history

  • the Greene & Greene-ing of America

    This past week’s Arroyo Monthly, a free publication mailed mostly to homeowners in Pasadena, California, includes the following article by Michael Cervin on the increased popularity of Greene & Greene not just in Southern California but nationwide:

    Architects Charles and Henry Greene are known around the world for
    their striking Arts and Crafts homes, which so thoroughly punctuate the
    Southern California landscape. It’s perhaps ironic then that the late
    Henry Greene’s own home, the one he initially built for his
    mother-in-law, was razed in 1968 and is now a parking structure.
    Charles Greene’s home on Arroyo Terrace still stands. Thus fared the
    personal residences of the architects whose names are more closely
    associated with Pasadena than those of any of their peers. The brothers
    built 75 structures in the Crown City during their career, mainly
    custom residences, of which nearly 40 are still standing.

    “Other architects have enjoyed more famous careers,” noted Edward
    Bosley, James N. Gamble Director of the Gamble House. “Others have
    produced more buildings. Still others have earned more notoriety for
    progressive designs that advanced the discipline of architecture. But
    no other architects have left us with a more glowing legacy of beauty,
    craft, livability and spirit than Charles and Henry Greene.”

    British architecture critic Reyner Banham, quoted in a book by
    former Gamble House curator Randell Makinson, said that Greene &
    Greene residences looked completely in their element in Southern
    California, “and especially so in Pasadena – that it’s often difficult
    to conceive of them as part of any nationwide, let alone worldwide,
    movement. They seem so specific to that Arroyo Culture of which they
    are the chief ornaments and the true treasure-houses.”

    Though the term “bungalow” is associated with the Greenes, most of
    their best-known homes are not true bungalows, which were conceived in
    India as modest one-story structures. Certainly the Greenes started out
    designing homes for the common man. The Architectural Record referred
    to their work in a 1906 essay: “The houses are largely successful
    because they so frankly meet economic, domestic and practical
    conditions. Their chief characteristics are their lowness, big
    overhanging roofs, their shingled walls and the absence of
    architectural ornament.”

    read the full article on the Arroyo Monthly site

  • please help: Gastonia historic district threatened

    Residents of Gastonia, North Carolina – a beautiful community just a few miles north of the NC/SC border, just west of Charlotte and not far from Arts & Crafts center Asheville – are very scared that their showcase historic district is in immediate danger of being partially demolished and almost totally homogenized by real estate developers:

    I live in a historic home, in a historic district, adjacent to a historic downtown. While many homes and buildings are in disrepair, some to the point of severe deterioration, I have always, and will always feel that they are worth saving. And I need HELP!

    Gastonia’s City Council has recently voted to demolish 3 city-owned buildings on our Historic Main Street, including a theatre that was built around the turn of the century and an old Woolworth’s, even though there were multiple offers to purchase and rehab them. Contrary to what the City Manager, Mayor and Coucilmembers say, there are multiple buildings that have just been renovated, or are about to be.  These buildings are right in the middle of the block, sharing walls with buildings that are currently under rehab!  Our downtown is on the National Register, and yet none of the preservation societies are able to help.  If any one knows of any way to help stop this travesty, please post here!

    Here are the links to relevant articles!  Our small paper is doing a great job of reporting this! 1 2 3 4 5

  • Sears kit homes in Minneapolis

    Kim Palmer had a good article on Sears kit homes in the Star Tribute earlier this month. Read the entire article on the Star Tribute site.

    When Paul Kirkman first laid eyes on the house he bought last year, he
    knew it was a rare find: a 1917 Arts & Crafts bungalow with all its
    original woodwork and charm intact.

    The
    house, in Minneapolis’ Bryn Mawr neighborhood, had all the features
    that bungalow fans covet: dark built-ins, wainscoting and moulding,
    coffered box-beam ceilings and even an Inglenook fireplace.

    "I
    said, ‘This is perfect — the one,’" recalled Kirkman, who had been
    searching for just such a home for seven months. "I like bungalows, and
    in my mind, this hits the pinnacle of that kind of architecture. The
    living room is about as original as you can get."

    But Kirkman’s
    bungalow is something even rarer: a Sears kit house, one of about
    75,000 sold by mail order between 1915 and 1940.

    There were 370
    models, representing many styles, but Kirkman’s house, the "Ashmore,"
    is one of the least common, with only a handful of known surviving
    examples, according to Rosemary Thornton, author of "The Houses That
    Sears Built."

