University Hill Farms Historic District

The University Hill Farms neighborhood is one of my favorite parts of my home town and in today’s episode I’ll be your tour guide! 

It's on the national historic register and boasts a concentration of great mid-century including one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. And, while I love the homes, there are a whole bunch of elements that make the neighborhood great. 

In Today's Episode You'll Hear:

• Why mid-century neighborhoods are sometimes less great than the houses located there. 
• How University Hill Farms has stayed great over time. 
• Which elements make University Hill Farms, and neighborhoods like it, great.

Get the full show notes with all the trimmings at https://www.midmod-midwest.com/2302

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Transcript

00:00
What's the best mid-century neighborhood near you? I don't just mean the spot with the best mid-century homes. What's the best neighborhood? Now MCM houses all tend to exist near schools, parks, libraries, churches, office buildings and more from the same era. But while the mid-century years are my absolute favorite for housing design, they weren't always the best for urban planning. For one thing, they kicked off our national car-centric planning era, and we're still in it. But there are some winners.
 
00:27
Today I want to talk about the history and qualities of one of my favorite parts of my hometown, the university Hill Farms neighborhood. If you're local, it's the area around Hilldale mall, and it's great by several measures. It's even a historic district inventoried in the National Register of Historic Places. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I'm your host, della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You're listening to Episode 2302.
 
00:58
Now today's episode is going to be less about advice for your house, and more about MCM history, urban planning history and even what we should be advocating for in our neighborhoods, towns and cities today. If, however, you need a fresh hit of practical how to advice this week, I still have you covered. Make sure you bop on over to YouTube at some point and check out the video series I just wrapped on the cornerstones of mid mod designs, I have covered how to arrange your art and your additions asymmetrically appropriate for a mid-century house, how to keep your style consistent with simple shapes, as in your products and your building materials.
 
01:33
The secret to selecting finishes that will always feel timeless. Spoiler alert, it's when in doubt go with a matte or satin finish, unless you're talking about stainless steel. And wrapping up this week, how to improve your layout when you remodel, because failing to consider a layout change in a remodel is, in my opinion, one of the greatest. I'm going to call it a sin of the home industrial remodeling complex. It just means you're replacing one surface with the newest, trendy surface, and never considering how to tailor or tune your house to fit your life, so how to strike the perfect balance between better flow but not necessarily turning your ranch into an open plan magazine spread with no place to hide daily clutter.
 
02:14
Yeah, I know. I get it if you're not already following mid mod Midwest over on YouTube. I highly recommend it. I've been slowly building a library there, and if you know, if I say so myself, the video format allows me to do more, to show examples and in generally, to be a little more short and sweet and pithy than this rambly everything on my mind. Podcast format, you can get the best of both worlds by following us in both spots, I will put a link to the YouTube video, specifically, series, generally, our YouTube channel.
 
02:47
You can also just go find it at mid mod Midwest on YouTube. It's not hard, but you'll find that in the show notes, plus also a bunch of references and information today about the university Hill Farms area, some pictures of its development, maybe a Frank Lloyd Wright house or two, just as a tease, and you'll get all of that on the show notes page at mid mod. Dash, midwest.com/ 2302.
 
03:09
Okay, so talking about university Hill Farms is really special for me because it crystallizes a bunch of disparate facts that I gathered about mid-century development, about Madison, about design history. When I began to really dig in on this, specifically my mid-century awakening, if you will. And I was studying mid-century all over the country, I was trying to figure out why Madison felt to me like a big mid-century town. Spoiler alert, it's because half of our housing stock was built during the post war boom. It really, it really is a big mid-century town.
 
03:45
But also, like we talked about in the interview with Scott Sidler last week, the mid-century years were an era of experimentation. Americans were building homes fast, and they were both standing on the shoulders of the building, techniques, styles and materials that had come before, and also really throwing spaghetti at the wall, trying new innovative things, new methods of construction, new materials, new esthetics, new urban planning techniques, even new window types. Now some of those changes worked really well and became normalized into our current set of assumptions about the way buildings and neighborhoods work.
 
