American Bungalow Magazine - The Magazine published in the interest of preserving and restoring the modest American 20th Century Home, the Bungalow, and the rich lifestyle that it affords.

TURNING STONES
During the three years the home was under construction, Al took up residence at the Eikrems’ older cottage in Lincoln City while he worked on the extensive stonework at the new house. Dave would come down on weekends to help out, and the two became close friends.

“We got into a little routine,” Dave says. “I’d drive down on Thursday night after work and go right to bed. When I’d get up in the morning, Al would be downstairs playing his guitar, we’d have breakfast, I’d pack us some lunch and we’d go off to work.”

The stones used in the construction of the house came from a glacial moraine near Flathead Lake outside of Polson, Montana.

“Some of those stones are enormous, well over 1,000 pounds,” Dave says. “We had to figure out how to get them from the driveway down to the house, so we built an impromptu sled. We figured out that to transport them, we could run a rope from the sled over to a pulley on the foundation, then back around to the bumper of my old Ford Explorer. On a good day we could maybe get two of those bigger stones moved to the base of the chimney. Lifting them into place required an additional pulley apparatus and at times even more ingenuity. It was exhausting work, but the end result is quite spectacular.”

Taking cues from some of the stonework on Greene & Greene–designed homes like the Mary E. Cole House and the Edgar W. Camp House, both in Pasadena, Tom and Al flared out the bases of the foundation walls and columns to appear as though they arose out of the earth itself, while also acting as a foundation for the massive weight they support.

Tom detailed the basic look and proportions of the fireplace and chimney, but Al was given creative license to design how it all came together.

“Al chose the stones, put in the orders, and specified how many of each type of rock he wanted,” Dave says. “Then once they were on site, he had them laid out all over the driveway, separated by size, color and shape. He would then handpick where each stone would go and make sure its face was speaking in harmony with the others.”
The home’s signature stonework is the lifeblood of the home. “Al is the most honest craftsman I’ve ever known or worked with,” Dave says. “He loves his craft and he’s proud of what he’s accomplished, and when he’s done, the money he’s made from it is secondary to the satisfaction he gets from the work itself.”

WORTH THE WAIT
Now that the years of planning and building are over, the Eikrems spend as much time as they can at their home on the coast, and they routinely welcome friends and family to enjoy the house as well.

“One of the things our friends always tell us is that they immediately feel comfortable here and find it to be very peaceful and relaxing, almost therapeutic,” Dave says. “It’s a real sanctuary because there’s no television, no Internet, no phone and none of the other things that normally distract us. There are just the waves, the wind, the trees and a warm fire.

“There’s an expression that goes something like, ‘you can’t build an old house,’ but you can build a house the way the old houses were built and furnish it with things that are old. Seeking out antiques and artifacts, and using salvaged hardware and repurposed architectural elements, we’ve tried to disguise the fact that it’s new construction. Gradually, it has become an old house.

“We’ll continue to share this home with our kids and grandkids—and maybe even their kids—for generations to come. There’s something very satisfying about that. If we had bought and built on this property when we first saw it, it might have turned out to be completely different. We anticipated that everything was going to take a long time. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have been worth waiting for.”

David Kramer is a Portland-based freelance writer and curator of the website TheCraftsmanBungalow.com. He is grateful to David and Pamela Eikrem, Tom Shaw, Alan Bauch, and Craig and Reisha Bryan for helping to make this article possible.

