Muncie Sesquicentennial:1925 City Hall

 

The city of Muncie, Indiana, celebrates its sesquicentennial this year and the Drawings + Documents Archive is participating in an exhibit opening soon in Ball State University Libraries' Bracken Library. We will also devote much of the blog in the next few months to exploring the city's architectural heritage.

In 1874, Muncie built a brick structure for the city offices, such as mayor's office, city jail, jailer's residence, fireman's hall, courtroom, and city clerk's office. This building quickly proved inadequate after the explosive growth experienced during the area's gas boom. It was razed in 1924 for the building you see in these photographs. Above is a construction photograph of the 1925 Muncie City Hall that stood at 401 E. Jackson Street. It was designed by local architects Charles Houck and Smenner, whose firm was called Houck and Smenner. Other notable buildings by the firm include Tempel Beth-El (1922), Grace Maring Library (1929), McKinley Junior High School (1938), and the William H. Ball residence (ca. 1940).

Muncie City Hall was built in an Italian Renaissance Revival style with classical details. The facade was adorned with Greek Doric columns and broken pediments featuring urns. The building was made of light beige brick and trimmed in terra-cotta. The entrances, two-story pilasters, entablature, cornice, decorative urns, and corner eagles were all beige terra-cotta to match the brick.Total construction costs were $185,000.

While the exterior received few changes over the years, the interior experienced many damaging alterations in its lifetime. By the 1980s, city officials had found the historic building inadequate for their needs and the building was torn down in 1993.

Images: Muncie City Hall photographs, ca. 1925. DOC-87.010. Documentation Collection, Drawings + Documents Archive, Ball State University.

Historic Muncie Students Shoot Architectural Drawings for Immersive Learning Project

Last week the Drawings + Documents Archive welcomed back film and historic preservation students in Prof. Chris Flook's Historic Muncie: Preserving Middletown's Neighborhoods Immersive Learning class. Offered for the first time last year, students created a website to chronicle their discoveries as well as a documentary film Stories and Legends: Historic Preservation in Muncie, Indiana that was just shown at this year's Heartland Film festival in Indianapolis.

The research and film project has been garnering much praise for the students' work and it has just been announced that the group will be awarded the Governor's Award for the Preservation of Historic Places, presented by the Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, Indiana Division of Natural Resources. We're thrilled to see the students and faculty rewarded for their hard work and proud to be an on-campus contributer to the project.

This year's class focused their research on Beech Grove Cemetery and the Old West End neighborhood of Muncie. They spent the earlier part of the semester researching our collections of original drawings and Historic American Building Survey (HABS) drawings, and returned Friday to film the drawings and drawing tools for use in their upcoming documentary.

Both the drawings and the tools you see in the photograph, above, are from our extensive Kibele & Garrard Collection. Prominent gas-boom era architects Cuno Kibele (1866-1927) and Carl W. Garrard (1889-1981) established the firm in downtown Muncie and built many of the town's extraordinary structures, including Ball Gymnasium, Masonic Temple (now Cornerstone Center for the Arts), and Ball Memorial Hospital (now IU Hospital). The collection is rather unusual for its large amount of historic drawing implements, such as pencils, watercolor sets, technical tools, papers, eraser shields, and measuring tools dating from the early 1900s.

Image: Historic Muncie students filming in the Archives, October 26, 2012, photo by Carol Street.