The district neighborhoods

BRANCH · NEIGHBORHOODS · DISTRICTS, NOT CORRIDORS

Lead: Read as a neighborhood, the historic district is the walking city itself. The New Carlisle Historic District — National Register reference 92001653, listed 14 December 1992, 24 acres, roughly bounded by Front, Arch, Chestnut and Bray Streets — was nominated by Glory-June Grieff in May 1992 on the significance of Commerce, with periods of significance running 1825–1949 and a building stock in Italianate, Italian Villa and Queen Anne. Its spine is Michigan Street: forty-five feet wide, wider than any other street in town, and a part of an improved thoroughfare from the town's platting in 1835 — first the Michigan Road, later the Lincoln Highway, finally US 20. The nomination's town perches on its hill above the Terre Coupee prairie, its two parallel railroads along the north edge at the bottom of the hill, open farmland beyond — a commercial district a resident could walk end to end, with the houses of the men who kept its stores in the same blocks. That is the district neighborhood at its instrument's size; the corridor's trade course stands in its own files and is pointed to, not re-dug.

The postwar additions print at the size the nomination record gives them, which is a landscape size, not a plat size. The same district record describes, outside the boundary, commercial development at the western edge of town along US 20 at the county line, some residential development to the south, and along US 20 to the east, toward South Bend, a long line of circa-1950 housing development that until recently edged farmland between the highway and the railroads. Those are the postwar districts as the federal record reads them: an east highway ribbon of ca. 1950 houses, a south residential growth, a west-edge commercial strip. The named subdivisions of the banked parks record — the Bourissa Hills ground among them — are not platted out as districts in any instrument read; a district-by-district reading from the plat and directory record is a named gap, its settler the county recorder's plats and the town directories. The campus-gate pattern prints as tested and not applicable: there is no campus in this town. No college or university gates a neighborhood here; the nearest campus, Notre Dame, is a boundary seat to the east and belongs to the film row's boundary article, not to this town's neighborhoods.

Sources:

1. National Park Service, NPGallery asset record 92001653, and the district summary drawn from Grieff's May 1992 nomination — bounds, acreage, listing date, significance, styles, Michigan Street width and road succession, ca. 1950 east-side housing and edge development.