The Most Beautiful Houses: North McBride Street

Syracuse. NY. 306 North McBride Street. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

Syracuse. NY. 306 North McBride Street. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

Syracuse. NY. 304 North McBride Street. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

Syracuse. NY. 306 North McBride Street. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

The Most Beautiful Houses: North McBride Street
by Samuel D. Gruber

Syracuse. NY. 306 North McBride Street. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

Few would disagree that the late 19th-century Queen Anne style is the most intricate and ornamental of all the popular residential architectural styles that came and went during the 19th-century. We call that period the Victorian era - though why I am not sure - since we are in America, not the UK.  Perhaps it is better to think of the decades after the Civil War as the Gilded Age, a name that refers to the ostentatious display of wealth of the elite - the one percent of the day. The term was first applied by historians in the 1920s (another period of rampant materialism), inspired by Mark Twain's satiric tale The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, first published in 1873. But the term also aptly refers to the delicate decoration (more cake icing than gold leaf)  that adorned so many houses built from the 1870s until the Depression of  the 1890s, after which there was a widespread embrace of Renaissance and Classical motifs in architecture and throughout the visual arts.

Syracuse was once filled with houses in the Queen Anne style with a full display of ornate wrap-around porches, turrets and towers, and all sorts of decorated doorways, windows, dormers and every shape of roof.  Variations of these elements are sometimes called "stick style" or "Eastlake-inspired," due to the abundance use of machine-turned wooden deocrative spindled, raisl, brackets and other elements. It was all part of the same fashion; one that also filled these house interiors with alcoves and niches, chock-a-block with the plentiful ornamental nick-knacks that delighted the consumer world of the 1870s and 1880s, and left that era's heirs awash in bric-a-brac.  

Plentiful examples of the style once lined West Onondaga Street, Danforth Street, the Walnut Park area, the Westcott Neighborhood, and elsewhere. To my mind, some the prettiest and best preserved (restored) Queen Anne houses are a surviving pair of houses on the east side of the 300 block of North McBride Street, on the western edge of the Hawley-Green National Register Historic District (designated 1979). There were built in the early 1880s and renovated in 1981-82. Their restoration, soon after the designation of the District, helped spark renewed interest in the history and architecture of the area. 

 Syracuse, NY. 300 block of N. McBride Street (middle left). Detail from

Atlas of the city of Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York  (New York : J.W. Vose & co., 1892).

Both houses are especially noteworthy for their applied decoration - the wooden porches and window frames that give the otherwise boxy buildings expansive and visually stimulating appearances. They were restored with the woodwork painted in bright colors. The two houses were sold in 2015 and I see that some work is taking place on 306 now, and I hope this will not mar the house's appearance.

Number 304, built for real estate agent Edward Townsend, is a wood-frame clapboard-covered house with much stick style ornament and a noteworthy sunburst design in the roof gable. Next door, the brick #306 was built for Alfred E. Lewis, an executive at the Syracuse Saving Bank. The building houses the feminist bookstore My Sister's Words from 1987 until 2003. 

Both houses are fronted with porches with gazebos. A former carriage house which may have belong to one of these houses or another now demolished structure, is situated in the back, at 306 ½ North McBride Street, and has been renovated with two residential units. The noted architect Archimedes Russell has been suggested as the designer of both houses, but there is no confirming evidence. A third house at the north end of the row has been demolished, as well as two other large houses across the street. 

 

Syracuse. NY. 304 North McBride Street. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

Syracuse. NY. 306 North McBride Street. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

Other fine and well-preserved examples of the Queen Anne style can be found at 405 Hawley Avenue and 701 Lodi Street, but in addition to those on North McBride, the most impressive houses in the style are along the 200 block of Green Street. On the other side of James Street 500 and 714 North McBride are note worthy houses of the 1890s. More on these in another post.
 

Variety of form and especially building profile as well as the use of vivid color were hallmarks of the Queen Anne style. Sadly, most reminders of the gaiety of time are in sepia or black and white and it it often hard to imagine the that despite the sometimes haze of coal smoke, the 19th-century was a color-mad time. What Lewis Mumford dubbed the "Brown Decades" were not, in fact, always so brown.  

Syracuse. NY. 306 1/2 North McBride Street. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015