    Advertised as "the Aristocrat of Bungalows," the
    Ashmore was among the largest (2,800 square feet) and most elaborate of
    the Sears kit homes. "It’s a beauty, with a lot of nice features,"
    Thornton said.

    And it definitely defies any stereotype that
    mail-order homes are low-rent, said Tim Counts, president of the Twin
    Cities Bungalow Club. "Some people think of kit homes as ricky-ticky,
    slap-it-together, but often they are very high-end homes, and that one
    is a perfect example."

  • Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kentuck Knob (1954), Ohiopyle PA

    This wonderful FLW property – built in the "deluxe" Usonian style on a beautiful 80-acre lot – is just a few miles from Fallingwater. Along with the extensive sculpture garden, it is open for public tours.

    The House on Kentuck Knob was designed in 1954 and completed in 1956 for I. N. and Bernardine Hagan, friends of the Kaufmans, for whom Wright built Fallingwater. The home, build of tidewater cypress, glass and 800 tons of local sandstone – and a very striking copper roof – is situated in western Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands, and includes a gorgeous view of the Youghiogheny River gorge and the surrounding hills.

    The Hagans lived in the house for 30 years, and sold it to Baron Peter Palumbo, an English developer, art collector and architecture conservationist, in 1986.

    • slideshow of images from Kentuck Knob and its sculpture garden, including a few of Fallingwater

    Thanks to Douglas Sanders’ wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright Newsblog for reminding us of this very pretty and unique home!

  • Brea’s Bungalows

    Richard Dodd’s May 19 article in the Orange County Register on Brea, California’s Union Oil Co. neighborhood is a good one:

    The 1882 discovery of oil in shallow wells in Brea Canyon had a major influence in the history and economy of Orange County. Several small oil companies sprang up shortly afterward and in 1890, some of them merged to form Union Oil Co. of California.

    Many local communities faced a housing shortage for new workmen during the oil and land boom in the 1920s. Union Oil built 61 homes for their employees in the southwestern part of Brea. This area became known as the "Union Oil neighborhood."

    The bungalow period was in full swing at the time. As a result, most of the homes are California, Craftsman and Pueblo bungalows and other variations interspersed with a few
    provincial revivals.

    read the whole thing

  • Signature Style in the San Francisco Chronicle

    The San Francisco Chronicle, for its various failings as a source of unbaised and serious local reporting, has some of the best feature articles on architecture of any regional paper in the country. Especially worth reading are Dave Weinstein’s Signature Style columns on local architects and properties – often with a very strong Arts & Crafts bent. Here are several that most closely relate to Arts & Crafts homes and their builders in Northern California:

  • Los Gatos Historic Homes Tour

    Well, I missed it this year – the tour was two weeks ago – but Los Gatos’ annual Historic Homes Tour was a big success, raising money for both the Los Gatos Art and History museums.

    The $30 tour visited six homes in Los Gatos’ historic Glen Ridge neighborhood, which is jam-packed with pretty bungalows and cottages, most of them with interesting Craftsman details. Alastair Dallas of the Los Gatos Observer has a good article and several photographs of the tour; homes from the 2001 tour can be visited, online, through Shari Kaplan’s October 2001 article in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

