Window Treatment for Chatham Arch

Local Window Treatment Experience in Chatham Arch

Thirty five years of platting, four styles, 54.5 acres

Platting ran from 1836 to 1871, thirty five years, and construction followed through the later nineteenth century. Local construction workers and German immigrants built and occupied most of the original houses, which is why the scale here is more modest than the mansion districts to the north despite the same era. The neighborhood declined through the 1950s and 1960s and came back substantially in the 1990s, so the fabric you see today is largely restored rather than continuously maintained. Post-2000 infill exists too, and it's the only thing in the district carrying open plan glass.

The four styles carry four different sets of consequences. Gothic Revival pointed arches mean the head of the opening comes to a point, and no rectangular product will ever sit inside one. Queen Anne towers mean curved or faceted glass, which is the same problem with a different geometry. Italianate means tall narrow openings with heavy brackets nearby, so there's often decorative work exactly where a bracket wants to go. Stick Style means applied timbering framing the openings, which leaves very little flat trim to fix anything to. The houses are 130 to 175 years old and the platting is 155 to 190 years old, so out of square is the baseline.

Pointed arches, applied timbering and a diagonal through the grid

A pointed arch is the least forgiving head shape in domestic building. There's no flat surface at the top of the opening, the two sides meet at an angle, and the widest point of the opening isn't at the head. What works is a shaped fixed panel following the arch, with an operable unit below it on a divider rail, or an outside mounted treatment on a header board set above the point so the arch stays legible from the street. Either way it starts with a physical template rather than a tape measure, and we take that template before quoting anything.

Exposure here doesn't follow the grid the way it does in Herron-Morton six blocks north. Massachusetts Avenue cuts diagonally across a rectilinear street pattern, which produces acute angled corner buildings whose elevations face intermediate compass directions rather than squarely north, south, east or west. Combine that with the wrap around porches shading two or three elevations at ground level and you get a district where knowing the street doesn't tell you the light. We ask which room, which floor and what time of day it becomes uncomfortable, and we specify from that.

What we specify most in Chatham Arch

No median was published separately for Chatham Arch when we last looked, though adjoining Lockerbie Square runs $460,000 list against $490,000 sale. What matters more for budgeting is that this district mixes house types with very different counts, from a 10 opening Stick Style cottage to a 32 opening Queen Anne, and that a share of those openings are specialty shapes that price above the standard lines. National figures put custom shades at roughly $250 to $2,600 a window and shutters $175 to $800. Templated arches and shaped panels sit above the ordinary range and take longer to make.

Getting around Chatham Arch

The district sits immediately north of Lockerbie Square and east of the Mile Square, bounded by I-65, College Avenue, East Street and North Street. Massachusetts Avenue is the diagonal spine and the reason the district is paired administratively with the commercial corridor. People here walk to the arts and theater venues on Mass Ave and pick up the Cultural Trail at the edge of the neighborhood. Park Avenue was Chatham Street until it was renamed, and John Wood Sr. named it after the Old English word for homestead, which is where half the neighborhood's modern name comes from.

The 2006 plan and what it governs

There's no homeowners association here. Review runs through IHPC under the combined Chatham-Arch and Massachusetts Avenue preservation plan adopted in 2006, and this is the only district in the city where we can point you at a plan by date. That matters because of how the statute is built. IC 36-7-11.1-9(a) requires a certificate of appropriateness before constructing an exterior architectural structure or feature in a historic area, and IC 36-7-11.1-7(a) says the preservation plan may exempt certain categories of work from that requirement. So the plan, not the statute, is where any exemption lives, and here you can at least name the document to ask for. Interior blinds, shades and drapery sit outside the trigger in the ordinary case. Anything fixed to the outside of the building doesn't, whether it's a residential awning or a storefront canopy on the avenue.

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