3169 Washington Boulevard

Year Built: 1910

Architectural Style: Queen Anne

- Key Features:

• Tower

• Asymmetrical Facade

• Decorative Details

One only a handful of Queen Anne homes in Meridian Park, this house was finally restored in 2015 after years of neglect. It’s the only house in the neighborhood with a turret and is more typical of homes one would find in Indy’s Herron-Morton neighborhood. What’s particularly special is you’ll notice the widow’s walk. Typically, found on 19th-century North American coastal houses. A popular romantic myth holds that the platform was used to observe vessels at sea. The name is said to come from the wives of mariners who watch for their spouses' return, often in vain as the ocean took the lives of the mariners, leaving the women widows. However, there is little or no evidence that widow's walks were intended or regularly used to observe shipping. Widow's walks are in fact a standard decorative feature of Italianate architecture, which was very popular during the height of the Age of Sail in many North American coastal communities.

The Queen Anne style was widely used in Indiana from about 1880 to 1910. If one feature is characteristic of the Queen Anne style, it is variety. Queen Anne homes often feature an irregular silhouette with front facing gables and large open porches. Roofs are steeply pitched hip types with irregularly placed gables. It was not uncommon for an architect to combine patterned wood shingles, clapboards, half-timbering, and stucco on one building. Although often associated with large homes, carpenters built thousands of small standardized Queen Anne cottages in Indiana during this period.