Monday, December 21, 2015

HILLS and DALES Neighborhood History





Alexander Sganga, Pranay Shoroff, Julian Belal Ms. Stacy Nall
  English 10800

15 December 2015

Hills and Dales: Old is Gold

West Lafayette is a town primarily fueled by Purdue University and the business it brings with its many students from all corners of the world, but it is seldom recognized that there is a more permanent community that resides outside the more direct influence of the University.
Though not nearly as old as some of its neighboring communities, the Hills and Dales community located just north­west of university campus has been deeply intertwined with Purdue’s affairs since its conception in the 1920s.
The Hills and Dales community has—for the most part—remained relatively unaffected by decades of depression, war, and other national crises and many houses from its original construction remain today as historic icons. One must wonder then, what kind of a role did politics play throughout the Hills and Dales community? This chronicle attempts to give its reader a short but thorough glimpse into the different issues that the community faced from its construction in the 1920s to present day, as well as compare and contrast the community’s life with that if surrounding West Lafayette.

Location


To understand politics in Hills and Dales it is useful to look at the larger area that represents Hills and Dales: West Lafayette. Present day West Lafayette rises above the tumult of its founding. But quite a twisted founding it did have. As local pastor and councilmember Peter





Bunder of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd puts it, “The city of West Lafayette has a checkered history. It’s 3 little towns. For a while you cannot send mail here because nobody knows what West Lafayette is. [...] It’s land speculators from the east who buy land along the river and are sort of jockeying for position.”
The jockeying was not a little thing. In the area of what is now West Lafayette, several settlements popped up before West Lafayette became what it is today. First, in the 1820s, the settlement of Jacktown came to be. Then in 1836, Augustus Wylie established a settlement peculiarly called “West Lafayette.” But that is not the West Lafayette of today, this previous iteration failed. 1855 saw Jesse Lutz found the Town of Kingston and 1860 was the year the Chaunceys came to town. Well, actually it was not. The Chaunceys were those eastern land speculators that Bunder mentioned earlier. The Chauncey family was a wealthy Philadelphia family who never lived in West Lafayette and might have never even graced its land.
Nonetheless, the Chauncey family founded the Town of Chauncey. These towns ­­Jacktown, the Town of Kingston, the Town of Chauncey, and not the previous West Lafayette­­ were the three towns Bunder mentioned that make up West Lafayette. In 1866, these towns started cooperating, and, by the turn of the decade, the three became one. The three became Chauncey. In 1871, Chauncey asked to be annexed by Lafayette but was denied due to transriver infrastructure costs. It was not until 1888 that Chauncey changed its name because, as Bunder mentioned earlier, nobody could send mail there. The town changed its name to West Lafayette, and all its mail was routed through Lafayette. Afterward, without Lafayette and with Purdue University, the town of West Lafayette grew to the point that in 1924 it became a city. With growth came the





development of more neighborhoods and, in the same year as West Lafayette’s establishment as a city, came Hills and Dales (New Chauncey Neighborhood Plan).
The cooperation between those three little towns that led to the creation of West Lafayette can still be seen in the contemporary politics of the area. West Lafayette is a small city and Hills and Dales is by no means a big community, facts which have not changed over the recent decades.

Small sizes mean that each of West Lafayette’s districts are small as well and that Hills and Dales does not constitute a whole district. Issues can easily extend between districts, uniting them in sentiment, and, in a similar manner, issues throughout a district can easily extend between communities. Not only do districts and communities interact and cooperate, but they have to in order to further their own desires. A controversy regarding Lindberg Road, the road





that constitutes the northern border of the Hills and Dales neighborhood, illustrates this unity between neighborhoods. Lindberg Road had been constructed over some mucky land, and was beginning to sink into the mud. In 1989, the City Council proposed a series of maintenance steps that included the widening of the street from 2 to 4 lanes in some areas. Many homeowners living near the streets were not happy with this plan, and voiced their displeasure. One went so far as to say “Quality of life means a lot to us­ that’s why we don’t live in Lafayette”. The extra lanes would cut into people’s property and the extra traffic that the road would invite could increase noise pollution. These are both things that would lower property values, possibly significantly (Higgins).
The fact that Lindberg Road extends far beyond the edge of the Hills and Dales neighborhood ensured that its controversy involved more than just the Hills and Dales Community. In fact, the most vocal individuals in the newspaper article that discussed the Lindberg Controversy were not even residents of Hills and Dales, but of Blackbird Farms, a nearby neighborhood (Higgins). What affected one neighborhood affected the other, creating a political bond that it does not appear will soon be broken.

