Fountain Square Window Treatment, Indianapolis, IN

Local Window Treatment Experience in Fountain Square

Two building populations, fifty dormant years apart

The commercial core grew over roughly seventy years, from the 1864 street railway turnaround through the 1892 viaduct to the 1930s, and then it stopped. Building didn't restart in any real way until the 1990s. What that leaves on the market today is a genuinely bimodal stock: restored 1890s houses at one end and 2023 new construction at the other, with almost nothing built in between. At its 1920s peak the neighborhood ran as many as seven cinemas at once, the Sanders, later the Apex, from 1914 to 1952 and the Fountain Square Theatre from 1928 to 1960 among them. That's why the commercial fabric is theater scale rather than shop scale.

The residential styles are early twentieth century bungalow, American Foursquare and nineteenth century worker cottage, sitting alongside two and three story commercial blocks on the square itself and contemporary townhouses on the infill sites. German, Irish, Italian and Danish immigrant merchants and builders put up the original fabric. Lots are compact on the near south side grid, with zero lot line commercial frontage along Virginia Avenue, Prospect and Shelby. There have been two fountains, not one: the 1889 original went up on merchant money and came down about thirty years later after an advertising banner was anchored to it.

Transom bands, three casing regimes and a fifty year gap

The signature condition here is the storefront transom band, a horizontal run of small lights above the display glass on the commercial blocks. It's an awkward thing to cover and an easy thing to get wrong. Drop a shade to the head of the display bay and you lose the transom band entirely; mount above the band and you're carrying a much taller product on a wider bracket span. The 1920s cinema buildings are a separate case again, with large blank walls and openings at marquee scale. On the residential side you get tall narrow units with door transoms, plus banded groupings under the broad eaves of the bungalows.

Casing splits three ways inside a few hundred feet, which is unusual even for Indianapolis. Masonry commercial reveals give you generous depth. Modest frame residential jambs with applied casing give you shallow depth. The new townhouse stock has drywall returns and no applied casing at all, so there's nothing to face fix to. Squareness splits the same way. The historic buildings are 90 to 160 years old and out of square; the 2023 work is dead square and still settling. There's very little in between because the neighborhood built almost nothing between the 1940s and the 1990s.

What we specify most in Fountain Square

Two conversations happen here and they need different answers. The residential one is about small counts and compact rooms, where stack height and how much glass a raised shade gives back matter more than they would in a bigger house. The commercial one is about street facing glass, afternoon heat on a west facing wedge and whether anything you fix outside the building needs a certificate first. National figures put custom shades at roughly $250 to $2,600 a window and motorized product at $300 to $1,500 installed. Those are national ranges and the commercial side often runs to a different budget line than the residential side.

Getting around Fountain Square

The neighborhood centers on Virginia Avenue where it meets Prospect and Shelby, on the near southeast side. Fletcher Place, also an IHPC historic district, adjoins to the northwest along Virginia Avenue, and Bates-Hendricks lies to the west. People here describe getting downtown along Virginia Avenue or on the Cultural Trail, and the IndyGo Red Line runs through. The second fountain commemorates congressman Ralph Hill and carries Myra Reynolds Richards's sculpture The Pioneer Family; it stood from 1924 to 1954, was pulled for traffic, and came back from Garfield Park in 1969. The neighborhood became one of six designated Indianapolis cultural districts in 1999.

Who reviews what in Fountain Square

There's no homeowners association here. What there is instead is an IHPC historic district drawn around commercial frontages, and the first job on any exterior item is confirming whether your address falls inside one of its three polygons. If it does, IC 36-7-11.1-9(a) applies, and constructing an exterior architectural feature needs a certificate of appropriateness. A storefront awning or a canopy is squarely that. An exterior solar screen fixed to the building is too. Interior blinds, shades and drapery aren't reached by the statute in the ordinary case, because the certificate requirement covers exterior features and designated interiors, and a private interior isn't a designated one. Exemptions get set district by district under IC 36-7-11.1-7(a) and this district's preservation plan wasn't readable, so confirm your position with IHPC before ordering anything that fixes to the outside of the building.

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