04:16
Some were quickly abandoned, and some, I should say, Were not great ideas, but we're still taken up into our set of norms and assumptions. I've talked many times about how I generally love the buildings in the mid-century era more than the neighborhood layouts, even though most mid-century neighborhoods are more walkable and closer to local park, schools, shopping areas and services than later suburban developments, the kind I grew up in in in the Chicago suburban I don't love it of my past. Let's just put that there.
 
04:49
But they were less walkable and interconnected than the areas that had come before. In mid-century urban planning, they leaned hard into the cul de sac concept of winding neighborhoods with. With no obvious through streets. This was meant to be a traffic calming measure that would keep drivers respectful of local kids playing in the road, but it turned into a way that made getting in your car the only effective means of getting out of your neighborhood and off to work, school and shopping. In short, it was not a great idea.
 
05:18
There were many ideas in this era, not all of them good, okay, but this neighborhood is also really special to me because it highlights an interesting quality of Madison, Wisconsin that is an interesting quality of the nation as a whole. When I summarize, for someone who's unfamiliar with it, the way that mid-century development and conceptual broad strokes hit this country.
 
05:42
There are two main looks, main concepts of mid-century houses, what we most obviously lean towards calling mid-century modern houses look like the ones designed by Cliff may that sort of California style, post and beam, glass walls, flat roofs, those were innovated in the west coast and sort of spread across the country from west to east at the same time, over on the east coast, builders like William Levitt were responding to the housing crunch with houses that looked kind of traditional, or at least referenced the traditional Cape Cod cottage, but were constructed with modern mass production methods. I even use a graphic of a map of the US with a cliff may house sketched on the west side, and 11 Cape Cod stretched on the east. And then arrows pointing inward to show how those housing styles swept across the country.
 
06:28
In Madison, we have a microcosm of that layout. Madison's post war housing crunch found solutions in two very divergent directions, the so called Cape Cod historical style, the traditional style, is much more prevalent on the east side of town, and the more airy, the more modern, the more ranch style house is more common on the west side. So that mid-century building boom adds one more layer to the cultural divisions between Madison's east and west side that were set in place by our geologic and cultural past.
 
07:00
Let me just do a quick overview of that, because while the specific east west divide may not ring true, this might seem similar if you look at the geographic layout of your town, to similar patterns and effects that have happened there. For us on the east side, the land is flatter to the east of the isthmus, it's also closer to Chicago, to Milwaukee, it was connected to regional train lines, which made it an ideal home for early, burgeoning industry. So Madison's post war housing boom began there with neighborhoods of modest Cape Cod houses that were quickly created for people needing easy access to jobs at Oscar Mayer, at Rayovac and other industrial employers. Those houses are often categorized today as minimal traditional, an extremely boiled down version of a colonial style with very little ornamentation, no roof overhangs, very simple interior finishes, they sort of culturally evoke patriotism and tradition, and they were by far the most popular housing type everywhere in the immediate post war, not even the early 50s, but maybe the late 40s.
 
08:03
This type of house was often called a four room house because the bath didn't count. Proliferated across the US in the late 40s and is most famously and obviously associated with Levittown development. But actually, here in Madison, we had an earlier match production version of this kind of house our Eakin Park neighborhood. Sorry, I know I said it was going to talk about Hill Farms university, but University Hill Farms, I'm going to get it wrong again and again. I apologize. It's cross wired my brain.
 
08:29
Our Eken Park neighborhood, though, is also culturally and historically significant. It had the new mass production techniques and the simple peaked form, and the houses here went on the market in 1943 they were for sale for just $5,650.04 years later, a next identical batch of 120 homes came along, and they were for sale for $9,975 so the nearly doubling in price that must have felt almost today like how we feel. Our housing prices are booming, quite shocking and unaffordable. The point Overall, though, is that we tend to find those minimal traditional, those cottage style mid-century houses early in the earlier in the mid-century era, and in more industrial and working class neighborhoods. And then the concept of ranch style homes comes back in, sweeping across a little bit later, and coming from west to east does not mean it shows up on the west side of towns, generally.
 
