Preservation Consternation

The recent battle between preservationists and a bill sponsored by Indiana State Senator Pat Miller creates an opportunity for pondering. What I'm pondering is this: how does a city keep important historic buildings and districts while also maintaining a sense of vibrancy? And, how might Indianapolis enhance its unimpressive collection of contemporary architecture with new buildings that are architecturally significant, while also maintaining its dwindling collection of historic buildings that are architecturally significant?

This is a ponderance that requires much long and thoughtful attention. And probably more than one blog. But for now, I'm going to think just a bit about it. I think I know the questions to ask but am still struggling internally with the answers to them.

In addition to being a preservationist, I also happen to be a modern design freak. Talk about your cognitive dissonance! It would be much easier for me to be one of those preservationist-types who looks at the City/County Building and feels nothing but remorse for the lost Marion County Courthouse. But I'm not. I thought the Second Empire Courthouse was fabulous and wish we still had it. But I also think the Bauhaus-inspired City/County building is great and I worry that since so few others love it, it is in danger of going the way of the courthouse that was demolished to make room for it.

At the same time, if I could make a wish for my city it would be that we begin to demand amazing architecture in new buildings that are constructed downtown. For I believe that until we start showing some muscle with great, hopefully even controversial, architecture, we will never deserve the title of the "world-class" city that all of our paid marketing boosters claim for us.

So, how's a preservationist/modernist junkie to resolve these conflicting notions: keep the old, and build new and fabulous? Over the course of the next few posts I'm going to offer my ideas of how to solve some of these dilemmas and why some just can't be solved.

The first rule has to be: if it's downtown and architecturally significant and it can be saved, then developers must be required to make the effort to do that. And if they say that's not possible, let's charge a demolition fine for destroying a building that's been deemed significant. This fine would be on top of whatever regular fees are required and it could be dispersed in grants to owners of the other downtown historic buildings to appropriately rehabilitate and maintain them.

Significance can sometimes be in the eye of the beholder. So let's establish some rules about determining it. First, let's just say that, when it comes to considering demolition, any building more than a century old is significant. No discussion. We must stop knocking down our heritage. If it's more than 100 years old, then you need to come up with some sound reasons to tear it down, and you need to pay up to the city for the loss you are causing to our cityscape and our cultural understanding of our history. If you simply cannot save one of our pieces of architectural heritage then pay up so that your fees will help other building owners save theirs.

Would this stop redevelopment downtown? It would deincentivize destruction certainly. But it incentivizes reuse. And makes wholesale demolishers pay up so that other significant buildings get more protection.

Rule 2. If you decide to build new within the MileSquare, then you have to bring it with the design. No more 3-story suburban housing developments. Yes, good design may also be in the eye of the beholder but no one in his/her right mind is looking at the development at Alabama and Ohio and thinking, Wow! that's fabulous! No more, blah architecture downtown.

My first rules to making a better city.

I know that we can't stop building in the city. This isn't a museum. If it were, we wouldn't have much of a collection. Not every old building is worthy of a fight to save it. Just as the pediatrician told us about raising children: save your "nos" for the most important stuff. Preservationists need to save their ballyhooing for the important buildings. Do I feel sad that the Jaws building is no longer a landmark downtown? Yeah, sort of, I guess. Even though that was a building that didn't fit---too small in scale, and probably would never have been considered significant, the redone building (now called the Broadbent building) is much worse. If we're going to give up an interesting old building, then a new one has to be better. Better in terms of design and in terms of landuse. (See Rule 2 above).

Stay tuned, more's coming. And I welcome your response to these first steps.

[black and white images from "Indianapolis Architecture"]

A Great Society and a not-so-great one: the importance and nuances of preservation

In light of the disturbing news that the Indiana State Senate has passed SB 177, which limits the terms of commissioners on the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission and which sends appeals of commission decisions to the Metropolitan Development Commission rather than to the Circuit Court. And in light of the Obama administration's withdrawal of budget support for some national preservation efforts it seems like a good time to repost a column I wrote for the July 2008 "Urban Times." Here is a brief primer on how and why preservation is important.

