“…Miss Anna Topp, who lives on the North Side, has to her credit the building of a half hundred houses in Indianapolis! That is quite a record—even for the most rabid ‘real estate’ of the male persuasion. Miss Topp’s houses have not been of the cheaper kind, either, but most of them pretentious and always artistic. In the spring of 1864, Frederick Topp, Miss Topp’s father, acquired a tract of land on North Illinois street which for years he used as a garden farm. The growth of the city and the platting of the ground north of his made it necessary for him to fall into line and cut up his garden into lots. That was in 1892. The panic of 1893 came on and for a time the lots did not sell well. Then a few years later, in 1897, Miss Topp’s brother Frederick Topp Jr., died and it fell to her to be her father’s assistant. In 1902, to facilitate the sale of lots, she began house building, and has been engaged in this occupation ever since. There is not another woman in Indianapolis, if indeed , in the state of Indiana, who has built as many houses as has Miss Topp. Her houses, if picked up and bunched in a country place, would make a village of no small proportions, and one that would be conspicuous for the beauty of its architecture. As it is, they are bunched between Thirty-first and Thirty-second streets, with Illinois Street on the east and Senate Avenue on the west, and form an attractive section of that portion of Indianapolis.
Miss Topp has her fifty-first house well under way and has just begun the fifty-second.”
This home at 3175 N. Senate Avenue looks like the one on the right in the newspaper clipping.
Photos below are the parking lots spanning that block of Illinois today on the west side –Anna Topp’s many houses long-since razed.
