Bartlett Real Estate Office

The Bartlett building is a one-story, masonry building with tan brick walls. The main entrance features an arch, which is the base to a two-story tower. It has a poured concrete foundation. The tower has iron railings and green wood trim. The main section has a flat roof with a rubber membrane, masked by a hipped skirt roofs on the parapets. This skirt roof is covered in green terra-cotta tile. The tower has a pyramidal hip roof covered in same green tile. It faces east onton Broadway, the main north-south road in the town. The Southshore, Chicago and South Bend Railway station is, leading from the interurban station to the Lake Michigan beach. It is a tripartite composition of two large storefront bays, flanking the arched central entrance tower. The sand-colored brick walls were laid with a variety of patterns: there is a soldier course around the foundation and above all storefront openings, and header courses for storefront sills (photo 3). At the front corners of the building, two large square piers extend into the parapet and interrupt the tiled roofs. These have slightly recessed vertical panels with basketweave brickwork – three vertical bricks alternating with three horizontal. The large, two pane plate glass storefront windows themselves were installed in 1995, to replicate the original configuration.[2]

Originally, the interior was divided into two functions: a front sales office room consisting of one open space, and a rear section with living quarters for a salesman / caretaker. The two front doors led one into the sales room. There was a line of load bearing posts running down the center of the room. In the 1980s, the city had contractors divide the room, using the posts to define two separate rooms, yet the posts remain visible in the drywall. A door connects the two rooms toward the west end. The north side of the front area is now the office of the clerk-treasurer. A small area to the west of the north room was further divided off to provide a bathroom and storage space. The south side room remains largely open and is used as the meeting room for the town council (photo 6). The wood floors throughout are now covered in carpeting, however, the pressed metal ceiling remains exposed in all but the marshal's office. Schoolhouse style lights are not original but are similar to those once used in the building. There are also contemporary ceiling fans in each room. In the meeting room, an original arched vertical car-sided door remains on back wall. It led to a hallway of the caretaker's quarters. The marshal's office occupies most of the former caretaker's office now. Though ceilings were lowered with a suspended tile system in the marshal's office, the original Murphy bed from the building's caretaker days remains in place.[2]

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• Stodola, Barbara. "Carl O. Reed and the Wide-Awake World of Beverly Shores," The Beacher, vol. 19, no. 30, July 31, 2003, pp. 1–5.
• Taylor, Robert Jr., et al. Indiana: A New Historical Guide. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1989.