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Downtown Indianapolis is brimming over with historic homes, historic districts, notable and outstanding properties, and even a National Historic Landmark (American Legion Mall).

Many downtowners are familiar with terms like “historic resources” and “historic preservation.” But unless you are a preservation professional (and even if you are) it’s difficult to understand the myriad of terms that define preservation in your neighborhood and even more difficult to grasp the nuances of the terminology. Here is a primer of sorts about the origin of those terms and their significance in the preservation movement.

We have Lyndon Johnson to thank for the federal government’s involvement in the national preservation movement. In 1966, President Johnson signed the National Historic Preservation Act. This act provides the groundwork for preservation on the local, state and national levels.

Lady Bird Johnson, a famous cultivator of historic and native plants and beautifier of national highways, wrote the forward of the report that became the impetus for national preservation and the preservation act. In her words, “…the buildings which express our national heritage are not simply interesting. They give a sense of continuity and of heightened reality to our thinking about the whole meaning of the American past.”

The National Historic Preservation Act gave the Secretary of the Interior the responsibility to expand and maintain a National Register of Historic Places. And Section 106 of the act gave teeth to the preservation movement. It was a legal mandate to consider historic preservation in federal planning and required that those working on federally funded projects had to take into account the effects of the projects on historic properties.

The preservation act called for the creation of governor-appointed State Historic Preservation Officers and required them to have staffs and offices and matching funds to oversee the preservation movement on the state and local level.

Each state’s historic preservation officer would oversee a statewide survey of historic resources. Since the mid-1970s, the Indiana State Historic Preservation Officer has overseen surveys of most of Indiana’s counties (about 3/4ths of the state has been surveyed). That survey is technically called the “Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory” (IHSSI).

Often conducted by graduate students, sometimes with little experience in evaluating historic properties, the IHSSI uses a standard form to collect info on properties’ materials such as windows, siding, foundation, and to postulate a date of construction and a style name for the building’s architecture, as well to record known history of the property. Surveyors are also asked to give the property a rating on a scale ranging from contributing to notable to outstanding.

Contributing properties are at the low end of the range. They retain enough historic integrity (original materials and design) to display their historic nature, but they may have lost some original materials, had additions of non-historic materials or they might simply be an unremarkable example of a common type. Small bungalows often fall into the latter category.

Notable properties have high historic integrity and may or may not have historic significance either as an architectural type or for their association with a person or event. Typically more research would need to be done on these notable properties to establish their significance and raise them to an “Outstanding” rating.

Outstanding properties have high integrity and their significance is known—either because the architecture is remarkable or because some historic event or person is associated specifically with the property, or because it is representative of a historic trend.

The information compiled by the IHSSI is published in book form in the county interim reports. Marion County has individual interim reports for each township. Unlike other county interim reports, though, Marion County’s township reports only list the properties rated notable or outstanding. The properties rated contributing in the IHSSI were not included in these report to keep the size of the reports smaller.

The National Register of Historic Places is a separate entity from the IHSSI and the interim reports. However, properties that receive an outstanding rating in the IHSSI and the interim report are considered eligible for listing on the National Register. But they aren’t listed until someone completes a nomination form and the State Historic Preservation Officer’s staff and the State Review Board both approve it and then send it on to the National Parks Service for review and approval.

The National Register recognizes the best of the best properties. Properties listed on the National Register may be individual buildings, districts, sites, objects or structures. They have both historic integrity and significance for architecture, or an association with a historic trend or events, or an association with a person of importance, or because the property might yield further information (though the latter is usually significant only for archaeological sites).

Properties that are listed (and also those that are deemed eligible for listing but are not yet on the National Register) acquire the protections provided for in the National Historic Preservation Act.

