Several Indian trails once met at a ford near the present-day Broadway Bridges. Today its a convergence point for Broadway, Plymouth Road, Wall Street, Maiden Lane, Moore Street, and Swift Street. During Ann Arbors early days the area was known as Lower Town, and it contains the citys oldest commercial structure, the 1832 Anson Brown Building at Swift and Broadway, home of the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store. The neighborhood flourished in the 1830s but became a backwater when the University of Michigan focused development across the river at what is now known as Central Campus.

Today, this portal to the northeast side is in transition. The apartments and condominiums along Wall Street and Maiden Lane, a location favored by the U-Ms medical students and residents, were recently joined by Kessler Commons, six groups of three-story townhouses. The ambitious Lower Town development planned for the area would replace the vacant shopping center bordered by Maiden Lane and Broadway with multifamily housing units, a health club, medical offices, retail stores, and restaurants.

The hilly area bisected by Pontiac Trail is increasingly in demand. Many older houses long used as rentals are for sale. They share the neighborhood with some of the citys oldest surviving houses, such as the Beckley House, built in New England Georgian style, at the corner of Pontiac Trail and Argo Drive. It was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, and schoolchildren used to take field trips there to see where the slaves hid.

Rising northward from the river, the Broadway neighborhood combines rental housing with older single-family houses on large, well-kept lots on and near Cedar Bend Drive, a lovely street that offers spectacular views of the Huron River valley. Many older homes have been rehabilitated, and the area has become more popular with families who have young children. Its also home to Ann Arbors steepest park, Cedar Bend Nature Area.

In the established, low-key, well-integrated neighborhoods off Pontiac Trail, neighbors fix their cars, children play tag in the streets, and retirees sit in rockers on the porch. Closer to the river, on Longshore, the houses are bigger and the street less social. A popular boardwalk along Barton Drive near the river provides scenic and safe pedestrian access to Bandemer Park and combines with a new bicycle path to complete a walking/biking loop around Argo Pond.

Farther up Pontiac Trail, the brick Cape Cods off Brookside and Skydale streets in the Huron Highlands area are home to families, retirees, and singles. Across Pontiac Trail is the 350-unit Arrowwood Hills Cooperative, an affordable townhouse complex built in the late 1960s. The lower-income families here include many U-M graduate students. Arrowwoods multicultural members participate in many shared programs and have cooperative garden plots. Carrot Way Apartments, a thirty-unit affordable housing complex off Dhu Varren, is also in the area. Nearby subdivisions include large single-family homes on Brookside and Tibbits Court east of Pontiac Trail and off Dhu Varren. Leslie Park Golf Course and the Leslie Woods Nature Area combine to give this area one of the largest recreation spaces in the city.

The area south of Plymouth Road and west of Huron Parkway is dominated by the U-Ms North Campus, a mixture of classroom and research buildings, residence halls, and rental apartments and townhouses for faculty and married students. South of Plymouth, off Hubbard, married U-M students live in a large complex of townhouses called Northwood V. Half of the residents are from abroad, and nearly all have young families. Their kids are bused to Northside, which historically has been one of the most diverse elementary schools in town in race, income, nationality, and religion. The schools annual potluck is an international feast. The Huron River Plaza apartments and high-rise Huron Towers on Fuller Court augment the U-Ms Baits and Bursley housing to create a densely settled neighborhood dominated by students. Almost all of the residents in the North Campus neighborhood are renters.

Northside is in the Clague Middle School and Huron High catchment areas, except for the U-Ms North Campus, where children are bused to Tappan Middle School. Under high school redistricting, however, students north and west of Plymouth Road and Island Drive will go to the new high school, while the remainder will continue to go to Huron.