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42°17′01.91″N 83°44′30.90″W / 42.2838639°N 83.7419167°W The Stefan T. Vail Cooperative House (or Vail House) is a housing cooperative for college students at the University of Michigan, Washtenaw Community College, and Eastern Michigan University located at 602 Lawrence Street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A member of the Inter-Cooperative Council (ICC) in Ann Arbor, Vail house is named after Stefan Valavanis, a former ICC President who became a notable economist. It is one of only two known adobe buildings in Ann Arbor.[1]
The building proper was constructed in 1848 by the family of Thomas and Margaret Mitchell, completed in the American Greek Revival style which typifies many Ann Arbor-area homes of the period.[2] It has been recognized by the Ann Arbor Historical Commission; one of the pillars on the front porch bears a plaque which identifies it as the Hubbell Gregory House. Gregory married the Mitchell's daughter, and his descendants lived there until 1914 when his daughter Jennie Gregory died.[1] Afterwards it became the residence of the family of Horace Greely Prettyman, who owned the Ann Arbor Press and White Swan Laundry.[1] They added the porte cochere at this time.[1] The Prettyman family lived here until around 1945, after which Abbie Schaefer took it over and ran it as a rooming house called Abby House.[1]
In 1960 it was purchased by the Inter-Cooperative Council and opened as women's cooperative housing in the fall of 1961. In 1991, it became the only all-female co-op in the ICC system, though today it is open to any gender.[1]
In addition to being one of the oldest houses in Ann Arbor, Vail House also boasts a magnificent oak tree in its front yard which has been estimated to be over two hundred years old.
Vail House was named for Stefan T. Vail (or Stephanos Valavanis),[1] who was an ICC member and president in the mid-1950s. While at the University of Michigan, Stefan Vail helped to devise the financial structure of the ICC.[3] After having earned his doctorate in economics, Stefan Vail was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University from 1956 to 1958.[4] While camping near Mount Olympus in Greece, Stefan Vail was shot and killed by an army deserter who mistook him for a pursuing officer.[5] His death was called a "tragedy" by his senior colleague at the Harvard Economics Department, Seymour Harris, who wrote that Valavanis was "brilliant, imaginative, and a first–class scholar and teacher"; according to Seymour, Valavanis's econometrics textbook had "pedagogical strength", proceeding "more by statements of problems and examples than by the development of mathematical proofs".[6] Soon after, the ICC Board of Directors voted to name the next house they purchased after Vail, in recognizing his contributions to the ICC and to economics.[7] In 1979, European members of the Econometric Society contributed papers to a volume commemorating Valavanis.[8]