Any federally funded project that might have an effect on the properties must take them into account and try to avoid an adverse effect. If that adverse effect is unavoidable, then the project managers will enter into mitigation with the State Historic Preservation Officer’s staff and try to work out an agreement on how to mitigate the effect, which basically means coming up with a way to essentially repay the community for affecting its historic resources.

A National Register listing doesn’t in any way impede what a private citizen wants to do to his or her property. If you live in a National Register Historic District, such as Lockerbie Square, the Old Northside, Herron-Morton Place, Meridian Park and Ransom Place, there are no restrictions placed by the National Register on what you do to your home or commercial property. This is true if you own a property that is individually listed, such as the Athenaeum, or if you own a property that is within not individually listed but is within a listed historic district, such as the Jungclaus Campbell Co. in the Massachusetts Avenue Historic District.

-----If you live in a LOCAllY designated historic district, you are governed and restricted by the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission, not by the National Register listing, as to how much, if at all, you can change your historic property. This local organization is the only protection that historic properties receive from their private owners tearing them down or painting them purple or pulling out all their original windows to install sliding glass doors, etc. The powers of the local IHPC are built upon the foundation that our architectural heritage is important to all of us and that private individuals are simply temporary stewards of buildings that can last for generations.

Although the nuances of historic preservation and its terminology can be confusing, we who live downtown reap the benefits of districts and individual properties, which are preserved for all of us to enjoy. For, as the National Historic Preservation Act attests, these resources are our “irreplaceable heritage.” Preserving them means that their “…vital legacy of cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, economic, and energy benefits will be maintained and enriched for future generations of Americans.”

Historic properties are inherently “green,” for they require no new-construction energy. And they help us better understand who we are and where we came from as a people and a community. We can be thankful that Lyndon Johnson listened to his wife about that idea. We can only hope that our current leaders will have as much foresight.

Dear Diary, I'm in love...with some houses on the near Northside

A few weeks ago I took a drive through the relatively new redevelop-ment project called Martindale on the Monon. I got excited. So I took another drive through, and then another--with my camera.

There is something going on in that neighborhood that makes my heart go pitter pat. New ultramodern design, blended with old homes getting a facelift, and with a fair number of new decent contemporary-traditional homes is making that a nice place to visit and I just might want to live there. I'm not moving yet, but if I were looking for a new place to settle in Indianapolis, this is where I'd be looking.

The development itself is interesting, with a mix of market-rate and affordable housing, which comes with the possibilities of grant money for rehabs or new builds. The Martindale on the Monon project will sell lots or sell houses built to their specs. These houses are nice.

But the stars of the development are the very modern dwellings and the modern adaptations of some of the older buildings that have begun to dot the streetscape. According to Cindy Higbee at Martindale on the Monon, some of these homes are architect-designed, some are owner-designed. Take a drive down 16th St. and have a gander at the fabulous rehab of what appears to be an old firestation. The design touches that make this a stand out---super cool frosted glass entry doors along with groovy house numbers and a stainless mailbox have converted this abandoned building into a hip new home while maintaining original window and door openings and the building's historic integrity.


Across the street from the rehabbed fire station is one of the 'hood's modern, new homes. A cantilevered second story, shed roof, and a facade wall that has the look of a shogi screen make this house a sexy eyecatcher.



At 16th and Cornell is another modernist-statement residence. This 2-story brick has a center bay that projects above the flat roof and a cantilevered canopy over the entry. And the square, flat-roof garage is almost cooler than the house.


A bit north, Redev Group designed a tall, skinny house with side walls and roof clad in galvanized metal. Huge corner windows must make this home a stunner from the inside as well as the exterior.

Another gem in the neighborhood is the home designed by Mark Beebe at the corner of 19th and Bellefontaine. This small house reminds me of a teak box. Shed roof, boxed entry portal, and even the rear landscape design make it a stunner significant enough to be featured on the 2008 AIA home tour.

