You are invited to come to Green Acres and take a walk through time.
You might, for instance, start on the neighborhood’s western boundary on Union or Jefferson Street and head east. Through the architecture alone, you will find yourself walking through the 1920s, 30s and 40s and will experience history developing into the 1960s. You will sense the importance of the interplay between Bloomington and Indiana University then and now—a complex relationship embodied by the students, faculty, and staff who have lived and still live in the area. 

As you explore the area in space and time, you might wish to keep in mind, regardless of your own political leanings, the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt from the Economic Bill of Rights (1944), also known as the Second Bill of Rights: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” Indeed, you might ponder how F.D.R. went on to maintain that an important aspect of achieving such security and independence for all of us, regardless of station, race, or creed, is to have the right to a good education and the right to a decent home. In that document, and here in this physical space in Bloomington, you can sense the optimism of a nation that has just won a monumental war and sees nothing but hope for the future. 

The bungalows, small American houses, modest cottages, and compact ranches built during that time and still standing today all speak to the relationship between education and home-ownership, to the sanguine expectation that things will keep getting better for us all. 

From the early postwar years of Harry Truman, through the economic growth of Eisenhower’s 1950s, up through the dreams of Kennedy’s New Frontier, these houses bear witness to the priority of fulfilling the need for affordable and efficient housing for the working class—housing “with dignity,” as the Federal Housing Administration would put it as a requirement. 

As you walk, you will see how this dream shifts and changes as you begin to encounter houses that reflect architectural styles that distance themselves from those constructed under a crisis of a shortage of housing (and thus mark the need for strict efficiency and affordability in the 1940s), coming upon domiciles that slowly begin to show a sense of growth during a time of economic stability. You will see, in the very materiality of Green Acres, how various aspects of the GI Bill and FHA-insured mortgages adapted to different economic situations. You will see, in short, a time capsule of mid-twentieth century American ideals. 

Be prepared, though, to have that euphoria and optimism sadly questioned, as you learn that minorities were not originally allowed to participate in reaping the full benefits of those policies and that hope, and therefore the houses in this beautiful neighborhood have been primarily owned by white people. To be sure, you might legitimately become not only saddened but outraged as you make your way to the Hillsdale addition in the southeast area of the neighborhood, knowing that the deed to that addition from 1947 read: “The ownership and occupancy of lots or buildings for this addition are forever restricted to members of the white race, and no person except for a member of the white race shall acquire title to a lot, lots, or parts of lots, or buildings in this addition.” 

Yet still you will encounter some of history’s most profound workings—the push and pull of battling ideologies—when you further come to learn that the previous owner of the subdivision, Lester Smith, was an historian who was passionate about publishing and keeping records of the oral history of the Underground Railroad in Monroe County. Indeed, at the end of your journey, you will not only have walked through time, but you will have ridden a small roller coaster of emotions. Such wide-ranging emotions are felt whenever one reads history with a critical eye, but in Green Acres all of this can be experienced directly through the architecture and the land. 

In Green Acres, the complexities of history on a local as well as national scale are made manifest in a living time capsule that, rather than being buried somewhere to be dug up by a future generation, is, here and now, living, breathing, changing, and bearing witness to who we are, who we have been, and who we aspire to be.

In Green Acres, the complexities of history on a local as well as national scale are made manifest in a living time capsule that, rather than being buried somewhere to be dug up by a future generation, is, here and now, living, breathing, changing, and bearing witness to who we are, who we have been, and who we aspire to be.

Read more about Green Acres history here.