The Bayard Historic District [†] evolved on an approximately 87-acre tract in the southern part of a quarter section platted in 1892 as the Columbia Addition. The district's development as a residential preserve was determined in 1893 by the various proprietors of the uninhabited and unannexed tract who, by recorded plat, barred any type of commerce in their respective subdivisions of the addition's blocks. This marked the first local instance of restricted land use. Settlement of the area—then referred to interchangeably as the city's "easternmost suburb" or "the Columbia Addition"—was sparse during the 1890's, and at the turn of the century there were only 20, or so, dwellings dotting the flat, and rather rude, landscape. Annexation to the city (1897), followed by installation of city water and sewer services around the turn of the century, the completion of a grade school (1900), and close proximity to the Washington Avenue streetcar line (in place by 1892) near its southern border were several factors which made settlement in the district convenient and feasible. The cultivation of the ten-acre Bayard woods into a landscaped park after 1901 was an added inducement for development. After the turn of the century, people from all stratas of the middle-class began moving into the district, and into houses designed to their specifications by architects, or into speculative housing put up by a new breed of large-scale builders/developers who geared their building styles to middle-class needs and tastes. The primary period of Bayard's growth occurred roughly between 1905 and 1915. By the end of the 1920's, the area was fully established, its early 20th century distinctiveness demarcated by later housing on its northern and eastern flanks, and by the older Washington Avenue Historic District (National Register, 1980) adjoining its western and southern borders.
Situated about a mile east of the downtown commercial center, the Bayard district comprises about 335 buildings, a figure which includes 330 houses (only nine of which are 45 years of age, or less), a church, a library, a former fire station, a floral shop, and a section (now an adult education center) of the old Stanley Hall grade school (razed c. 1970). Building set-backs and spacing are fairly uniform and close for most of the district. Some houses, such as those with park vantage^have more generous sites. The street plan of the old Columbia Addition adheres to a standard grid with primary, house-lined streets running in an east-west direction. The only major north-south street in the district is Kentucky Avenue, where houses range its east side, some of them facing the park. Special features of the district are the ten-acre Bayard Park and the 1912 Carnegie Library, both located at its east end.
Significance
The Bayard Park neighborhood has the distinction of being Evansville's first suburb of the modern era. Unlike streetcar suburbs preceding it (for example, the linear Washington Avenue Historic District, National Register, 1980) or "garden suburbs" following it (for example, the Lincolnshire Historic District, Indiana Survey, 1981), Bayard Park was remarkable for its Progressive Era character and appeal to the city's entrenched middle class, a middle class willing, it seemed, to put aside ethnic, educational and religious differences in favor of more transcendent values.
In keeping with the times, building activity in the district during its period of greatest development—1905 to about 1915—sprang from a cult of commercialism. As never before, builders, real estate agents, designers and mortgage lenders joined together in formal, interdependent relationships to make housing available to a middle class of managers, executives, clerks, and proprietors.
The clearest case of this alliance involved nearly one-third of all dwellings erected in the district. Anderson and Veatch, quality designers and builders, put up over 100 dwellings in the district beginning in about 1906. Before long, the firm was in partnership with a banker and a real estate agent and, in 1909, formed the Evansville Development Company, a general real estate development and management concern. Anderson and Veatch ! s modest approach ended in 1911 when the firm purchased a large acreage of the Bayard Park land and began its house production in earnest. The firm relied upon a single lender—the American Trust and Savings Bank—for nearly all of its land acquisition and construction expenses. In turn,American Trust and other commercial lenders made home ownership a middle class reality by financing the purchase of those speculative and custom-built houses.
Risks to the developers of the early Bayard Park homes were kept to a minimum through both private and public initiatives. Among the private steps taken to secure investments were assurances by buyers of vacant lots that whatever was eventually built met certain standards of cost, materials and the like, and would be put to residential use, only. Public gestures included the establishment of a Carnegie-supported free public library branch (1912), a public school (1900), and a fire station (1909)—all within or nearby one of the city's few interior public parks, Bayard Park, whose creation in 1901 was supported by Progressive Era politicians (and businessmen).
The preponderant involvement of the firm of Anderson and Veatch marked a new chapter in local building practices nowhere more apparent than in Bayard Park. Like housewrights of mid-19th century Evansville, Anderson and Veatch were as much contractors as designers, as much businessmen as artists. The distinctions between architecture as a business and architecture as an art which characterized the end of the 19th century were blurred as firms like Anderson and Veatch made architecture a corporate and practical pursuit.
Adapted from: Joan Marchand Evansville Department of Metropolitan Development, Bayard Park Historic District, nomination document, 1984, National Register of Historic Places, Washington, D.C.