The neighbor-hood also features a stellar modernist rehab of the old National Auto Company into the Project School. The inspiring industrial building is a lesson in paying homage to old design with good redesign and reuse.

Martindale on the Monon is still sprinkled with its fair share of rundown, abandoned homes, commercial and industrial spaces. (Note to developers: if you get your hands on that little pagoda former gas station, please don't ruin it! Reuse, reuse, reuse!)


This is a neighbor-hood ripe for the picking and if I were you, I'd go grab a lot or an old rundown building and make something fabulous happen. Your neighbors have already gotten a good start on that!

blog blahs

I know I've been a tardy poster as of late. Holidays, deadlines, schlepping around the state have kept me busy elsewhere. Look for a new post come late December on a sexy, new redevelopment project. I'm oh so excited about it but need a little time for some research before I publish. But, just know, it's made me excited to be an Indianapolis resident again. And come back and read and see why in a coupla weeks---maybe sooner.

In the meantime, here's my favorite holiday picture. Wishes for Happy Holidays of every persuasion coming your way from cResources.

Lessons a House can Teach

This blog isn't devoted to home renovation. But, lately I've spent about a month painting my little Folk Victorian house and have been amazed at what I've learned about my home in the process. Even for a person who makes her living evaluating old buildings, there were lots of clues I missed in reading my own home. So this particular post is about my little house and the changes made to it that I've figured out either quickly or slowly while living here.

My house is in Fountain Square in a neighborhood severed by the construction of I-65/I-70 in the 1960s. My neighborhood has homes constructed from about 1860 to about 1960. My house is one of the older ones, with a construction date I estimate around 1895. The Folk Victorian style (a sort-of poor man's Queen Anne)was popular around that time and I know by looking at old Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of my neighborhood that my house wasn't here in 1887 and was here in 1898, so the approximate date I'd guessed fits the evidence I can find. (Love it when that happens.)

I chose my new paint color because I found this periwinkle color under several layers of pale blue, yellow and white paint on the house. I matched a chip of that old paint with my new paint. Green trim also showed up under the old paint though not exactly this shade of green. Next year I will add a magenta shade to the window sashes and mullions--she will be a real Victorian painted lady.

My house was originally a twin, but is no longer an identical twin, to the house next door. Sometime around 1915 or so one of the owners of my house "modernnized" it with a Craftsman-style brick porch that wraps around two sides of house. In the process the owners removed the original, small porch that once decorated a portion of the northwest facade with turned posts and a spindled frieze board. As a preservationist I seriously covet my neighbor's still-intact fancier porch, but I have to admit that my big shaded porch is one of the best things about living in this house. It's always breezy and pleasant there no matter how hot the summer days become.

At the same time the porch was added my house also got a rear addition, a 10' x 11' room that was built over the old cistern (which is now exposed under that room's floor in the basement). The rusticated concrete block foundation on the addition matches the foundation on the porch (the rest of the house is built on a brick foundation), indicating the two additions were made at the same time. The rear addition has a hipped roof, popular in the Arts and Crafts period when the bungalow was king, further supporting the idea that it dates to about 1915.

Probably at the same time the owners changed up the porch and added the rear room, they also installed some new windows. The facade and some of the northwest side windows of my house are classic bungalow style: wooden, double-hung sashes with three panes on the top and one pane on the bottom. They are also grouped in an Arts- and-Crafts period ribbon placement in a group of three contiguous windows in a row. Each group of three ribbon windows replaced two separate double-hung windows (judging from the sister house next door). What I also learned while painting was that even one of my remaining pairs of original double-hung windows was also altered at the time the new windows were installed. Although they remain in their original configuration of separate one-over-one windows, at least one set was replaced with shorter windows, evidenced by the replaced clapboard siding covering the original openings and a new sill, much smaller than the two original sills still in existance on the other side of the house.

