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SOUTH BEND & SAINT JOSEPH COUNTY HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMISSION 235-9798 MEMORANDUM Wednesday, September 15, 2004 TO: HPC Members FROM: Karen R. Hammond -Nash RE: Yard Lights in Historic Districts; City Yard Light Program At the August HPC meeting, John Oxian raised the matter of the City of South Bend yard Light program, and requested a Memorandum to be presented at this September meeting, discussing the appropriateness of such yard lights in South Bend's historic districts. As you know, the period of historic significance in most districts runs from the 1880s at the earliest, to the late 1920s at the latest. This forty -year period was both the earliest, and the largest, period of residential building and new development in South Bend's history. Many of the buildings that remain from that period were so well designed and constructed, that they have continued in uninterrupted use, and where they form stable neighborhoods with a coherent and consistent style and sense of place, a desire to maintain the function and design is usually what has motivated the neighborhood associations to seek historic district status. Our research has been unable to locate any evidence of the use of yard lights in South Bend during the period of historic significance for any of our historic districts. Before and at the turn of the last century, such things as electric yard lights, for ordinary urban or suburban use, were of course unheard of. In the 1920s, electric lighting for urban use was considered the latest, greatest thing, and the Cutter company, in South Bend, was one of the country's most prominent street light manufacturers. We have, in our office, several pages and sections from the Cutter catalogues, and none of them makes any reference to yard lights. The lights available at the period were generally limited to public lighting for streets and sidewalks, and to house -mounted lights for doorways, steps, entries, and porches. The streetlights ranged in height from 12 to 20 feet tall, depending upon location. None were designed to shine right at eye -level, like contemporary yard lights. Additionally, Frank J. Scott's Suburban Home Grounds, and his later works, contain countless designs for landscaping city lots, with never any mention of a yard light. While the advertisements in the twenties speak glowingly (no pun intended) of the expectation that public lighting would eliminate all urban crime, and make the nighttime as safe as the day, the police reports from that period and this do not bear out that promise. On the contrary, police reports from the teens, twenties, and thirties commonly report that the police were alerted to a crime in process by seeing lights moving in areas that should be dark, especially around houses. More recently, schools in rural Texas experimented with all kinds of bright and pervasive lighting in an effort to combat a rash of vandalism that continued over many months. The vandalism