    • 22 Glen Ridge Ave.: A two-story cottage-style house, built in 1904 for lawyer William F.
      Pierce and his family, will have the original architect’s drawings
      displayed in the library. It has two cutaway bay windows, a hipped roof
      with widow’s walk and a front-facing gable over its front porch. Used
      for years as a rental, the home has been returned to its original
      single-family status by its current owner, who tore down a 1908
      addition to build a new kitchen and bath in that space.
    • 133 Glen Ridge Ave.: Look carefully for the subtle decorative elements on the house built
      in 1909 by David Crummey, who started the Bean Spray Pump Co., maker of
      the first high-pressure pump for insecticides. (The company later
      evolved into San Jose’s Food Machinery Corp., a maker of farming
      equipment and, later, huge military vehicles.) Corner towers have
      hipped roofs, cantilevered on the front and sides with decorated braces
      below. A hipped center dormer has exposed rafters under the eaves.
      Stained glass can be seen in the top panes of the tower windows. And
      here’s where you can see the aforementioned quatrefoil windows. The
      house retains its original footprint, front facade and entry porch, but
      the insides have been updated – keeping to the period – by the
      current owners.
    • 219 Glen Ridge Ave.: More fun architectural details are on the cedar-shingled
      Craftsman-style house with its recessed porch and side-gable roof,
      built in 1907 for Frank A. Dixon, superintendent of the San Jose Fruit
      Packaging Co. Carved rafter "tails" show off the skills of a fine
      woodworker, and the stonework at the sidewalk is original. Inside, many
      period features remain, including built-in bookcases and dining room
      buffet, paneling in the dining room and coved ceilings. The current
      owners extended the rear of the house to remodel the kitchen and add a
      family room in the 1990s.
    • 19 Hernandez:The oldest house on the tour was built before 1891 and is known as
      the family home of "Judge" Fowler, although Thomas Fowler actually
      was a senator and may have even died before the family moved into the
      house. The Victorian Queen Anne-style house has cantilevered bay
      windows on the right front and side, a porch with turned columns and a
      central, front-facing gable. The current owner has remodeled in period
      style and added a second story for a master bedroom and bath in the
      early 2000s.
    • 119 Tait Ave.: The newest house on the tour was built in 1993 to replace a
      circa-1890 Victorian that was red-tagged and razed after it was knocked
      off its foundation during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It has
      typical Queen Anne-style features such as a bay window, wraparound
      porch with turned columns and hipped roof – all designed to allow the
      new construction to fit seamlessly into its neighborhood. The current
      owner purchased it in 1994.
    • 142 Tait Ave.: What’s called the "Rene Doolittle House" was built in 1923, likely
      by Doolittle himself. About 12 years ago, the second story was added,
      but the first story retains its original Craftsman features such as the
      stucco under the gables and braces and the exposed rafter tails.

  • Oakland’s Architectural Gems: From Victorian to Craftsman & Beyond

    Glendalesmall

    Valerie Garry of the Oakland Heritage Alliance was kind enough to write an introduction to Oakland’s architecture with a special emphasis on its great Arts & Crafts properties just for us. In addition, she’s included a number of images in addition to the Glendale house (pictured), all of which are available for view in a special Flickr album. Please forward additional photos of interesting Oakland buildings to us for inclusion in this set.

    The Oakland Heritage Alliance – a stalwart organization of grass-roots preservationists – celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2005 and what a quarter century it has been.  In 1980, seven people with an ambitious goal scraped together a $150 to get the organization rolling. Their goal: to stem the tide (at times a Tsunami) of urban renewal projects that were paving over, plowing under, and otherwise obliterating at an alarming rate some of Oakland’s precious historic architectural fabric. Whole blocks of Victorians had already been lost. Many of downtown Oakland’s handsome early 20th century commercial buildings were knocked down to make way for dreary paved expanses of parking lots. Even the masterpieces, such as Bernard Maybeck‘s magnificent Packard Showroom by the shores of Lake Merritt, were demolished.  Armed with a fierce determination to protect the precious historic, architectural and cultural legacy of Oakland, the small group began to throw their energy and time into preservation action.

    Oakland Heritage Alliance has now grown into an organization of close to a 1000 members. Although the battle to save irreplaceable old buildings continues, the organization has logged an impressive list of historically significant architecture, cultural assets, and unique green spaces, that it has helped save and restore. There is Oakland City Hall, a magnificent Beaux-Arts skyscraper that was nearly demolished because of damage it suffered during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The Fox Oakland Theater, with its exotic blend of Indian, Moorish, Medieval and Baghdadian styles, which one writer dubbed "one part Arab and three parts Hollywood hokum," narrowly escaped becoming a parking lot.

    One of Oakland’s most distinctive Art Deco buildings, the Floral Depot, with its brilliant cobalt blue and silver glazed terra cotta, was also almost demolished. Now completely restored to its lustrous beauty, it is about to become a stylish restaurant. OHA fought to save Old Merritt College, a rare surviving example of early 20th century California school architecture modeled on California missions, nearly razed to make way for a shopping center. The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The list goes on and on.

