Window Treatment Serving Old Northside

Local Window Treatment Experience in Old Northside

Two communities, forty four years and a very heavy renovation history

The neighborhood came together from two separate places. College Corner grew around Ovid Butler's North Western Christian University near 13th Street and College Avenue and thrived from 1855 to 1875. Alongside it, an affluent residential area developed north of the Mile Square along Meridian Street. Building ran from 1870 to 1914 and the style range shows the span, with Gothic Revival at the start and Colonial Revival influence by the end. Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Taggart, Lyman S. Ayres, Hiram P. Wasson, Herman Lieber, Booth Tarkington and Meredith Nicholson all lived here, and the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site is still on Delaware Street.

Then it fell hard. The district declined after the First World War, hit its low point through the 1960s and 1970s with poverty, neglect and commercial intrusion, and was restored from the early 1970s onward by owners who bought wrecks. By 1993 roughly 80 percent of the housing stock in the 36-block area had been renovated, which is far more than any other historic district in the city. For anyone measuring windows that's the most important fact on this page: expect original frames carrying units fitted at some point in the last fifty years, and measure the opening you have rather than the one the build date implies.

The deepest casing in the city, and the reasons you still can't use it

Frame depth here is the most generous we work with. High style Victorian houses carry deep wood jambs with heavy applied casing and weight pockets behind, which on a rectangular opening gives you room for a shutter frame, a cassette or a side channel with space to spare. The catch is how few of the openings are simply rectangular. Between mansard dormers with sloping reveals, Gothic heads that come to a point, Queen Anne tower curves and oriels that project past the wall line with no usable head, a large house here can have a dozen units that need something other than a standard order.

Then there's the neighbor problem, which is peculiar to this district. Onyx+East and other infill builders have put modern townhouses directly alongside the Victorian stock, and those have drywall returns with no applied casing at all. Two adjacent addresses on the same block are opposite jobs: one has deep trim and no square openings, the other has square openings and no trim. On the light side, the sourced descriptions emphasize large wooded lots and tree lined streets along Central Avenue, Alabama Street and Delaware Street, so mature canopy sits on the lot itself rather than only in the tree lawn.

What we specify most in the Old Northside

At a $499,900 median sale price against Irvington's $245,000, budgets here are usually less constrained than counts are. A 26 to 38 opening house with a dozen specialty shapes is a multi phase job whatever the budget, because templated and shaped items run longer than standard lines and you don't want the whole house waiting on them. We sequence the rectangular openings first so the house is usable, then the shaped units. National ranges put drapery at roughly $300 to $4,000 a window, motorized product $300 to $1,500 installed and shutters $175 to $800.

Getting around the Old Northside

The district sits immediately south of Herron-Morton Place across 16th Street and immediately north of downtown, with I-65 forming the southern edge. It's walkable and cyclable, and the Monon Trail is close enough that people use it as a route rather than a destination. The Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site on Delaware Street is the landmark visitors come for; the Morris-Butler House is listed by IHPC as an individual property in its own right, separate from the district. Tinker Street and Foundry Provisions are the addresses people give when they describe the neighborhood to somebody who doesn't know it.

Old Northside, Inc. and the commission

Old Northside, Inc. was founded in 1975 as a restoration organization. It isn't a mandatory homeowners association and it holds no architectural control over your property. What governs exterior work is IHPC, under IC 36-7-11.1-9(a), which requires a certificate of appropriateness before anyone constructs an exterior architectural structure or feature in a historic area or alters an exterior or designated interior feature. Read it as the two limb test it is. Interior blinds, shades, shutters and drapery in a private house are caught by neither limb, so they need nothing. An awning, an exterior solar shade or an exterior roller screen fixed to the building is caught by the first limb and should be treated as needing a certificate. Exemptions are set district by district in each adopted preservation plan under IC 36-7-11.1-7(a), and this district's plan wasn't readable, so confirm anything exterior with IHPC first.

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