Normain Heights as built: 315 houses, seven designs

1946–1951 · THE NORTH SIDE

The commission: Normain Heights is the largest single act of building in Mishawaka's record, and the only one of its Register districts whose architecture is a system rather than a set piece. Its nomination counts the fabric: across seventy-six acres, 224 contributing buildings, ninety-two noncontributing buildings, one contributing site and one noncontributing object — the noncontributing count itself a measure of seventy years of siding, additions and replacements over the original stock. All 315 houses stood complete by September 1949. The builder was Mishawaka Vets' Homes, Inc., the nonprofit the American Legion Post 161, VFW Post 360 and URWA Local 65 committees formed and chartered in August 1946; the social record of the subdivision — its buyers, its battles-named streets, and the restrictive covenant its deeds carried, printed whole in the controversies record — stands in the neighborhoods record of this history. The built facts are these. The corporation bought the eighty-acre Felton farm, formerly the William Schmelz farm, northeast of the North Main terminus; Robert L. Pine, a development engineer from Dayton, Ohio, prepared the land-use plan; and the organization hired the architect Karl Schwartz to design seven different houses from which buyers chose, all to FHA standards.

The houses: They were, the nomination insists on the point, sturdily built on site, not prefabricated — the distinction mattered in 1947, when the veterans' project was competing in the public mind with the era's kit and prefab schemes. Every house was sided with aluminum provided by the Reynolds Company; every kitchen came fully equipped; each family chose its furnace fuel — gas, coal or oil. Scale models of each of the seven designs stood in the URWA hall, with floor plans and blueprints, for buyers to choose from. The plat was annexed in November 1946; the streets were laid fifty feet wide, Normandy Drive at sixty and the North Main extension at eighty, and named for the campaigns the buyers had fought — Ardennes, Palau, Saint Lo, Bastogne, Leyte, Guam, Normandy. The money was a combined loan of $2,499,000 from the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Company of Hartford and the Guarantee Title and Trust Company of Columbus, Ohio; the houses sold at cost, advertised at $55 to $63 a month inclusive of taxes and insurance, the down payment later reduced to $330. Groundbreaking came in November 1947; about fifty houses stood partially up by year's end; the formal dedication followed in October 1948 with more than seventy complete. The form's materials line reads as the era's own summary: concrete foundations; walls of synthetics and vinyl, metal — the aluminum — and wood; asphalt roofs. The Register classifies the district's architecture as the Modern Movement, and lists it under Criterion A alone, for community planning and development and social history, its period of significance 1946–1951. The nomination closes with a claim this history prints as its authors made it: "No other such project structured in any similar manner has come to light in Indiana."

The object: The district's one object is its memorial: the monument to Pfc. John F. Nagy at the intersection of Normandy and Guam, dedicated a few weeks before the subdivision's own dedication in October 1948 to represent all the armed forces' dead, damaged by frequent collisions over the years where it stood in the roadway, and eventually removed — a new memorial dedicated in the same intersection in 1991. The seven-acre park on McKinley followed the houses, one acre of it deeded for the fire station fronting Main Street at 2332 North Main; the state's Normain Heights marker, erected in 1997 by the Historical Bureau and the Beiger Heritage Corporation, stands on that station's lawn. The nomination was prepared by Glory-June Greiff for the Normain-Northway Neighborhood Association on 16 July 2001, and the district was listed on 20 March 2002.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Normain Heights Historic District (2001), prepared by Glory-June Greiff, read first-hand — the counts, the corporation and its charter, the Felton purchase, Pine's plan, Schwartz's seven designs, the on-site construction and aluminum siding, the streets and their widths, the loan, the prices, the building course of 1947–49, the Nagy memorial's whole course, and the closing claim quoted.
2. National Register Information System — listing 20 March 2002, #02000203; classification Modern Movement; Criterion A; period of significance 1946–1951.
3. The neighborhoods and controversies records of this history — the subdivision's social geography and the covenant's paper trail, carried whole there.