09:30
But here in Madison, Wisconsin, the area to the west of the isthmus, to the west of the Capitol, was higher ground, more rolling hills. It had been farmed up until the 1950s and then started to be developed as kind of an exurban a beautiful get away from it all by still being close to the city, place for a more professional class of home buyers and builders. This is where our more mid-century cool houses show up. This is where the ranch houses proliferate, even if they're very modern. Focused. So the home buyers over here were more likely to be veterans moving into town to study on the GI Bill, young professionals, university professors and people finding employment in the state government. Most of the young couples moving to Madison's West Side couldn't afford an architect designed home, but they could often spring for a custom builder.
 
10:19
So this area also is almost universally not developed in a development style, in a model where a builder buys a tract of land, puts up a bunch of houses that are all the same, or a range of a few different types, and then sells them all to owners. But instead, either an owner buying a plot of land and hiring a builder to build a one off house for them in it, or a builder buying individual plots of land, building on them, selling them, using the profits of that to buy a few more plots, most of Madison's neighborhood.
 
10:50
And this is an interesting distinction where you are in your mid-century era. If your mid-century builds in your general geography, are more likely to be built as tracts or as builder. One offs affects the variety. It also affects the sort of speed at which neighborhoods were built, or is affected by that, and it certainly affects the way that houses feel more uniform or not in the area. This is something to observe about mid-century houses around you, noting whether the mid-century neighborhoods in your geographic area tend to be developed in tracked format or as one offs, is a useful distinction in a way, to compare your mid-century locale to others.
 
11:32
Now there's one other thing that's unusual about Madison's mid-century homes is that the Custom Homes commissioned by all these young couples and families settling on the west side were a little different visually than the builder basic ranch styles across the rest of the Midwest, and this is largely the shadow of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Taliesin influence is strong. Here is how that was described to me by a UW art history professor I spoke to back in 2019 when I was trying to learn more about all of this.
 
12:02
Anna Androsowski is someone who sees Madison's west side as a unique laboratory for mid-century building and both the Frank Lloyd Wright awareness of regionally specific style and a generation of designers and buildings trained in his design philosophies out at della Jasson, who then moved into Madison and then looked for commissioned work here, and also just people builders seeing that and being influenced by it indirectly and drowsy. Calls this the Wrightification of Madison's homes. Now, Wright himself designed 33 buildings in Madison representing every period of his work, but I really see it more showing up here in all of the West Side neighborhoods, in other architects who were trained at Taliesin and then set up their own practices.
 
12:53
There were others too, like William Keyser, who has a bunch of houses here. He was trained in the international modern style but came back to Madison and then soon started designing like right the other special to Madison, but not unique to Madison, quality that we had that influences the style of homes in our West Side neighborhoods, generally and specifically in university Hill Farms, is the Parade of Homes. I've had some real fun talking to Adam Stevens, by the way, who's going to be next week's interview. So keep your eye peeled for that he and I are going to have a great conversation to share with you. But in the past, I've talked with Adam about the Parade of Homes that happened in Denver that concentrated and gathered up people's good design ideas, and then, you know, shared them by example with other people, who then were influenced by them, knocked them off, purchased more of them and spread them around.
 
13:42
So Madison had a history of Parade of Homes, events starting in 1952 the 52 parade showcased some extremely modest early ranch homes. These were priced between 11,017 1000. So that's more expensive even than the contemporary houses by a significant proportion that were happening on the east side. But still, when you look at them, they are, oh my gosh, they are so builder basic. There is this great ad I found for one of them that mentions specifically that the bathroom has a vanity cabinet and a mirror. Yeah, let's make sure we highlight that in the copy, because that is that's special, right there a bathroom with a mirror and a vanity cabinet. You know, things we take for granted today, but each year of the parade, home sizes and amenities increased as early as two years later.
 