At some much later point, maybe in the 1990s, someone got the bright idea to replace some more windows on the house. I actually believe that "someone" was SEND. Their classic move to pull out original wooden-sash windows and install vinyl was repeated all across my neighborhood, including in my house. So, three of my windows have been replaced at least twice. At least these newest (and no more efficient) windows are at the rear of my house and not very noticeable to a casual observer.

One other thing I learned about my house while painting is that my old steel gutters were mounted on the roof because there isn't enough space between my house and the house next door to allow for gutters to hang below the eaves. I count my old roof-mounted gutters as an asset because they didn't require ugly gutter boards around the roof edge and that means that my exposed rafter tails are all still intact and not cut off like many in my neighborhood. I think my house may not have had any gutters originally. There's no evidence of any other place where they would have been attached. My existing gutters, like my windows and porch, probably date to the Arts and Crafts period around 1915 or so. They are a typical style from that period.

Finally, one thing I had never noticed until I began to hit it while scraping the clapboard was that my house had hardware above the windows that must have held awnings of some sort. The awnings---I'm imagining Cool Vent aluminum slats from the 1940s or so---are long gone. Now, so is most of that leftover hardware, which I removed. The imprints on the wood from the hardware are still visible though, leaving a hint of the past for the next owners to ponder.

New paint over termite-ridden boards

A lot of disparate events in the last few months came together in my mind today as I was reading the Indianapolis Sunday Star's article about revitalization along Martin Luther King, Jr. Street.

It's a touchy subject to be critical of a story about revitalization of an African American neighborhood when one is not African American, but a few things in the coverage of the project to revitalize the area seem wrong-headed to me.

As a downtown resident, and one who had to study some of MLK for impacts that might be caused to historic properties by the Cultural Trail, I have spent quite a bit of time walking and driving on the street. The article in the Star correctly states some of the problems, such as lack of parking and fast-moving traffic, and spells out some efforts that will be helpful in ameliorating them, including creating parking spaces out of one lane of traffic. New signage to direct visitors to local places of interest, banners "depicting figures such as [Martin Luther] King and local basketball legend Oscar Robertson" will line landscaped medians where the traffic lane once was, and the intersection where MLK meets I-65 will be "marked with two decorative pillars."

That all sounds fine. And it sounds a lot like the sort of ideas that Storrow and Kinsella, the landscape design firm in charge of the project, offer up for most of their downtown "revitalization" projects. Slow traffic, put something in the middle of the street, and create an environment that feels like something special is going on.

I have a few issues with this. First and utmost is that these are all just glossy paint over the much bigger issues on this corridor and in much of urban Indianapolis, which are abandoned derelict buildings and the crime and fear that comes with the broken window syndrome. Murals of Barack Obama and King are not going to make those problems go away. I have to wonder how much bigger an impact there might be if the $2 million spent on these cosmetic issues were put into making those empty buildings occupiable or even giving incentives to businesses and homeowners to move into them.

As a neighborhood activist in a working-class neighborhood with its own large set of abandoned buildings, and as one of a half-dozen neighborhood leaders invited to tour the southside with city department heads to talk about how we are trying to address this issue, I'm well aware that the issue of abandoned buildings is a primary problem in most neighborhoods and almost insurmountable for private citizens or citizen groups to tackle alone. The long waiting period while buildings sit empty before the city will place them on tax sales, and the city's own foul-up after the last tax sale, which voided the purchase of hundreds of these buildings, force neighbors to look elsewhere to try to address the problems that arise from having empty buildings around.

That's where beautification efforts come in. The thinking goes that if we make our neighborhoods look better in other areas maybe the folks we hope will make their homes here will overlook the broken windows and boarded-up doors in the 5 other houses in their block. As I toured the southside and heard the various stories of each of the neighborhood leaders on the bus the one thread that we all wove our tales around was abandoned buildings. Most of our neighborhood groups had coalesced around that issue, but none of them had been able to make any headway in solving it or even improving it much.