    Oakland has some of the most architecturally varied and distinctive residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Its architectural heritage includes Art Deco, Victorian, Beaux Arts, and period revivals (Italian Renaissance, Spanish Eclectic, and English cottage), Stick Eastlake and colonial revival. And in the gently rolling hills of Oakland are a seemingly infinite variety of Craftsman homes-charming, rustic, whimsical, modest and grand -many built to provide homes for San Franciscans who moved to the East Bay after the 1906 earthquake, or who sought a sunny summer place to escape the foggy city by the Bay.  There is the exotic Jesse Matteson house, or Sunset House, in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Built in 1905, one writer described it as a cross between a Japanese Bungalow and a Viking ship. There is Bernard Maybeck’s elegant and incomparable Guy Hyde Chick house (1913), which, remarkably, survived the 1991 Oakland Hills fire; there is Julia Morgan’s remarkable YWCA building in downtown Oakland; homes by John Hudson Thomas; and Storybook style homes with witch’s cap turrets by Carr Jones.

    A TAKE ON THE TEMESCAL

    On Sunday, October 15, the Oakland Heritage Alliance will present a house tour of homes in one of Oakland’s most vibrant and historic areas – the Temescal neighborhood. The tour will be from 1-5:30 p.m. Among the houses featured on the tour will be a 1903 Classic Revival house that incorporates a water tower and a c. 1900 house transformed into a mid-century modern house. A 1910 stucco bungalow on the tour features an unusual collection of antiques such as Chinese cinnabar, antique Chinese children’s hats, beaded handbags, Victorian lace dresses, black paper dolls, and 19th century ruby Bavarian glass. The tour will also include an 1880 two-story Italianate, as well as an Eastlake and Arts and Crafts bungalow, both undergoing extensive renovation.

    The house tour is self-guided and easy to walk. The starting point for the tour is in front of Acorn Kitchen and Bath, 4640 Telegraph Avenue. Proceeds from the tour benefit the Oakland Heritage Alliance. Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 the day of the tour, and $25 for OHA members and include a reception with refreshments. OHA is looking for volunteers to help with the tour and all volunteers will receive complimentary admission to the tour. Contact 510.763.9218 for information or to make reservations, email info@oaklandheritage.org, or visit www.oaklandheritage.org.

    Valerie Garry, MS Historic Preservation
    Vice President, Oakland Heritage Alliance

    for more information: Oakland Heritage Alliance is a non-profit membership organization that advocates the protection, preservation, and revitalization of Oakland’s architectural, historic, cultural and natural resources though education and action.

    For 2006 summer walking tour and fall house tour information, contact: Oakland Heritage Alliance: 446 17th Street, Suite 301 / Oakland, CA 94612, or send us email or call 510.763.9218.

  • Forest Hills Gardens: an American Planned Community

    Fhgyellowmap
    Situated on the edge of New York City’s borough of Queens, Forest Hills Gardens is probably the most successful – and best known – example of an English planned garden community in the United States. Originally built as a commuter suburb – even in 1915, just six years after its construction, it was less than 15 minutes from Manhattan’s Penn Station by rail – the community was originally planned and built by the Russell Sage Foundation and Cord-Meyer Development Co. beginning in 1909. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the father of landscape architecture and a great craftsman and technician in his own right, collaborated with architect Grosvenor Atterbury to make a community that worked both internally and as part of the world-class city they both realized New York would soon grow into.

    This thriving community still offers a lush, green and very much park-like escape for several thousand residents, and suggests solutions for our conflict between limiting sprawl and creating living, working, and above all livable communities. Forest Hills Gardens was home to many visionaries of the time, including Frederic Goudy, one of the foremost typeface and graphic designers of the age and an important figure in the American Arts & Crafts Movement. Goudy even published a monograph in 1915 detailing his own family’s many reasons for relocating to the community; unfortunately, the book has not been reprinted, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a copy today. Gustav Stickley’s own magazine, The Craftsman, also featured articles and drawings on the community in 1911.

    Susan Klaus has written a terrific book on Olmsted’s relationship to the community, focusing on the planning of the community and with many illustrations of its history to the present. It’s worth a read if you are interested in planned communities in general and how the Arts & Crafts Ideal can be applied to so much more than simply architectural design. Additional photographs of and articles on the community are available online.

  • Saving Bingham House

    The great Prairie architect George Maher‘s Bingham House, in Highland Park, Illinois, will likely not be standing this time next month if its new owners get their way. They originally applied for a demolition permit back in January 2006; their application was stayed by the local Preservation Commission via a six-month reprieve, which expires in a little over a week.

    The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois (LPCI) has prepared a PDF on the structure itself.

    Can anyone in Highland Park update us on the status of this property or the Preservation Committee’s action? Thanks to reader James Shewmaker for letting us know about the impending destruction of one of the area’s most striking and historicall important buildings!