History


Ross Ade Stadium and Hills and Dales’ Early Development. Hills and Dales’ foundation was first laid in 1924, the same year that West Lafayette officially became a city, and continued to grow through the 30s and into the 40s. According to Tour de Lafayette, “Early settlers and developers considered the land undesirable due to the hilly topography, but in the 1920s the land was thought to be ideal for housing development. Young families associated with the university saw the area's potential.” So, in one of the biggest political plays of the Hills and Dales’ early





years, that potential was given the chance to materialize in response to Purdue’s desire to create Ross­Ade stadium and become part of the Big 10 College Network.
“It was about that time that David Ross who was one of the influential people at the university, he was a local industrialist who was a Purdue Graduate and interested in Lafayette, decided that if Purdue was to be a factor in the Big 10, they had to have a stadium. And he decided that the place to have the stadium was at the extension of the western campus residential development. [Jim Shook’s] grandfather and [his] dad had already contract for the piece of property north of Cary hall and where the stadium is today… and [his] dad said ‘Well what are we going to do about that? Where are we going to go? We need more housing and we both have a problem.’ And Ross said ‘Well go find a piece of ground and we’ll work it out.’ … and so they took a gamble and David Ross bought the piece of ground and traded it for the land for which the stadium is built. 1925. And they developed a subdivision. I have to give my dad and my grandfather credit, they did it properly…” (Jim Shook, Interview)
These traded lands became Ross­Ade stadium and Hills and Dales. The Shook agency, the land developers who ended up with the piece of hilly topography that was once considered undesirable, looked at the hills and dales of their plot of land and decided to develop a neighborhood.
A few years after development started, the Great Depression struck the nation. However, national and small town politics are not always the same. Hills and Dales and the rest of West Lafayette received fewer scars from the Depression than the rest of the nation. West Lafayette’s economy was university driven and the Depression did not remove universities nor the need for them (Bunder). Purdue University, the main employer in West Lafayette, endured the depression





with only 2 pay cuts: 5%, then 10% (Shook). Such actions were much less drastic than the rest of the nation’s. Even nearby Lafayette had much more of a struggle as stated in the Journal and Courier article, “Poverty: The Way We Were:” “Within three months of the 1929 stock market crash, Lafayette’s Monon Railroad Shops laid off 20 percent of its workforce. Other businesses­­small and large­­ followed suit. [...] 75 percent of the unemployed before 1933, [...] couldn’t get poor relief (Cullen).” The Great Depression could not even stop Hills and Dales from building houses. The development of those first World War homage homes in Hills and Dales was relatively constant until the second World War came along. Development then stalled for a while during the second World War. However, after the war, housing demand exploded (Shook).
Slowing of Development. Yet the demand that exploded was not for Hills and Dales type housing, but for suburban housing. This was the start of a conflict between national housing trends (influencing West Lafayette) and the local housing desires (influencing Hills and Dales). Suburbanization took the nation and West Lafayette too with the dusk of war. Now, Purdue University’s continued expansion worked against Hills and Dales’ desires. With more students came the need for more housing but West Lafayette went with population dense suburban apartments over homey European influenced family homes. This clashed with the style of Hills and Dales and other historic architecture. As an even greater affront to the traditional styles of housing, houses were converted to rentals or destroyed to make way for the suburban apartments (New Chauncey Neighborhood Plan). This had to be done because land is scarce, and though community members of Hills and Dales want to uphold the “integrity and value” that their area has (Shook), Purdue University just needed the living space. Although Purdue University is still





expanding and little has occurred to alleviate the concerns of Hills and Dales residents, Hills and Dales still stands the test of time. In 2002, due to the successful preservation of Hills and Dales homes, the United States Department of the Interior bequeathed to Hills and Dales the title of Historic District (“Hills and Dales Neighborhood”). 


Residents


Residential Concerns. Another important detail to recognize is the demographic of Hills and Dales’ initial residents. Firstly, the Hills and Dales community instituted a restrictive covenant that prevented individuals of low economic status and people of color from living there. That
 really changed the way the neighborhood developed. Even today, with the restrictive covenant removed, the 

demographic remains primarily white and primarily University staff. Peter Bunder also remarked that “folks 

there had more money than the people in the rest of the town”. This may be a part of the equation as to why 

the residents’ desires regarding the building of sidewalks were respected throughout the years. Of course, 

there are other factors that likely played an even larger role, such as the fact that they are the people who live

 in the area itself and who would almost certainly put the most effort into being heard in regards to the issue.