14:34
In 1954 we had two car garages introduced into Madison area homes. This lined up, by the way, with the introduction of the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. I've talked about this before, and in 1955 there was the first split level home showed up in the Parade of Homes. All of this was sort of swirling around in the stew of design thinking and planning. When the Hill Farms University neighborhood do. Was conceived. So this particular neighborhood is unlike other mid-century areas because it was developed wholesale by a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin and the city of Madison. That land originally had been a 613, acre parcel owned by the UW Madison College of Agriculture and farmed as an example farm by students since the 1890s as the West Side started to develop it, hopscotch the area building all around it and then beyond it. And it didn't seem practical to keep it as farmland anymore, so the university decided to sell it, develop it, and buy more farmland further out of town.
 
15:42
But rather than just, you know, finding a developer and turning it over, the managing committee decided that they were going to develop the area themselves and ambitiously plan it as a city within a city. So unlike most residential areas, which were just as many single family homes as were allowed, with a few required allotments for parks and schools. This particular plat, the university Hill pumps neighborhood, was planned as a full community with office parks, high rise apartments, state government buildings, schools, churches and a dedicated shopping center, Hilldale Mall.
 
16:16
This is the part we just have to admire, because we can't go back and plan other mid-century neighborhoods like this, this. This is one of those things that has to be baked in. It's something I struggle with as an architect who works, particularly now in residential remodels, is there's a certain amount that you can never remodel into a house. You can't put a house in a better location. You can't, generally speaking, Site A house better in orientation to the sun or to the street or for privacy. You can put additions on it. You can reconfigure it. You can change the footprint of it to make it better than it was planned originally.
 
16:52
But there are some things that you can bake in for free, orienting, arranging to put your bedrooms or your social spaces, or your roof line, to face the sun or not, to face a private area in the backyard or not, putting your social areas closer to the street and your private areas closer to the backyard. Some of these things, if you do them in the first place, it costs you literally nothing, and if you want to come back and fix it later, it can be expensive or impossible. And that's kind of the same with urban planning. If you bake in the concept of mixed use development, of having a dedicated shopping center, of having multifamily homes as well as single family homes, you are so far ahead of the curve, that's I mean, that's why this neighborhood is a literal national landmark compared to all the other neighborhoods full of nice houses around it.
 
17:43
Now it is also a neighborhood full of extremely nice houses. There are repeat plans, but the rule was they could never be side by side with each other. No two neighboring lots were permitted to have identical houses. And there are a lot of architect designed and contractor designed spec homes in this area. The Parade of Homes in Madison organized inside of the Hill Farms University neighborhood on four separate occasions, four different years. Probably the most shiny name brand architect, fancy house you can look up is the so called Professor Walter and Mary Ellen Rudin house, named for its original owners, which was a Frank Lloyd Wright design. It was one of his Usonian houses that he originally intended to be a kit home, or a home that could be replicated over and over again in multiple places.
 
18:34
And honestly, you know what? You just have to go to the show notes page and check out some photographs of this house. And you tell me whether you think this is a house that was going to, just like, take off and everybody was going to be building these everywhere. Frank, my guy, no, it's gorgeous. It's stunning. I was lucky enough to get to take a tour of the inside of this house a couple of years ago on a right and like tour day in the summer, and unfortunately, I was not permitted to take any interior photos of the space, but I'll share a few of my outside snaps on the show notes page. It's stunning.
 
19:13
It's got double level spaces and this interesting arrangement of upstairs bedrooms that kind of open and close to each other with shutter like design and sliding panel walls, and it really stands out and connects gorgeously with its heavily oak treed property. But it's incredibly unusual and specific, and it really It cracks me up that he thought this was going to be a wildly successful sort of replicable house design. By the way, this house is also one more ridiculous self-own in his quest to tell everybody that he was not influenced by Japanese design, even on the Wisconsin history.org property records website, they describe it as being. Reflecting his ongoing interest in Japanese architecture.
 
