Window Treatment Across Irvington, Indianapolis

Local Window Treatment Experience in Irvington

Twenty plats, seventy eight years, one neighborhood name

The 1870 plat laid out 109 variously sized lots of two or more acres, and those were subdivided again and again over the decades that followed, so parcels today run from original large holdings down to ordinary city lots. The recorded dates read like a timeline of the east side: Julian, Johnson's, Rawls and Good's on 27 April 1872, Southeast Irvington on 25 July 1873, Layman and Carey's Irvington Park on 4 April 1894, Metzger's on 14 June 1898, Irvington Hill on 8 November 1905, Irvington Terrace on 7 August 1913, Bailey's on 25 May 1922, Pope's 1st on 20 March 1925, Jenney's Irvington Gardens on 11 April 1929 and Irvington Hills Amended on 11 July 1939.

Ten named styles turn up inside the district: Craftsman bungalow, American Foursquare, Queen Anne vernacular cottage, Second Empire, Italianate, Colonial and Georgian Revival, Neo-Classical Revival, Tudor Revival, Neo-Jacobean and Free Classic. Most of the stock is two story, with a heavy one and a half story bungalow component off the 1910s through 1930s plats. Butler University sat here from 1875 until it left for Fairview Park in 1928, growing from about 200 students to nearly 2,000 in that time, and the grandest houses on Audubon and University were built for a campus that isn't here anymore. Irvington was its own municipality from March 1873 until it agreed to annexation in 1902.

Arched heads, storm panels and 156 years of settling

The National Register nomination is specific about what's on these elevations, and it's the specificity that makes the district hard. It records limestone, stone and wood surrounds, segmental arched hoods, half round arched hoods and paired configurations. Add door transoms and sidelights on the Colonial and Georgian Revival houses, bay and oriel projections on the Queen Anne stock, banded groupings tucked under broad eaves on the Craftsman bungalows, and leaded multi light units on the Tudor Revival and Neo-Jacobean houses. An arched hood means the head of the opening isn't flat, which rules out a square cut inside mount at that unit before anybody gets a tape out.

Behind the trim you're dealing with real wood jambs, applied built up casing and weight pockets rather than the wrapped drywall returns a 1990s house gives you. Interior storm panels are common here and they take back whatever depth the casing gave you. Everything in the district is between 78 and 156 years old and it's all sitting on Marion County clay, so head and sill differ, no two openings in one house repeat, and a masonry reveal measures differently at the top than at the bottom. On the arched units a three point measure isn't even enough. The head profile has to be templated.

What we specify most in Irvington

With a $245,000 median sale price and 16 to 24 openings in a typical Foursquare, whole house budgets here get decided by count rather than by any one product choice. National figures run roughly $60 to $600 a window for stock shades against $250 to $2,600 for custom, and shutters $175 to $800. Those are national ranges and not a quote for your house. The practical move in Irvington is to do the rooms you actually sit in first, order everything in one room from one dye lot, and keep a note of the line and color so the second phase matches the first.

Getting around Irvington

The neighborhood runs roughly between 10th Street, Arlington Avenue, Brookville Road and Emerson Avenue, with the National Register boundary drawn at Arlington on the east, the ConRail right of way south, Emerson west, and Pleasant Run Parkway, Ellenberger Park and Pleasant Run Creek along the north and northwest. East Washington Street is US 40, the old National Road, and it's how people here describe getting downtown, about five miles west. The school picture is split: the Indianapolis Public Schools and MSD Warren Township boundary runs through the neighborhood, so two houses on the same street can feed different systems.

Who actually has a say in Irvington

There's no homeowners association here and no architectural control committee. The reviewer is a public body, the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission, and the trigger is written into state law. IC 36-7-11.1-9(a) says nobody may construct an exterior architectural structure or feature in a historic area, or reconstruct or alter any such exterior or designated interior feature, without first filing for a certificate of appropriateness. Read it carefully and it has two limbs, exterior features and designated interiors, and nothing else. Interior blinds, shades, shutters and drapery in a private Irvington house sit outside both limbs. An awning or an exterior solar shade fixed to the building sits inside the first one. Exemptions are set separately in each district's adopted preservation plan under IC 36-7-11.1-7(a), and we couldn't read Irvington's plan, so confirm the exterior question with IHPC before you order.

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