And that's why I think this revitalization effort is misdirected. Creating parking spaces for businesses and slowing traffic are laudable. But adding banners of Oscar Robertson and building up landscaped medians are not going to fix what's wrong in a neighborhood where a good portion of the buildings are sitting empty. And until those empty buildings are filled, no amount of makeup is going to cover the blemishes that mark the neighborhood.

The Star article neglected to mention where the funding for this effort is coming from or how much of it is going to the planners, but I strongly suspect that a different approach might render better results in the long run. I'd like to see the city make a real effort to fill up these empty buildings. And I'd like to see the monies that go into prettification go instead into incentivizing real people to take a chance on a troubled neighborhood.

A friend of mine just took me on a tour of a termite-infested house he's recently purchase for a song. His plans for rehabbing the house don't start with paint on the half-eaten boards or with a flower bed outside the front door so you won't notice what's missing in the beams and rafters. He's going to take out those termite ridden boards and put new ones in their place in somes spots; in others he can treat the board with insecticide and inject filler into it so that it reinforces the board from the inside out, making it strong once again. Painting and primping comes much further down the road for his house. He knows he has to have strong posts and beams first.

No matter how nice it is to have the city pay some attention and throw some money at a troubled neighborhood, unless the city helps do the real work of restoring the neighborhood and getting home owners and business owners into the abandoned buildings, it's still just painting over termite-infested boards.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009911150353

Slowly comes a new Skyline

Indianapolis has been and remains a small topographical blip on the landscape of Central Indiana. But a couple of new changes to the downtown landscape are expanding and lifting the urban skyline. The first one, Lucas Oil Stadium, hulks massively over the southwestern edge of downtown. That's ok. It's not a terrible building. It's conservative, like most of our buildings. Some of the details, mainly the buttressed pilasters that define its window bays, are attractive. But in general it's just another huge football stadium, and it's another stadium (like Conseco Fieldhouse)that's paying design homage to the great beauty of Butler University's Hinkle Fieldhouse.

Lucas Oil Stadium is an architecturally benign growth.

I am happier with the design of the JW Marriott, the new hotel under construction along Washington and West streets as part of the revamped Convention Center project.

The JW Marriott was designed by HOK Architects, a firm that is also responsible for the no-big-deal Indianapolis International Weir Cook Terminal (which by the way, looks a whole lot like the also no-big-deal Providence, R.I., airport terminal). HOK has designed some cool stuff, like the Edificio Malecon Office Tower in Buenos Aires and the very cool Tyson Foods Discovery Center in Springdale, Arkansas.

The JW Marriott in Indianapolis isn't in the spectrum of cool that those buildings represent. It isn't a great building. But it is a kinda-cool building. Rising 34 floors (according to Wikipedia)the curved building is clad in shimery-blue glass panels. A shorter two- to three-story section spans its facade along West Street. The design is nothing special, but the look is attractive and modern. And the panels break the smooth line of the glass wall which prevents the building from looking like a curved blue version of the negative landmark, "gold" building. Shorter buff and tan block buildngs that attach on the south side and spring up to the rear of the blue high rise are also part of the complex and are attractive in their own right, although far more pedestrian.

This isn't knock-your-socks off architecture. But it is a big asset to the downtown skyline, adding a high-rise several blocks west of Meridian Street on a corner that has been uninspiring. It's a nice juxtaposition to two buildings I like a lot on the north side of the street: the sandstone Eiteljorg and the sort-of 1950s International-ranch retro style of the Indiana State Museum. And the JWM even fits nicely with one of the city's best old buildings, the Perry K Steam Plant, whose terra cotta details make it a remarkable, industrial Art Deco beauty.

So this new good building is making nice with some existing good architecture. Along with Lucas Oil Stadium, it expands downtown to the west. But the most important asset the JW Marriott building brings to downtown Indianapolis is its addition to the skyline. This is a tall and truly urban building that's making a statement. And I like what it's saying. Feel free to weigh in with your yays or nays.