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Resources:

ARCHITECT
Tom Shaw
Portland, Ore.
503 286-3414

STONEMASON
Alan Bauch
Troutdale and Lincoln City, Ore.
503 762-6634

STONE SUPPLIER
Mutual Materials
Portland, Ore.
503 650-2939
mutualmaterials.com

CABINET MAKER
John Fisher
Skyline Fine Cabinets &
Furniture
211 Grimes St.
Eugene, OR 97402
541 342-2196

BLACKSMITH/CUSTOM LIGHTING
Darryl Nelson
Eatonvile, Wash.
360 832-6280
darrylnelsonblacksmith.com

TILE
Pratt & Larson
Portland, Ore.
503 231-9464
prattandlarson.com

Tile Restoration Center
3511 Interlake Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
tilerestorationcenter.com
206 633-4866

SALVAGED WOOD
CraftMark
Denny Elmer
McMinnville, Ore.
503 883-4100
craftmarkinc.com

PLASTERER
Gerald Buchko
Construction
South Beach, Ore.
541 867-6994

FINISH CARPENTRY
Terry Bolin
Construction
541 740-4300

HARDWARE
Aurora Mills
Architectural Salvage
14971 First St. NE
Aurora, OR 97002
503 678-6083
auroramills.com

Rejuvenation
1100 SE Grand Avenue
Portland, OR 97214
503 238.1900
rejuvenation.com

by David Kramer

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about this Craftsman-inspired home, perched on a windswept bluff overlooking a secluded cove on Oregon’s central coast, is that you can appreciate its beauty long before you ever step inside. The road leading to it meanders past a vista point, then makes its way around the cove while crossing a bridge over a small gorge, affording unimpeded views of the home nearly the entire way.

“The approach to this property and that feeling of curious anticipation that you get as you see it from the road is part of what drew us to it so many years ago,” says David Eikrem. That was back in the early 1980s, when he and his wife, Pamela, would drive past the cove on trips up and down the central coast from a vacation cottage they maintained in nearby Lincoln City. The house that stood on the bluff back then was not the house that stands there today, but it was attractive enough in its magnificent setting to whet the appetites of countless travelers passing by.

“One day we drove past and I said to Pam, “I wonder if it’s for sale?” We turned off the road and pulled up to the property. Much to our dismay, there was a big sign in the front yard that read No this house is not for sale. No this house is not for rent. Don’t ask.”

Fast forward about a dozen years, to another drive down that same stretch of coast, after they had moved their primary residence from Portland to Longview, Wash. This time they didn’t see the house they had so often admired. It was gone. They drove down to have a closer look at the property, now vacant except for the chimney and the ghostly remnants of the house’s foundation, where a “For Sale” sign now stood in the yard.

They made their way to the edge of the cliff and gazed out over the ocean and the panoramic view of the graceful 1920s-era arching bridge that spans a small creek on the innermost corner of the cove. Realizing again what a special place this was, they decided to inquire about buying it. They learned that the couple who had owned the house had passed away and left it to their heirs. It sat vacant and deteriorating for several years, succumbing to the harsh coastal conditions, until it was eventually declared a hazard and taken down by the local fire department with a controlled burn.

“Without knowing whether we would ever build on the site, we just thought that since we had admired it for so long, and we now might have a chance to own it, we had to try,” Dave says. They did, and soon it was theirs.

It would be several more years before they would make the decision to replace the Lincoln City cottage with a new house on the cove. During those years, through crucial relationships they established with an architect and a stonemason working on their Longview home, they were awakened to the architecture of Charles and Henry Greene and the Craftsman aesthetic, and a vision of the unique Craftsman house that stands on their coastal bluff today began to emerge.

“LITTLE RED SHED”
In the early 1990s, Dave and his partners in their Longview dental and orthodontics practice had met with Tom Shaw, a Portland-based architect whose style and approach had made an indelible impression on Dave during their interviews in connection with the practice’s need for new offices. Although the partners decided to retain another architect instead, the two men stayed in touch.

“I told him that at some point Pam and I were going to remodel our kitchen, and when we did, we would ask him to design it.” Dave says. That project, the Eikrems’ first experience working with Shaw, expanded beyond its original scope when Dave and Pam asked Shaw to convert an existing utility room into a study and add a new corner fireplace to better reflect the era the home was built in.

Later, when they needed to replace the garage of the Longview home, they again called on Shaw. At the heart of that project was the addition of a modest, cozy room that Dave and Pam named the “Little Red Shed” after a tiny pub of the same name located at Historic Edgefield, a lodge in Troutdale, Ore. The couple had often visited the pub when they lived in Portland and drew much of the inspiration for the room from it.

