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With visitors in town and showing off the Twin Cities in order, it’s always a safe bet to drive down White Place. Stretching four blocks from Emerson to Empire streets on Bloomington’s near northeast side, few if any of the city’s streetscapes offer a more attractive view. With out-of-town guests craning their necks as the car rumbles slowly down the brick street, one is likely hear the refrain, “Why can’t we make our newer neighborhoods as lovely as this?”
Dating back more than a century, White Place (the subdivision also includes the east side of Clinton Boulevard) is recognized as one of the city’s first developments with a distinct suburban feel.
It’s difficult for present-day residents to appreciate how small— geographically speaking —Bloomington was in the late 1800s. Before it became a neighborhood of physicians, ministers, grain dealers and college professors, the area that includes White Place was a no-man’s land between the city of Bloomington and the sleepy college town to the north. The Pantagraph once described this stretch of ground situated west of the Illinois Central Railroad (today’s Constitution Trail) as presenting “an unsightly appearance, a part being grown up to weeds and the remainder a swamp hole.”
The White in White Place comes from its developer, Samuel R. White. Arriving in Bloomington in 1870, White enjoyed success in a variety of related occupations, ranging from building contractor to insurance appraiser. He patterned his development after similar neighborhoods (or residential “places”) popular in St. Louis and other cities. These proto-suburban developments typically included deed restrictions, initial work by a single architect, and a decorative gate at the entrance.
Most White Place lots run about 50 feet wide and 160 feet deep, meaning the substantial two-story homes stand shoulder-to-shoulder, presenting an aesthetically pleasing “wall” of various architectural styles, housing materials and colors. For added effect, twenty-five-foot-wide landscaped boulevards run down the center of both White Place and Clinton Boulevard.
Perhaps the best known structure in all White Place is the gate at the street’s south end. Designed by Bloomington architect Paul O. Moratz, the elaborate entryway of ashlar-faced stone once included three sets of wrought iron gates (see accompanying image). Moratz also served as the architect for 27 White Place, the first house built in the subdivision. Dating to 1899, this Queen Anne-style residence is known for its distinctive Romanesque rock-faced piers.
Of the development’s earliest residences, the most expensive was 22 White Place, built for a cool $10,000 (or around a quarter of a million dollars now, adjusted for inflation). White’s son-in-law and daughter, Elizabeth, lived there, and around 1904 they were joined by Samuel White and his wife, Minerva. The University Street entrance to the house includes an attractive doorway topped by a cut-stone lintel with “S.R. White” etched in the transom window.
White Place also boasted its very own heating plant, located across Emerson Street. Shut down for good before the winter of 1949, residents had to turn to the city to heat their homes. The plant’s 110-foot-high smokestack is long gone, but the rectangular concrete block building remains, though six decades removed from its intended purpose. The two-story (and still-standing) frame house to the immediate west served as the residence for the heating plant’s caretaker.
Although White Place was slow to grow, the opening of the heating plant helped spur a mid-1910s building boom. Many of the mixed Colonial, Craftsman and Revival-style residences from this period came from stock plans often printed and sold by mail order architectural companies.
Long after White’s death, bourbon-fueled residents removed the “S” of the entryway gate, making the statement (or so the story goes) that the developer could no longer claim possession of the street. Thus “Whites Place” (the sign always lacked the necessary possessive) became simply White Place, and even today longtime residents remain confused over what to call the boulevard.
By the late 1960s, early 1970s, White Place had lost some of its luster. Fortunately, the formation of a neighborhood association in 1974 helped spark the development’s renewal. The boulevard was cleaned up, for example, and the arched sign over the gate repainted and repaired (it was also placed five feet higher on its piers to prevent vehicles, mainly delivery trucks, from smacking into it). And the trend of converting the dignified homes into apartments was put to an end with an overdue revision in the zoning code.
Today, White Place is back to its rightful place as one of the premier residential districts in the Twin Cities.
