A few weeks ago old Pa Pitt took a wintry walk on North Avenue (which used to be Fayette Street back when it did not run all the way through to North Avenue on the rest of the North Side). He took piles of pictures, and although he published four articles so far from that walk (one, two, three, four), there’s still quite a collection backed up waiting to be published. Thus this very long article, which is a smorgasbord of Victorian domestic architecture with a few other eras thrown in. Above, a pair of Italianate houses. They both preserve the tall windows typical of the high Italianate style; the one on the right still has (or has restored) its two-over-two panes.
We might call this style home-grown Second Empire.
A heavy Queen Anne house with a lot of wood on the porch.
A pair of very simple Italianate houses that use every cubic inch of their lots.
Just to remind us that Manchester isn’t all Victorian, here is a duplex from the early 1900s, when the neighborhood was becoming a little less desirable.
Little frame houses like this often turn out to be older than their grander neighbors.
A Queen Anne that crams as much picturesque detail as it can fit in a narrow façade.
Two late-twentieth-century houses built when the neighborhood began to revive. They fit well except for being set back too far from the sidewalk, and that may have been mandated by the zoning rules then in force.
This grand Romanesque mansion has a whole house history written by the late Carol Peterson (PDF). It was built in about 1890.
It is hard to guess the age of this house; it may be a Victorian Gothic house under layers of remodeling. Perhaps someone from the neighborhood can give us more information.
The revival of Manchester is incomplete. These two tiny houses from the early 1900s were part of a row, the rest of which has already vanished. These houses, one of which has already burned out, will follow their siblings soon.
This pair of houses is in the simple and solid style of the Greek Revival, but with a gingerbready porch apparently added in the later Victorian era, when simplicity was too simple.