20:02
And you can't not see it. The gridded glass walls look like a Shoji screen. It's got sliding panel walls. It's got folding bedroom walls that look like Japanese partition division. It just it. This house says, Hi, I've spent some time in Japan, and I was impressed by it, and I've come home and want to tell you all about it. I'll come back and talk some more about the other, less name brand architect designed homes and architecture examples in the area a little later in the episode. But I want to actually come back to this notion of a neighborhood planned as a mixed use area with a commercial center in it, that shopping mall.
 
20:41
Hilldale mall is still one of the most thriving business centers of Madison today, or I should say, maybe is, continuously and again, one of the most thriving building centers and commercial centers in Madison today, but it always has been. I did a lot of the research on this place for an article I wrote for Madison's local weekly newspaper the isthmus in 2019 I'll link to that article. I'm quoting myself in sections of this. I'll link to that article in the show notes page. But in it, I also did a bunch of research that didn't make it into the writing by actually just posting letters to some of the addresses of my favorite houses around town, letting the owners know that I thought their house was cool, and asking if I could talk to them for the article.
 
21:25
And I got some amazing conversations with a bunch of people, some of whom lived inside of the university Hill Farms neighborhood, some people who lived scattered around the west side. Many of them volunteered to me that Hilldale mall was part of their local geography. One said that she grew up in Madison, moved away, and then came back, but she remembers Hilldale Mall as the go to source for luxury shopping. Another remembered that her wedding China came from a store at Hilda. It used to be a place where people would walk inside. Nannies would go there. People who were had limited mobility would walk with their walkers. It used to be an indoor oriented mall, and it's recently been redeveloped to be flipped outward, but it's always been a distinct location in Madison, the place with the Boston store, the place with the Macy's now in Madison.
 
22:19
Again, this is sort of getting maybe bigger picture. But we also have two later developed so this mall was developed in the 50s. We had 260s era developed malls, East town with an E on the end, and west town with an E on the end. And I remember in my college days them feeling like your classic, successful shopping mall. They are today, pretty dead letters, the Sears going out of the both of them a couple of years ago was kind of a last nail in the coffin. But they are big, chunky spaces in the middle of a sea of parking lot that's often unfilled, and they really feel like a different concept of urban planning.
 
23:01
They are surrounded by neighborhoods that are much more housing developments, and then a little bit of urban development, a little bit of stores and strip malls along the major through street, and then the big mall full of anchor stores and little stores. But Hilldale mall was smaller, was snugger, was more integrated into its community, and this difference in city planning, I think, really reflects how it has remained successful over time. Madison, again, is a town without a lot of we don't have a major highway system that comes through. We've got the Beltline that runs around the outer edge of town, and a bunch of radiating streets that wind their way through the parks, through the rivers, through the lakes of Madison to get out to them.
 
23:47
And one such major thoroughfare is Midvale Avenue. My house is just a few blocks off Midvale, and Midvale takes you straight through from the heart of university Hill Farms directly out to the Beltline highway. That road only went through in, I think, the mid 1950s before that, Midvale was discontinuous from moderna to the now bike path, the former train line, until 1954 actually. So that's a fun fact for Madison, local people only. But these concepts, where the through streets go, how many of them there are, what they connect to are hugely influential on the success of the neighborhood of a commercial center, and they have a lot to do with the good thinking that went into university Hill Farms at the time it was done, and why it was listed as a historical place.
 
