Owosso chose brick again for Michigan Avenue

Drive down Michigan Avenue in Owosso and your tires start talking — a low, even hum you do not get on asphalt. The street really is paved with brick. The surprise is that the brick under your tires is newer than it looks.

A National Park Service nomination for the nearby Lincoln School says Michigan Avenue is one of Owosso’s few remaining brick-paved streets and was refurbished with new bricks in 2004. So this is not an untouched street surface that has sat in place since the horse-and-wagon era. It is a modern reconstruction made to keep an older part of Owosso’s character visible.

That choice was deliberate. In a 2015 City Council packet, a founder of Preservation Owosso wrote that the group helped repave Michigan Avenue with brick pavers and raised the difference between the cost of asphalt and brick. The point, she said, was to preserve the look of the original street.

Michigan Avenue is still a working residential street, not a museum floor. City Council minutes from 2023 record a resident’s concern about heavy truck traffic and the pavement’s condition. That is worth keeping in mind as you look: what feels like a leftover from another century is really an ongoing local decision to keep a historic streetscape in everyday use.