This year, The Blade’s interns explored a variety of Toledo's neighborhoods. The following ongoing series highlights those communities.
Tudor-style brick homes line the streets of Toledo’s Old Orchard neighborhood, a largely residential area with heavy tree cover, gardens, and greenspaces home to close-knit local families.
Old Orchard Neighborhood Association president Billy Mann said living in the neighborhood is a bit like living in a Norman Rockwell print.
Old Orchard’s trees and famous home gardens serve as reminders of the neighborhood’s pre-development history as extensive apple and pear orchards. Quaint homes came to replace them, preserving the neighborhood’s peaceful environment within bustling urban Toledo.
Old Orchard was named after the apple and peach orchards that once stood before the neighborhood was built.
The neighborhood is home to Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz.
Numerous streets in Old Orchard have English names, including Cheltenham, Middlesex, Pemberton, and Darlington.
Over 1,200 homes in Old Orchard sit together in a space smaller than one square mile.
Last year, Old Orchard held a celebration for its 100th birthday.
Residents named Old Orchard’s safety, walkability, friendly residents, and close proximity to business hubs of Toledo as central features. More recently, the small Cricket West shopping center has become revitalized with a few new businesses, adding hotspots for food, coffee, clothing, and salon services, among other features.
“It's just one big community. And I feel like even if you don't know someone's name, you can still talk and be present with them in a conversation. I think that's really beautiful,” said resident Ava Foor, who has lived in Old Orchard her whole life and works at Cricket West’s SIP Coffee. “ I mean, there's so many people who come in here from everywhere, but lately, a lot of people tend to walk from the neighborhood and come up here.”
Almost all of Old Orchard sits between Central Avenue to the north, W. Bancroft Street to the south, Douglas Road to the east, and Secor Road to the west.
The neighborhood primarily consists of homes and apartment complexes, but some events tend to draw many outside visitors. For one, the annual Old Orchard Garden Tour has brought hundreds of guests to the home gardens of a handful of residents each year, creating a sense of “voyeurism” into the quiet, usually private homes.
The Old Orchard Neighborhood Association, which has helped manage community life in the neighborhood for a decade, hosted the fourth annual garden tour in June. It drew just under 700 people to eight home gardens.
“We get some small-size backyards, and I think that those create the most interesting spaces, I think because people might fence them in or kind of make them private with plantings, they make for really nice small intimate spaces,” said Brent Lohmann, a garden tour committee member. “I think that the garden tour has really helped bring Old Orchard into the forefront of people’s minds.”
As for the residents themselves, Old Orchard is a popular neighborhood for families and professionals, Mr. Mann said. It’s also a favorable residential area for students and faculty at UT, which shares a border with Old Orchard.
Rebecca Zietlow, interim dean of UT Law School, lived in the neighborhood for about 20 years. She said that though there’s always “pressure” associated with any neighborhood that’s located near a university, the relationship between Old Orchard and UT has mainly remained healthy. Over time, there have been tensions over issues like loud parties at students’ homes, tight parking space on some streets, and changes to road accessibility in past decades, but Old Orchard and UT usually maintain a dialogue over these topics.
Valerie Simmons-Walston serves as the special assistant to the president for Community Engagement and Strategic Partnerships at UT. As part of her work, she collaborates with Old Orchard community leaders to “involve students within the fabric of their community.”
When the neighborhood celebrated its 100th anniversary in October, 2022, UT helped sponsor the celebration, and Mrs. Simmons-Walston encouraged students to attend as well. On the flip side, Ms. Foor said, UT’s annual homecoming parade crosses through Old Orchard. Neighborhood residents often line the blocks to experience the parade floats, music, and candy tossed out for the children.
“The university is open to partnering with them, collaborating with them to solidify even more the relationship between the university community and Old Orchard and doing things together to improve the surrounding community,” Mrs. Simmons-Walston said. “Any programmatic efforts –cleanup, community projects, whatever we can do as a university to try to support that Neighborhood Association – we want to do that.”
Mr. Mann cited communication with UT, businesses, and adjacent neighborhoods as a central function of the Old Orchard Neighborhood Association , which gives residents a “unified voice” in the face of any issues they may face. For now, residents are occupied with beautification efforts, honoring historic homes that have stood for nearly a century, and collaborating with UT to install historical markers.
First Published December 9, 2023, 1:00 p.m.
