over the bridge with no way to turn.
posted by OFWinsurgent on May 4th, 2005 at 9:17 am