24:39
Later that, Hilldale mall then was surrounded by more spaces. The master plan for Hill Farms University, University Hill Farms includes 800 houses, but also apartments, a school, state office buildings in a collection a nursing home and a collection of. Small commercial buildings, which off the top of my head, dentists and doctors’ offices, a bank, the post office, a number of small offices that have, you know, little one off units for lawyers, therapists, PTs and sole practitioners in one unit. And the shopping center, which has recently been converted into an outdoor facing mall, and it's still thriving today. Hilldale has the Apple Store. The Whole Foods is a couple blocks away. Target is there. It's clearly been chosen as a place that people want to go to and that stores who want people to come to them locate themselves at. And that has to do with both being on one of our most major thoroughfares, university, heading east west from the Capitol, out of town and the cross street of Midvale, and just being located in the center of its own neighborhood, not just University Hill Farms, but the radio Park neighborhood that's adjacent to it, Shorewood, right across University and I certainly watershed down.
 
25:56
The grocery store I most often shop at is there when I need to run out for a few small things. I go to the Ace Hardware store that is there. I can walk to there if I want to. It's less than two miles. I run down to the UW Credit Union Bank if I need to do business during the middle of the day. I jog there on my lunch break and come on back. It's a 5k loop. This makes it a place people come to it makes it a place where people want to buy homes. These houses have staying power, because they are located by all these great city services. Now, they're also some great houses, because if I sort my camera roll by location, I've got nearly 1000 photos taken inside the boundary roads of the university Hill Farm Neighborhood.
 
26:36
And you know, there's that Frank Lloyd Wright house. But they are also just universally charming and well maintained by people who seem to appreciate their inherent mid-century style. These kinds of details are a little harder to reflect in audio format, in podcast format, but I will put a bunch of photos from my camera roll into the show notes page for this episode, and I want to just think about so this was the idea behind this neighborhood. It was planned for mixed use. It was planned to have employment, shopping, schools, even worship facilities, all within its area and parks, a lot of park space, a lot of green space.
 
27:16
How does it pan out today? Well, it's got a thriving, vital shopping mall. And I think if we compare it to the sort of categories of what makes a great place, I turn to the American Planning Association website for this, just to you know, I've got my own opinions, but they list a couple of qualities of what make a great neighborhood, that it has a livable, built environment, which includes walkable and bikeable with mixed use land patterns. Yes, we've got bike trails and bike lanes that go through this area. Is it in harmony with nature? Does it respond to the natural habitats and topography? Well, it certainly does. Built in the rolling hills of the west side, the houses go up and down the neighborhood feels incredibly activated. It's got a bunch of ancient oak trees on it, and it's very thoroughly wooded. Does it have a resilient economy? Well, yes, it does.
 
28:07
There's room for businesses to grow and thrive. There's a healthy mix of places where people can be in public, and the sort of semipublic spaces that you can go to hang out outside a coffee shop, park your car once and walk around to hit a post office, a Target store, a grocery store. We used to be able to go see a movie, and very unfortunately, the movie theater did not make it and has recently been redeveloped. That made me very sad, but generally speaking, yes, does it contain interwoven equity a range of housing types. This is one of the biggest flaws of mid-century neighborhoods.
 
28:47
Generally, they tend to be single family homes only, owner based homes only. And we do lose a lot of diversity and equity in our beautiful, particularly our most beautiful, mid-century neighborhoods. And one of the things that makes University Hill Farms amazing is that it has spaces with multi-unit housing. It has a bunch of duplexes actually lining, you know, lining the outside of the neighborhood. So that's a little bit unequitable, but it's got rental spaces. It has a nursing home so you don't have to leave your community when you can no longer live in your space. And it's got access to health care systems, to schools, to public safety services.
 
29:31
Does it have healthy community? Does it feel environmentally healthy? Does it provide support for greenways, outdoor fitness, bike lanes, trails. Yes, in fact, it was really fun to see Madison go ahead and put in bus lane dedicated spots with pickup and drop off for our new BRT system. I'm really thrilled about this and designate specific bike lanes, although in our Madison winter. I do tend to see the drivers driving wherever they want to as the lines fade out under the pack snow. We've had a recent melt, so we're back to making our bike lanes visible again, and I'm seeing people out biking on them. Does it provide residents with access to healthy, fresh foods? Why? Yes, there's a local farmer's market. Does it engage in responsible regionalism? Does the neighborhood provide residents with access to regional destinations like employment opportunities, services and recreational amenities. Yes, and I wish it could do more.
 
