St. Aidan’s Bears Cross for 35 years on Good Friday.

April 6, at 12:00pm, in a contemporary service of “Stations of the Cross,” members and friends of St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church (www.staidan.org) will once again bear their cross from the bottom to the top of Broadway Hill, the neighborhood of the church they share with Northside Presbyterian. This service, though fashioned on the 14 stations in Jerusalem, makes each station a place of prayer for present day concerns. We pray for hunger and good harvests, for ecological awareness and clean water, for fun and leisure, and for the elderly and those who are alone. We offer prayers for good government, for those who are sick and the vast number of people and institutions in our community who serve them, and for good education at all levels. We include prayers especially for the poor, unemployed, underemployed, and victims of violence. We pray for the scars of the economic challenges that we face today and for the spiritual ability to face the path ahead of us.

The Broadway Neighborhood is not just a place for peaceful residents, rather a mixed and vibrant community.

Because of this, we have always been able to find places to focus all these prayers. This neighborhood was one of the first settled in Ann Arbor as it sits at the edge of the riverside plain and the joining of two Native American trails (Pontiac and Plymouth Rds.) that come together at a gentle ford of the Huron River.

Today, at its lowest edge it borders the gateway to the Medical Campus and the housing for much of the Medical Campus staff, both student and professional. It offers Indian and Korean markets, a vibrant pottery studio, and pizza. The block supports senior and low- income housing, an Avalon program house, a yoga studio, three churches, and the Baits Dr. entrance to the University of Michigan North Campus with its Music, Engineering, Architecture, and Theatre departments. The bold new venture of a private apartment-like dorm (Courthouse Square) on Broadway adds its housing alternative to the vast campus of Co-op, Undergraduate, Graduate, and Married Student housing.

In contrast to this successful building venture, at the other end of Broadway sits the blighted site of the planned development of “Lower Town,” a place where the ambitious hopes and dreams of city planners met the current financial and housing crises. The locked gates on this fallow property give witness to the economic challenges of Michigan and the nation that we often imagine pass by a fair city like Ann Arbor.

Even as we bear this witness to blight, the street hosts a lovely creek side play park, some of the natural woods of North Campus and the St. Aidan’s/Northside Presbyterian Natural Habitat, a 5-acre natural woodland that offers walking trails on the verdant slope between Broadway and Plymouth road. Finally, Broadway hosts Cedar Bend Park and the romantic overlook off of Cedar Bend drive that has long served as a lovely place to contemplate the expanse of Ann Arbor or to spend some special time with someone you love.