The Reitz Hill home of Lisa and Tom Huck at 2726 Marion Ave.

When Jeff and Katie Lyons first considered buying the red brick bungalow at 23 Dreier Blvd., atop the West Side promontory overlooking Reitz High School, the Ohio River and Evansville's skyline, they approached some neighbors sitting on their porch, taking in the view .

BOB GWALTNEY / Courier & Press The woodwork in the home of Lisa and Tom Huck is one of the many features of their Reitz Hill home that is on this year's Evansville Philharmonic Guild's "Homes of Note" tour.

"What's it like living up here?" Jeff Lyons asked.

"There's a certain energy on Reitz Hill," their soon-to-be neighbor said.

"With the football games and the river, there's always something going on. There's an energy up here you won't find anyplace else in town."

"I think she was right," says Lyons.

The neighborhood will get a fresh source of energy Saturday, as the Lyons and five other families living on Reitz Hill open their homes to visitors in "Harmony on the Hill," the Evansville Philharmonic Guild's 2008 "Homes of Note" tour.

Even without hundreds of visitors moving from house to house or without a football game filling the street with cars and the air with crowd noise or the annual Fourth of July neighborhood block party Reitz Hill hosts each year, the neighborhood hums with the quiet energy of community.

"It's a true neighborhood," says Shannon Dierlam, who lives with her husband, Randy, down the street from the Lyons at 103 Dreier Blvd., in another home on Sunday's tour.

"People still sit out on their front porches, neighbors still come out and borrow things, and they help each other out. It's a community, it truly is."

Part of that sense of community comes from history. The Dierlams' Arts & Crafts-style two-story bungalow was built in 1920, just a few years before the Lyons' home, back when the subdivision, developed on the former Coal Mine Hill, was known as Forest Hills.

It didn't take long for the whole area to become known as Reitz Hill, taking its identity from the high school that opened in 1918.

Many Reitz Hill residents share personal history with the school and the hill.

Jeff Lyons, chief meteorologist for WFIE-NBC14, graduated from Reitz, his father taught there, and his grandparents lived just around the corner on Marion Street.

He remembers weekly visits with his grandparents, which usually included a walk up the hill and the view of the school and the city below.

"Even now, when I walk up the street I'll think of that" says Lyons.

Memories fill the Lyons' home, as well, in framed family photographs and documents and furniture and decorative items handed down.

Shannon Dierlam went to Central High School, but her husband is a Reitz graduate, as are their sons, who both live within blocks of their parents. Before moving out, both lived in an upstairs apartment the Dierlams now use as large family room.

Like the first floor, the upstairs has its own porch with a spectacular view of Reitz Hill, the Ohio River and Evansville's Downtown. Sometimes she takes it all in from the wicker swing on the front porch, says Dierlam, but she spends a lot of time in a hammock swing hung from a tree in the high front yard.

Lyons never tires of the view from his home. "Just seeing the sun come up everyday over the river is a real treat," he says. "I used to ride my bike to see these things — now I can sit and eat my cereal and see the same thing. It really makes you feel differently about the West side and the city."

Down at 2726 Marion Ave., Tom and Lisa Huck can't see the high school, but those on Sunday's tour will be able to see another section of the river from a family room in a remodeled sun room in the back of their home, built in 1934.

The real eye-catcher in the Hucks' bungalow, however, is the recently uncovered and refinished inlaid wooden flooring, done in an intricate pattern of white oak, red oak, walnut and cherry.

Even that project reflects the sense of community on Reitz Hill, notes Lisa Huck, who represents the third generation in her family to graduate from Reitz High School.

Reitz home football games are always party nights for the Hucks. When friends at one of the Friday gatherings learned the Hucks planned to take up the carpet the next day, they insisted on attacking it that night, moving furniture, pulling up the rugs, says Huck.

Once they saw what had been hiding under the carpeting, "they were just amazed," recalls Huck. "Nobody had seen floors like that before.

"Over the next couple of weeks (as worker refinished the floors), they kept coming back to see how it was coming."

The inlaid floors are part of the neighborhood's history, as well. An uncle to the bride gave the floors as a wedding present to the couple for whom the house was built, explained Huck.

The original owners aren't around to view the restored flooring, she adds, "but I'm going to invite their niece over to see it."