30:29
So unfortunately, during the last state administration, a decision was made to move a bunch of the state office buildings out of the area. I was really sad to see the old state office building that used to have the DMV located in it demolished. And I'll put a couple of pictures of what it used to look like on the show notes page. My God, it was such a gorgeous okay, I'm sure the inside of it was like regular old timey office building. I don't remember waiting in the waiting in the waiting room at the DMV to be particularly a lovely experience, but it had this amazing drive up awning with a ripple wave pattern that I don't even know what kind of concrete shell construction was used to make that it was stunning.
 
31:12
And I went over there and trespassed on the demolition site a couple of days to get some pictures of it just before it was taken down. That's mid-century tragedy, in my opinion, but in general, I feel like we have so many good lessons to take from what has made University Hill Farm strong and what is keeping it strong and we can advocate. There are always opportunities for infill development. There are always opportunities for us to go into our state and local government organizations and advocate for more YIMBY development. YIMBY Being Y, I, M, B, Y, yes in my neighborhood, yes in my backyard, to add density and mixed used housing and advocate and support it, because that only makes our neighborhoods richer. It only makes our mid-century homes more valuable. More gives them more staying power.
 
32:10
It gives us the ability to live close to a diverse range of neighborhoods, and perhaps to stay in the neighborhood ourselves when they no longer want to be in a single family house and taking care of it. This is, I think, one of the best and most important things we can do as mid-century homeowners is to look for ways to make our areas more like the university Hill Farms neighborhood and to bring more of the conceptual diversity, as well as just making our individual homes more beautiful, more specific, more personalized, but to make our areas and our neighborhoods and our communities as strong as they can be as well. I'm curious what your thoughts are on mixed use in your mid-century neighborhoods, on the nature of your mid-century neighborhood itself.
 
32:56
Does it feel like it's well connected to its surrounding community? Does it feel like it's a place that gives you almost everything you need. Could you spend a day, maybe a day, where you don't go to work only in your own neighborhood? And if not, what's the missing element? What are the missing pieces? Is there any way to envision making changes to that we have so much less control over our neighborhoods than we do over our own homes, but as homeowners, we still have the ability to advocate for and recommend and support, both at a city council meeting and also just chatting with neighbors over the fence line.
 
33:32
What could be done to make our neighborhoods and our communities stronger. Ultimately, we are so lucky to be living in these great houses, in usually pretty great neighborhoods, and finding more ways to increase our density, to share that good fortune with more people, is something we all might want to do if there are other topics that you're curious about, in terms of urban planning, of ADUs, For example, of mixed use development of mid-century, nonresidential history that you'd love for me to talk I would love to talk about. I'd love to know what those are, because I'm always looking for more topics to ramble about on the podcast.
 
34:12
So shoot me an email. You can always find me at della at midmod-midwest.com, or you can find me on Instagram @midmod-midwest, send a message and let me know what's on your mind, about communities, about neighborhoods, about what you wish for your own and what you've seen done well there or elsewhere, and thanks for going down this little rabbit hole. Definitely head over to the show notes page to check out pictures of the neighborhood as a whole, the area as a whole, and specifically a whole range of really, really cute mid-century buildings from my own camera roll, plus some information on the area as part of the National Register of Historic Places.
 
34:52
You can find that at midmod-midwest/2302 and next week, stay tuned. I'm going to be chatting with Adam Stevens, a. Out the history of mid-century developments, and specifically, I'm just going to tease you right now about faux mansard houses. Do you love them? Do you hate them? Next week's episode might change your mind. Okay, see you then.