This doorway could use some fresh paint and a little wood repair, but it would certainly be worth preserving the Victorian carved ornaments.
-
Carved Brackets on Carson Street
-
Finial
Decoration on the roof of a Victorian building on Carson Street, South Side.
-
Victorian Storefronts on Carson Street
A pair of storefronts in a commercial building between 15th and 16th Streets. The decorations are very well preserved—enlarge the picture to see how the ornaments in the carved cornice match the keystones in the flattened arches. Notice also the recessed entrances. Old Pa Pitt is still astonished that we have forgotten the reason for those. The reason is that, if the entrance were flush with the sidewalk, someone leaving the store could swing the door out into a passing pedestrian’s face. This happens more often than we realize in modern storefronts, or old ones that have been modernized, and apparently the reaction each time is “Who could have seen that coming?”—to which the answer is “Any Victorian architect.”
Note the distinctive beehive ornament in the middle of the building that serves as the date stone.
-
Victorian Details on Carson Street
Ornamental details on a row of commercial buildings on Carson Street.
-
Victorian Commercial Buildings on the Boulevard of the Allies
Among the few human-sized buildings left in the area, these two at the corner of Stanwix Street are dwarfed by the skyscrapers around them. The large windows suggest workshops of some sort on the upper floors; the tasteful ornamentation suggests prosperity.
-
Splendidly Victorian
Even on a splendidly Victorian street like Carson Street on the South Side, this building stands out as unusually ornate.
-
Front Door on Sarah Street
-
Victorian House on South 18th Street
This is the kind of eclectic mess twentieth-century architects meant when they vigorously condemned everything “Victorian.” You can hardly pin it down to any historical style. That would probably identify it as “Queen Anne,” the term for Victorian domestic architecture that is a hodgepodge of every historical style, with strange angles thrown in for added picturesque effect. And to those twentieth-century architects, old Pa Pitt has only this to say: this house is a lot more attractive and a lot more pleasant to live in than anything you came up with.
-
H. Daub Building, West End
No one has to ask when this distinguished Victorian commercial building was constructed. There was a brief time about fifteen years ago when the West End looked like the next trendy artsy neighborhood—for example, you can just barely make out that this building briefly housed a Steinway piano dealer. It seems that the neighborhood was too far out of the way for the arts community to take firm roots. The neighborhood is still pleasant, but much of the business district is deserted.
-
Carved Brackets
