Deco Delights: Former Eastwood Engine House 17 on South Midler Avenue

Syracuse, NY.Former Engine House 17, 401 S. Midler Ave. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Deco Delights: Former Eastwood Engine House 17 on South Midler Avenue
by Samuel D. Gruber

Old (fire) engine houses are found all across the city of Syracuse. Most of these are too small to accommodate modern-day firefighting trucks and equipment and so have been sold off over the years to private owners, or have been converted to serve some other public function. These out-dated engine houses date from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. 

Engine House 17 was built in 1929 on South Midler Avenue and Sunnycrest Rd., after the annexation of Eastwood by the City of Syracuse in 1926. The building replaced a substantial two-story gable front, wood frame structure built in 1907 that served as sort of village hall. The new building, just a block east of the Eastwood High School (1922), continued this purpose with police and fire services until 1988.  I have not yet identified the architect or builder. Today it houses the Frank DeFrancisco Eastwood Community Center run by PEACE, Inc.

Syracuse, NY.Former Engine House 17, 401 S. Midler Ave. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.Former Engine House 17, 401 S. Midler Ave. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.Former Engine House 17, 401 S. Midler Ave. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.Former Engine House 17, 401 S. Midler Ave. Tower detail. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

The Syracuse engine houses were built in many styles, including Renaissance, Flemish (Engine house 10), Tudor and Modern, but all have some basic components. The most distinctive of these features visible on the exterior are the ground floor garage bays for the engines and the attached tower which was used for drying hoses - these let anyone know what the building was once used for.

The attractive Engine House 17 with Art Deco detailing around the door frames and at the roof line served as dual public service center, housing both Engine Company 17 and Police Precinct 5, which was entered through a decorated doorway on the side.

Syracuse, NY.Former Engine House 17, 401 S. Midler Ave. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.Former Engine House 17, 401 S. Midler Ave. Entrance to Police Precinct 5 on right. Photo:  

 
For more on the history of Eastwood see Margaret McVicker, Did You Know?: A History and Memories of Eastwood, (Syracuse, 2010).

The Most Beautiful Houses: Mayor Stephens' Highland Avenue Row

Syracuse, NY.  Lyman Stephens House, 213 Highland Avenue (c. 1856). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.  Lyman Stephens House, 213 Highland Avenue (c. 1856). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.  Lyman Stephens House, 213 Highland Avenue (c. 1856). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

The Most Beautiful Houses: Mayor Stephens' Highland Avenue Italianate Row
by Samuel D. Gruber

I recently wrote of some pretty Queen Anne style houses on North McBride Street in the Hawley-Green National Register Historic District near James Street. On the other side of that major artery are also still many notable and beautiful 19th-century houses, some of which are in the locally protected Sedgwick-Highland-James Preservation District.

Though most of the great 19th-century mansions of James Street were torn down in the 1950s and 1960s, but just a block north of James Street on the north side of Highland Avenue between Graves and Oak Streets, is another near-contemporary stretch of street laid out in the 19th century with its striking row of four impressive Italianate mid-19th century houses intact. Today, this block is part of the southwest-northeast axis for the Sedgwick-Highland-James district. Highland Avenue is the district's oldest developed portion. 

Lyman Stephens, Mayor of Syracuse, 1855

 

The row is anchored by the Lyman Stephens House at 213 Highland Avenue. Built c. 1856, one year after Stephens served as Syracuse mayor (1855), it is one of the finest remaining pre-Civil War mansions in Syracuse. The building's form and massing are in the Italianate villa style, but the house also shows the influence of the contemporary Romanesque Revival. There is a corbel table beneath the wide, bracketed eaves, and the use of some Romanesque style round-headed windows.  Inside, the house is said to contain intricate plasterwork detail. 

Stephens, who was a prosperous salt manufacturer and Mayor of Syracuse in 1855, also built the three houses in 1874 for his daughters and their families immediately to the west of his own residence. 

 

Syracuse, NY.  209 Highland Avenue (1874). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.  The near-twin houses of 207 and 209 Highland Avenue (1874). Note the matching towers. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.  207 Highland Avenue (1874). Porch added later (c. 1900). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.  207 Highland Avenue (1874, porch added c. 1900). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.  207 Highland Avenue (1874, porch added c. 1900). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

Syracuse, NY.  209 Highland Avenue (1874, porch added c. 1900)). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016

These three homes are more in keeping with a version of the Italian villa style popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The house at 209 Highland retains the original entry porch, but the two (originally) nearly identical houses to the west have been modified with larger porches added at the turn of the 20th-century.  The porch at #205 is especially impressive. it was applied with skill, so the two styles go well together. As a place to live, 207 was probably much-improved with that early 20th-century porch. One can imagine the evening spent there watching the world go by (and at least one resident was relaxing in the shade of the porch when I took a walk on this block a few days ago). The addition of ample porches coincided with improvement and expansion of street paving and the creating of permanent sidewalks, all of which encouraged walking strolling and perambulation at any pace. 

The westernmost house in the row is currently vacant and in need of repair, but it is, according to neighbors, scheduled for renovation.  The use of arch keystones with decorative reliefs is shared in all three 1870s houses and is one of many indications that they were built together.

Syracuse, NY.  205 Highland Avenue (1874, porch added later). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016.

Syracuse, NY.  205 Highland Avenue (1874, porch added later). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2016.

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