Middlesex Plat Historic District

About this property

The Middlesex Plat Historic District is located in Des Moines, Iowa, United States. It was an upper-middle-class neighborhood of two-story square houses and bungalows that were built from 1910 to 1923. The district has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2000. It is part of The Bungalow and Square House--Des Moines Residential Growth and Development MPS. The Middlesex Plat is an infill area to the east of the western developments that had been built in the late 19th and early 20th century. The reason this plat had not been developed earlier was a lack of infrastructure. The Ingersoll Run sewer line was completed into northwest Des Moines in 1907. The closest streetcar line was along University Avenue, which was a distance to the north, and other the lines in the Drake and Sherman Hill neighborhoods ended to the east of this area. They were extended at the time of the sewer lines. Another factor was that the property was owned by J. Callanan who kept the property off the real estate market in the late 19th century. Most of the houses in the district were built from 1910 to 1923. Those who promoted the development of the area were able to control it in order to maintain their promises to those who bought lots and the builders. Realtor Winner and Kauffman and house builders Henry Tillia and Charles Barnes were influential in the development of the area. The Middlesex Plat Historic District is largely composed of square houses and bungalows with a mixture of a variety of subtypes. Of the 293 properties in the district 187 are houses, of which only nine are not contributing because they were built more recently or substantially altered. There are also 106 detached garages in the district, of which 62 are contributing properties. The square houses outnumber the bungalows, and there are also 18 other houses that were built in another architectural style. Most of the square house plans have a front gabled roofs with a full-width front porch. Six of them were built before 1906 with most of them built between 1910-1911 and then 1914–1916. Three more houses were built in this style between 1917 and 1918, with the last being built in 1923. The second largest subtype has a side-gabled roof. The peak year for construction of this type was 1910 when seven were built. Otherwise, two to three houses were started each year between 1906 and 1919. The last four houses in this subtype were built between 1919 and 1925. There were only nine American foursquare houses with a hip roof built in the district. All but two were built before 1911. The other two were built in 1916.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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