 It is also important to remember that Purdue most certainly dwarfs Hills and Dales (as well as the other local

neighborhoods) in terms of influence derived from wealth. It is hard to imagine that all of the West Lafayette

neighborhoods combined would be able to match Purdue’s 2.443 billion dollar endowment (Purdue 

University Endowment Fund). However, the University’s monetary advantage has not always served as an 

overwhelming factor in conflict resolution, such as during the initial development of the neighborhood when 

Purdue wanted to become part of the the Big Ten.
Peter Bunder called Hills and Dales the first suburb in the area and Wes Shook would say that Hills and Dales had more of a country rural feel. Being a peculiar rural suburb in the West Lafayette area provided Hills and Dales with unique characteristics of quietness and seclusion as well as a location within close vicinity of the campus, something desired by the University’s residents. The neighborhood still values its isolation and exclusivity enough that it is in no hurry to add sidewalks, in spite of the fact that it is no longer in a heavily rural area. According to Peter Bunder, “you can see some of that today, there is no sidewalks, there is a lot of screaming and yelling whenever the city attempts to put safe paths to school, sidewalks in”. The resistance to





sidewalks tells about the local politics. The close vicinity of the neighborhood to Purdue’s campus makes it extremely convenient for the University’s staff to get to work easily, but the neighborhood’s rural ostracization also allows residents to live quietly and raise a family outside the otherwise active and sometimes rambunctious lifestyle that naturally occurs nearby a large University such as Purdue. One could surmise that the creation of sidewalks and other activities that would reduce the neighborhoods relative isolation may make it less appealing to University faculty. Politically speaking, we can see already that the two major parties in this community are Purdue (and its students) and the residents of surrounding West Lafayette, including Hills and Dales. There is a balance between the University’s agenda and the desires of the community that is evaluated and maintained every time there is a change that affects either party.
Even when analyzing the land swap between David Ross and the Shook agency, one can see the balance between University and the community. In that arrangement, the way things were done in the negotiation were much more informal, and really seemed to have less tension than many land disputes that can be found elsewhere . Both Purdue and the Shook family got what they wanted with a simple trade of equivalent value, seemingly without struggle. This also says something about the nature of local politics during this era. The way that people dealt with local problems during that time seemed kinder and more negotiable. Having small towns meant that the community was much more intimate, which increased the empathy that people felt for each other. As a result people were more inclined towards reaching a satisfactory end result for as many parties as possible with compromise. On the contrary, National level politics, even­more­so International, deals with many more interests and naturally, because of the lack of





direct empathy, compromise can seem much less attractive since parties cannot intimately see the effect of decisions on their opposition.
However national and small town politics are not always so far apart. People in Hills and Dales identified with their nation, felt pride and love for it. This is seen in that during the founding of Hills and Dales, a scant few years after the first World War, residents decided they wanted architectural styles that symbolically connected them to their own nation and its allies (Curtis). And so, the predominant architectural styles in Hills and Dales are Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, and French Eclectic (“Hills and Dales Neighborhood”).
The primary concern of residents in the community in regards to their home ownership appears to be property taxes. That is a very well founded concern, especially since Hills and Dales is what is referred to as a TIF district. TIF is an acronym that stands for Tax Increment Financing. What it essentially means is that, as the property values within the neighborhood increase, extra property taxes can be collected allowing the local governments to collect more revenue. This is not necessarily the case in all neighborhoods, where devices such as tax caps can prevent governments from collecting as much money as they would otherwise like (Bunder).
Naturally, Hills and Dales would prefer to pay less property tax, especially since their properties are already considered to be fairly valuable and, therefore, income taxes are probably relatively steep. Tax concerns for West Lafayette as a whole are substantiated by the fact that research at the West Lafayette public library yielded more political articles concerning tax statistics than any other single category.
The obstacle of property taxes does not prevent Hills and Dales residents from wanting to preserve their property values, which are fairly high. In fact, there are currently four one­story





houses within the community for sale, and their prices range from $129,900 to $219,000. (realtor.com). It is likely that much of this value comes the state of the neighborhood, so residents do not take kindly to events that may affect alter the neighborhood’s state of being, such as in the previously discussed Lindberg Road fiasco of 1989.
Public Individuals. There are a fair amount of Hills and Dales residents who have run for public office over the years. This is logical since the community is full of individuals with the resources, intelligence, and community concern needed to enter into the political arena. One example of such a man is Mr. Gerald Thomas. He is a former Purdue University basketball player and Purdue alumni who ran for City Council for the first time in 2007 and has held the office for the last two election cycles (Meeks). Another notable individual is Randy Truit, who currently represents the local area as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives in the state capital of Indianapolis. Mr. Truit has a couple of relatives who have a history in politics as well (Schenkel).

Discoveries


The political history of the Hills and Dales neighborhood reveals several relationships involving the community that have done a great deal to define it politically. One is the relationship between Hills and Dales and Purdue University. This relationship is one that simultaneously benefits and harms the neighborhood. The University benefits the neighborhood in several ways. Purdue is and historically has been the neighborhood’s number one employer, with many of the residents working either as a professor at the University or as some other faculty member. The University is also home to some Purdue Alumni and others who, via their background, have a direct interest in the continued success of the University (Bunder).