The room’s most striking feature was to be a dramatic raised-hearth fireplace similar to the one in the home Dave had grown up in. He had assembled a supply of clinker bricks and sketched out a design for the fireplace when he agreed to hire Alan Bauch, a stonemason whose 20-page bid on the job—describing at great length the intricacies of the fireplace venting, the damper, specifics about the throat dimensions and how the design as a whole would allow for maximum draft—amounted, in Dave’s words, to a masterful “dissertation” on the subject of fireplace and chimney design.

As it turned out, the experience of designing and working on the Little Red Shed room in turn provided the seminal design ideas and shared experiences that enabled the Eikrems, Shaw and Bauch to become the team that would eventually create the Craftsman masterpiece on the bluff overlooking the Pacific in Depoe Bay.

Click Here For Part 2

By Tim Counts

When Web developer Sonja Dahl went shopping for a house in south Minneapolis in 1999, she had difficulty buying one. Not because her finances weren’t in order, but because she kept getting outbid. The first bungalow she bid on received some 20 offers from hopeful buyers. Her second attempt fell short as well.

Those were the crazy years before the housing-market crash, when houses in desirable neighborhoods routinely sparked bidding wars. “Everyone was offering above asking price,” she says.

She and her agent raced to a third house the day it went on the market. Paint on the exterior trim was crumbling and a “Beware of Dog” sign peeked from a grimy porch window. “It looked awful,” she says with a laugh.

The previous owner of the 1925 bungalow had lived there for 65 of its 75 years of existence. Inside, its wallpaper, carpeting and light fixtures reflected multiple decades of fashion. Still, she says, “I immediately saw what it was. I could see that it had all these original features, and that I could do most of what it needed.”

The natural oak woodwork in the living and dining rooms was unpainted and in pristine condition. Sonja walked into the kitchen (through 1980s louvered closet doors) and saw that the original, though scruffy, birch cabinets remained. She looked out the kitchen window to the original cottage-like garage. “That’s when I fell in love,” she says. “Everything was just so cute and bungalow-ish.”

She closed on the house on December 27, 1999, four days before much of the world celebrated the millennium.

Every Surprise a Good Surprise
“I bought this house quickly, without knowing a lot about it,” she says. “Every inch of every wall was papered. Every floor was cloaked in carpet or vinyl. “I had no idea what was underneath.” She and her mother began with the wallpaper, which peeled off with relative ease. But layers of paste underneath required days of effort to dampen and scrape off, filling bucket after bucket with thick, brown goo.

She vividly recalls ringing in the new century. “There was no furniture. I was sitting here at midnight on the floor with my bottle of champagne, stripping wallpaper. Depressing? I was thrilled!”

When she reached the plaster walls beneath the paste, they were bare—they had never been painted, only papered. “That’s why the woodwork is so perfect,” she explains. “In a lot of houses, even if the woodwork has never been painted, you’ll find drips and splatters from when the walls were painted.”

Still more good news came when the carpeting and vinyl flooring was pulled up. High-quality oak floors ran throughout the main rooms and kitchen; the hallway and bedroom floors were maple. “With this house, every surprise was a good surprise,” she says, beaming.

In the kitchen, white laminate covered the counter and backsplash. “I was afraid the wood underneath was going to be all chopped up and water-stained.” But she peeled it off and found the original wood planks in excellent condition. She stripped and refinished the full wall of cabinets herself, then reinstalled the original drawer pulls and cabinet latches. Fortunately, she found the original kitchen/dining-room door in the basement and reinstalled it.
She considered replacing the wall-hung kitchen sink, but ultimately decided against it, reasoning a new sink and cabinet would be costly and wouldn’t add much benefit. “I saw an old ad from the ’20s that showed a woman sitting on a stool at the sink,” she says, so she bought a stool-height aluminum chair. “I don’t actually sit at the sink, but I wanted to be able to.”

