Reprinted from the June 1981 Ann Arbor Observer. Stevens died on July 26, 2015.
His gaze fixed ahead upon the Greek Revival house at 126 North Division, City Historian Wystan Stevens backed slowly out into the middle of the street and peered through his lifted camera. At 6:30 in the evening, the rush hour traffic had subsided. Stevens, red-bearded and sandy-haired, his ample Falstaffian figure clad in black trousers and a black pullover sweater, had the street temporarily to himself. He was accompanied on this picture-taking ramble by his raven-haired, English-born wife, Catherine, who was standing beside him keeping an interested eye on the cars gathering behind the red light at Huron Street. “I’ve been in worse places than this,” she remarked with a tone of bemused anticipation long past worry or even surprise. “Once he had me stand guard over him while he lay down in a gutter on Washington Street to get just the right view of a building’s facade.” Stevens beamed a smile at this compliment and snapped another picture. This time he used a wide-angle lens to accommodate the chestnut tree that loomed majestically in front of the imposing, columned house, in the lower left comer of the twilit scene sparkling before him.
Meanwhile, the light had changed, but Stevens calmly held his ground like some stranded but indomitable bull as three lanes of rushing motorists growled down upon him and whirred by without slowing or even deflecting their path. As the last of the traffic passed by, Stevens turned away for the first time from the scene he was photographing and observed icily, “People in cars are always in too big a hurry. You’ never see much from a car, even when you’re looking. You only notice what’s around you when you’re walking-and even then you don’t catch much unless you’re composing with a camera.”
Stevens carries a camera with him almost everywhere he goes, and he has taken nearly a hundred thousand pictures of local buildings, landscapes, events, and personalities since he bought his first camera in 1973.
Stevens, thirty-eight, has been feeling his way toward this understanding of Ann Arbor ever since he was a child. In fact, his destiny seems to have been set in motion even before he was born. In the academic year 1941-1942, the great English poet Wystan Hugh Auden came to the U-M as a guest poet-in-residence and became friendly with A. K. Stevens, a U-M English professor, and his wife, Angelyn, a long-time admirer of Auden’s poetry. Just before young Stevens was born, Auden wrote a poem about motherhood, “Mundus et Infans” (“The World and the Child”), which he dedicated to the expectant parents. The couple named their fourth child Wystan Auden Stevens, and Auden became his namesake’s godfather.
Stevens seems to have taken instinctively to heart the vision of an all-inclusive matrix of identity which Auden’s poem set out for him. “I’ve always thought of Ann Arbor as a friendly, tolerant, embracing kind of place. You know-homey, And as a child I just naturally thought of the community as a sort of extension of my family.”
Stevens first discovered that he could take matters into his own hands in 1962, when he was a U-M undergraduate art student living in Fletcher Hall, an obscure dormitory near the U-M Athletic Campus. “I was elected dorm president,” he recalls, “and people used to ask me where the dorm’s name came from. So I looked it up and ended up writing a history of Fletcher Hall. I was so amazed to discover how readily recoverable this history was that I started exploring other questions about the University’s past. I combed the U-M’s libraries and historical collections, and I was eventually led into questions about Ann Arbor history, and then into Washtenaw County history. ”
He became so absorbed in his newly found passion that he abandoned his art studies, at first dropping out of school, then returning to take a degree in history in 1970. He immediately took an unpaid position as resident curator of the Kempf House at 312 North Division, and he began acting as the city’s unofficial historian. In 1977, the Historic District Commission asked City Council to provide funding for Stevens as the city’s official historian. The matter is still unresolved. The city has funded Stevens for short periods but apparently does not consider the position of city historian sufficiently crucial to warrant its funding as a permanent, full-time position in a period of budgetary retrenchments. Stevens has eschewed half-time funding and currently receives no money from the city.
“I’ll have to leave Ann Arbor,” he says bitterly, “if I can’t get paid to serve as city historian. The work is too expensive and time-consuming to be done for nothing, and I can’t bring myself to refuse to perform the functions of local history expert. There’s no one else. This is what I do best, what I was born to do, but I can’t do it unless the city is willing to pay me for it.”