However, the University’s success has also led to the University’s expansion, bringing it in close geographical proximity to Hills and Dales and leading to some interesting occurrences. For example, a Purdue student once invaded a Hills and Dales home. He did not do it because he had anything malicious in mind. He did it because he was in such a drunken stupor that he thought that the home was actually Cary dormitory. This dorm is only a few block away from Hills and Dales, which helped to facilitate the incident (Smith).
A more neutral way in which Purdue has affected Hills and Dales is the University’s recent joining of West Lafayette. This directly led to a redistricting of the city, which went into effect during the 2015 local election. Since the new rules included a 7,000 resident per district requirement, Hills and Dales is now a part of a district that is more spread out than its prior one and includes much of eastern New Chauncey. An additional change brought about by the annexation of Purdue is that the West Lafayette City Council has expanded. There are now six council districts with three at large positions, while there used to be only five council districts with two at large positions (Bunder). The impact of these changes on both Hills and Dales and the local government remains to be seen.







The second relationship that helps to define Hills and Dales politically is its relationship with the rest of West Lafayette. The Hills and Dales is very politically connected to the rest of the city. In fact, West Lafayette became a city the same year that Hills and Dales was first founded. There has never been one in the absence of the other. With the exception of a homeowners association, which among other things organizes some community events, the West Lafayette city government has always been the most local government of which Hills and Dales has been a member. This is true for the other segments of West Lafayette as well, and acts as a strong tie between them (Bunder).
The final overarching idea to be discussed can best be described as past Hills and Dales versus present Hills and Dales, or how Hills and Dales has changed overtime. Surprisingly, the community has not changed as much over the decades as one might think, politically speaking.





Some things have certainly changed. For example, there is no restrictive covenant anymore, or at least not one that is enforced in any evident way. However, the neighborhoods attitude towards certain issues such as Purdue University’s growth and the potential addition of sidewalks show that sentiments reflected by the restrictive covenant, such as a need to protect the neighborhood against dangerous outside influence, may in fact still be present (Bunder).
The most likely explanation for this consistency of the neighborhoods political values is probably derived from the fact that there is also consistency in the community’s demographic. Hills and Dales was founded as a residential community. With the possible exception of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Hills and Dales is still completely residential. The community was originally settled largely by Purdue professors looking to live away from the hustle and bustle of the school. Today, professor is still the most common career to be found among residents. Hills and Dales was founded as a white community. Although there are minorities who live there, it is still predominantly white. There is no evidence regarding a major demographic change at any point in the neighborhoods history. This enduring of values is not uncommon in small town neighborhoods, in fact, it is expected according to Rev. Bunder, who stated that, “This place was small. This place is still small, and it’s that size and homogeneity that give the place its identity. So, it is very stable in terms of its structure. It’s very stable in terms of its ideology.”

Importance


A beautiful part about being human is the ability of choice. With the ability to think freely however, comes conflict and democracy. For eons, ever since the birth of communication, politics has played an enormous role in the development of the human race and the course of its
 
 history.   However, in the ever ­rapidly growing population, much of the politics of local communities gets

 drowned out by the buzz of mass media, as the issues of a single city or town very rarely bears any 

importance for outsiders.

So why document the local politics of a town if the profitability is low and the scope of importance is narrow? The answer is that the information will, none the less, be of value to someone. Though the rest of the world may not care so much about the housing conflicts involved with putting up a new apartment complex in a town that barely anyone has heard of, the residents of the area care. The documentation of people’s lives, embodied by their memories of happiness, conflict, and sense of community, deserves to have a place in the local records or library for future generations to have access. It preserves the value behind the land that future generations will inherit and allows a level of respect for it.
For students of Purdue University, it is often easy to forget that there is more to West Lafayette than the school itself. One would suspect that this fact holds for a student at any institution of higher learning in a “college town”. It can be easy to forget that there are many permanent residents of West Lafayette, whose heritage is to be respected and whose accomplishments are to be championed. It is hoped that this study paints a picture of the political history of a neighborhood that one could argue has been unfairly ignored by individuals either passing by or passing through. This picture may not be the most unique. This picture may not be the most surprising. This picture may not always be the most flattering. However, this picture contains the essence of many of the political values and relationships that are important to Hills and Dales and the historical context of these facets. It exists for the benefit of Hills and Dales, the benefit of West Lafayette, the benefit of Purdue University, and the benefit of anyone who
 
 feels inclined to enlighten themselves on the background of a very special West Lafayette neighborhood.
Many questions have successfully been answered about the previously almost undocumented political history of Hills and Dales. However there are still many questions left unanswered about other neighborhoods in towns all over the world. Bear in mind the value of the answers to these questions and the remarkable secrets they may reveal.

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