A final pleasant surprise was the discovery of the original dining-room chandelier in the attic. Though a couple of parts were missing, visits to local vintage lighting shops made it whole, allowing it to shine again. Now restored to its rightful place over the dining-room table, it coordinates beautifully with the original matching wall sconces above the living-room fireplace.

Making a House a Home
During the first four years of home ownership, Sonja had a housemate to help with expenses. With both bedrooms occupied, a television sat in the living room, and her computer, occupied the dining room.

“I hated having these beautiful rooms marred by an ugly TV and a computer” she says. So when she was able to afford the mortgage payments herself, her housemate moved out and Sonja moved the electronics to the back bedroom. She set up the main rooms to her liking, outfitting them with carefully chosen furniture, pottery, textiles and artwork.

Though not expensive, each piece she selected has beauty and meaning for her. The doilies in the dining room that bear embroidered olive branches were purchased during a vacation in Greece; a group of handmade art tiles are by a local tilemaker named Pooka Ness, whom she helps with her website. She refinished several pieces of oak furniture herself, and after taking classes at a local business, made matching stained-glass inserts for the windows on either side of the fireplace.

Bungalows Should Have Pianos
Sonja, an amateur musician, plays violin in a community orchestra, and in her spare time dabbles on the vintage 1913 Estey upright piano in her living room, which was previously owned by Boston musician Marcia Feldman.
“Bungalows should have pianos,” she insists. Pianos were certainly common in bungalows. Anyone who has visited an antiques shop has seen stacks of sheet music, most of it published during the bungalow’s heyday in the nineteen-teens and -twenties.

She points out that many bungalows in Minneapolis and St. Paul have “piano windows”—a row of three square windows set high on a living-room wall, leaving just enough space beneath for an upright. Though her bungalow was built with a fireplace instead of the signature windows, she made room for her cherished piano on the opposite wall.

The Perfect House
Happy as she is with her house, Sonja admits she was hesitant to have it photographed for publication. “Before I saw the photographs, I thought I’d be embarrassed about my bungalow compared to the others you see in American Bungalow,” she says. “They’re so spectacular.” She breathed a little easier after seeing her home through the camera’s lens.

“These houses are perfect for young people,” she contends. “They’re small, they’re affordable.” She still peruses house listings online and sees an ample number of charming local bungalows, many with original elements still intact. “You can get all these great features, and they’re still under $200,000.”

Note: Contractors are located in the area of Bend, Oregon. Check back here soon for more updates!

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Online Resources:

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Jessie Mixer’s house on Tillinghast Place still boggles today. The exterior is a stark box relieved only by the irregularly distributed plain windows, the logic of which is apparent from the inside. The interior design details, as the accompanying photos illustrate, reveal exquisite craftsmanship and Mixer’s devotion to the English Arts and Crafts movement. The most remarkable feature of the house is the great hall, borrowed directly from Morris and his followers, an immense two-story living room surrounded by second floor galleries. A mezzanine platform gives chamber musicians a place from which to serenade guests. A two-story panel of diamond-paned windows affords light into the hall. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the famous architectural historian, featured the Mixer House in the first major exhibition ever created to document Buffalo architecture, at the Albright Gallery, in 1940. Jessie May Anthony was still a prominent society woman in Buffalo at the time, the wife of Dewitt Halsey Sherman, a prominent physician, and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Buffalo, who just happened to die on 1 February 1940, while the exhibit was hanging.iv