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The work of city historian is not just a job to Stevens– it is his life. He is always either documenting Ann Arbor’s present or researching and collecting a record of its past. In addition to his almost perpetual picture-taking, he collects current ephemera, often stripping kiosks of flyers and posters of social interest, and he has been maintaining a collection of local “underground” publications since the late 1960’s. He is a tireless collector of old photos and postcards, he has a large collection of materials pertaining to the Michigan Theater, and until his tape recorder was stolen from the Kempf House, he interviewed older Ann Arborites in an effort to compile materials for an oral history. In addition to all the things he has been doing and continues to do, he would like to undertake a number of long-term projects should he ever be offered the security of a permanent position. Foremost among these, he feels, is his plan to index Ann Arbor’s nineteenth-century newspapers.
And when he’s not collecting and cataloguing materials, he’s likely to be presenting them in slide shows, exhibits, walking and bus tours, or just answering the requests for information about Ann Arbor that come to him, by phone and by mail, from individuals and from organizations.
On one cold and rainy Sunday in early May, Stevens led seven hardy members of the Sierra Club on a shortened version of his tour of downtown architecture. As he led the group from building to building, he would stand silently for a few moments to let them see what they could see, and then he addressed them in his deeply resonant yet mildly meditative voice. He told them about the buildings and about the aspirations and achievements, the failures and follies, of many of the people who had built, bought, inhabited, altered, and bequeathed those structures.
He told them, for example, how the Ann Arbor Inn occupies the lot where formerly stood Solon Cook’s Temperance Hotel, whose back entrance, with delicious irony, faced Heinrich’s Saloon in an Italianate storefront at 111 S. Fourth Ave. And he rehearsed the transmogrification of the Chapin House at the corner of Ann Street and Fourth Avenue, whose Ann Street entrance once sported Ann Arbor’s first catalpa tree (reputedly the tree from which all of the city’s catalpa trees have been derived), into Joe Parker’s Catalpa Inn, a popular tavern celebrated in the college song, “I Want To Go Back To Michigan.”
When the tour was over, people thanked him for more than a good time, though he had certainly provided that. They thanked him, in the words of one woman, “for showing me things I never realized were there.”
Ironically, it seems to be the very special character of Stevens’ gift that has proved to be the stumbling block in his efforts to secure a permanent position as city historian. He operates on inspiration and instinct, qualities that don’t make for a comfortable fit in any bureaucratic niche. An interesting event or unusual outdoor light for taking pictures tends to take precedence for Stevens over duties and deadlines.
As Marjorie Reed, the current chairman of the Historic District Commission, puts it, ” If you’re looking for someone to fill a 9-to-5 slot, you’re going to find Wystan at times frustrating. But if you’re willing to see him as an artist, who works at his own pace and follows his own instincts, you’ll find him more than satisfactory. I can accommodate to that, but a lot of people, especially in city government, can’t. They want a product that is more conventionally accountable than Wystan seems to be.” Louisa Pieper, the Historic District Commission’s sole paid staff member, explains Stevens’ predicament: “City Council feels that Wystan’s work is a hobby, not a profession, and he hasn’t been able’to get them to see otherwise, despite having given them some very eloquent explanations of what he is doing.”
In truth, Stevens’ work is much more than a profession to him. It is an almost sacred vocation. “People ‘don’t take the time to realize the uniqueness and richness of life in its various moments,” he explains. “Most people come and go from Ann Arbor without ever getting rooted, and there’s a thirst for this. The more you know about your surroundings, the more you feel at home in them and take an interest in how your home looks. And the more you appreciate what others have invested in your home, the more you are willing to invest in it of yourself. ” His tone brightens as his missionary zeal conjures this vision of a truly communal home-world, but his voice retains an edge of melancholy: people are always going to be too busy with their lives to realize them fully–or to see his work as anything more than an expendable luxury.
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Though he despaired at times Stevens stayed in Ann Arbor, remaining an indispensable resource on its history until his death. The Ann Arbor District Library posted this tribute to his work on its Old News archive: http://www.aadl.org/node/319836
