Shields 1300 block of East First Street, Bloomington, 1929, before landscaping Photo by Chris Meyer (Left to right) Megan Donovan, instructor Marleen Lipsick-Newman and Andrea Kaplon look over maps of the Vinegar Hill section of Bloomington. Lipsick-Newman, an architect, believes that core neighborhoods are more than an historic complement; they will inform the future in urban design and planning. ‘New urbanism’ in its successful manifestations is revitalizing American cities, taking a page from such core neighborhoods as Bloomington’s Vinegar Hill.

The 1993 book was set in Bloomington, the “quarry town” Shields knew well from visits she had made to her brother living at nearby Lake Lemon and partially at a fictional campus which mirrored, in many ways, Hanover College in Southern Indiana, from which Shields graduated in 1957. The author, who died July 17 of breast cancer, had lived and taught in Canada most of her life and had dual citizenship in the U.S. and Canada.

On one visit to Indiana, she took Bloomington’s Vinegar Hill walking tour, along tree-lined streets with homes built between 1900 and 1940 by limestone quarry owners and stone carvers. She described one of the East First Street houses in The Stone Diaries.

Vinegar Hill is a gentle rise about 2,000 feet south of the campus buildings along East Third Street. It was named for the smell of fallen apples from the many orchards in the area. Along with an appearance in The Stone Diaries, Vinegar Hill and surrounding neighborhood houses now are the subject of a class taught at Indiana University Bloomington by Marleen Lipsick-Newman, “Topics in Historic Preservation: The Development of Bloomington and the Limestone Industry/A New Historic District.”

“The homes along First Street were built by limestone barons and immigrant carvers, so the success of the limestone industry in the late 1920s literally built this neighborhood,” said Lipsick-Newman, a working architect who teaches in the Department of Apparel Merchandising and Interior Design.

“Indiana, and specifically the Bloomington area, provided the limestone that helped rebuild Chicago after the fire and created the hundreds of neoclassical civic buildings that were built after the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Indiana limestone provided the exteriors of such famous buildings as the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, Rockefeller Center and the Chicago Tribune Tower. Material for these buildings was the same as that used for the houses on Vinegar Hill.”

Lipsick-Newman and her students are working with Nancy Hiestand, program manager of historic preservation in Bloomington’s Department of Housing and Neighborhood Development, to prepare a nomination of the area for the National Register of Historic Places, administered by the U.S. Department of Interior through the National Park Service.

“Vinegar Hill is that rare example of a district that uniquely expresses local history,” said Lipsick-Newman. “There are no other districts like it in the state of Indiana.

“These houses are important because they express not only the architectural styles that were typical of that era nationally, but they also show the unusual use of limestone and skilled carvings in privately owned houses. The homes, many of them modestly sized, contain elaborate carvings both on their facades and in interior details on fireplaces and balustrades. This was the neighborhood of several very famous IU professors, including Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Institute and Hermann Muller, winner of the Nobel Prize.”

According to the National Park Service Web site, properties listed in the National Register include districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects that are significant in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering and culture. Properties also must be associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of U.S. history, Lipsick-Newman explained further, and they must be associated with the lives of persons significant in the past. Properties are required to embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period or method of construction, or represent the work of a master, or possess high artistic value, or represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction. Finally, to be included on the National Register, properties must have yielded or be likely to yield information important in prehistory or history.

Once they become familiar with the requirements, Lipsick-Newman’s students will collect much of the necessary information. “They will be researching the individuals who lived in the houses,” Lipsick-Newman said. “In an effort to make each house tell its history and its relationship to the limestone industry and the neighborhood, the students will delve into the city directories, do deed research and use Sanborn maps and death and census records.

“They also will study techniques for the creation of successful oral history interviews,” she continued. “They will visit and document the houses in sketches and photographs. They will meet the owners and interview them. We have connections with former local residents who are willing to tell their personal histories and relationships to the limestone industry and to Vinegar Hill.”

According to Lipsick-Newman, listing a property or a district with the register is important because it provides a mechanism for chronicling, evaluating and documenting the built environment. Buildings hold important links to the past and help to tell stories about that past, she said, but historic preservation also informs actions in the future.

“For example, ‘new urbanism’ seeks to reconstitute our urban/suburban environment by using the past as a prototype,” said Lipsick-Newman. “Design and planning elements—such as small lots, garages facing alleyways and ‘walk-ability’—that worked successfully in neighborhoods just like Vinegar Hill are central themes that run through new urbanism. In Bloomington, the houses in Vinegar Hill are within walking distance of shops, parks, the university and the downtown. Vinegar Hill is the perfect prototype for the newest developments in urban design.

“In addition, historic urban neighborhoods like Vinegar Hill—located in cities and towns all over the country and acting as the central core neighborhoods—are catalyzing the revitalization of our cities. These neighborhoods offer an option in urban planning that will allow growth in cities, the salvation of green space, and a reduction in traffic and congestion. The rebirth of these ideas in the form of new urbanism owes much to what I call the ‘old urbanism’ of Vinegar Hill and other older residential neighborhoods.”

Related photos