Finally, add to this mix Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright first came to Buffalo in November 1902, at the invitation of Darwin Martin, an executive at the Larkin Soap Company. Thanks to Martin, and the Larkin Company, Buffalo became home to the largest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright structures in the country outside of the Chicago area. Most of them are in Parkside, including the six structures which constitute the Martin House Complex (the main house, the attached pergola and conservatory, a carriage house and chauffer’s apartment, the Barton House, built for Martin’s sister Delta, and her husband George, and the Gardener’s Cottage, the latter two recently featured in American Bungalow. Wright also built a house for Walter V. Davidson, another Larkin executive, on Tillinghast Pl., across the street from the Mixer House. Indeed, Davidson and his wife lived in the Mixer House for a year in 1907-8, while their own house was under construction, and while the Mixers were away in Europe. One wonders whether the spectacular two-story diamond-paned window Wright designed for the Davidson’s living room owes anything to Jessie Mixer’s window across the street, although Wright scholars can point to a similar window designed by the master for the Hillside School, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, in 1902.v

Contemporaries were struck by how alien Wright’s buildings were to the existing cityscape. The Illustrated Buffalo Express wrote on 9 October 1904, about the Martin House, then under construction: “Jules Verne might well be the designer of a house that is being built at the northwestern corner of Jewett and Summit avenues in this city. It may be destined to be termed the freak house of Buffalo when it is finished.”vi There is no doubt that Wright intended his buildings as a provocation. The structures in the Martin House Complex are all on rigid axes, oriented to the cardinal points, ignoring Olmsted’s curving streets. (The Church of the Good Shepherd, across Jewett Parkway, is oriented to the curve on Summit Avenue, in contrast, as are the nearby houses.) Wright built the back end of the Barton House so close to the neighboring structure as to inconvenience its owners. When Wright published a version of the Gardener’s Cottage he designed for Darwin Martin in the Ladies Home Journal, in April 1907, he took what Buffalonians would have recognized as a swipe at a similarly sized cottage designed in 1900 by the Green and Wicks partnership, directly across the street from the Martin House Complex, by describing his own design as: “the result of a process of elimination… what remains seems sufficiently complete and the ensemble an improvement over the usual cut-up, overtrimmed boxes doing duty in this class, wherein architecture is a matter of ‘millwork’ and the ‘features’ are apt to peel.”vii

But today, with a hundred years’ hindsight, we may be struck as much by the lines of continuity in the buildings in Parkside as by the obvious discontinuity that Wright’s Prairie style houses represented. The young Wright, after all, worked in Silsbee’s studio, 1885-8, on buildings of similar character to the Church of the Good Shepherd. A somewhat older Wright spent many hours wandering around Olmsted’s ‘Wooded Island,’ at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, pondering the lessons to be drawn from the siting of the Japanese Pavilion, Ho-O-Don, in Olmsted’s landscape. And Lewis Comfort Tiffany was one of the few American designers for whom Wright offered unreserved praise.viii

A case can be made that local architects also responded to Wright’s work. The house at 156 Woodward Ave., built in 1923, for example, seems to reference Wright’s bands of casement windows, reinforced by the band of decorative quatrefoils, above it. The house at 165 Jewett Parkway, built in 1914 by the local architect Henry L. Spann, also seems to reflect Wright’s influence, with its pronounced horizontal lines and bands of casement windows. The broader Arts and Crafts movement influenced Parkside architecture after the turn of the century. The California bungalow became popular, as the accompanying photos illustrate. Arts and Crafts foursquares are ubiquitous on the smaller lots issuing from Olmsted’s redesign of neighborhood streets in the 1880s, since they offer the greatest possible living area in a compact space. The floor plans are similar, but stylistic variety was nonetheless realized by local architects and builders, through variations in use of materials, the articulation of porches and windows, and the treatment of the eaves, as the accompanying photo of the one-hundred block on Crescent Ave. illustrates.

Parkside was largely built out by the 1920s, and this probably marked the neighborhood’s first zenith. Already between the wars, the wealthy began to move out of the city into the suburbs. Parkside’s patrimony of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings turned into a problem, rather than an attraction, when Darwin Martin lost most of his fortune in the Great Depression. He died in 1935, and his widow moved out of the main Martin House two years later. It stood abandoned, in the center of the neighborhood, for seventeen years. Children who grew up there recall playing in its ruins. The architect Sebastian Tauriello almost certainly saved the main house from destruction when he bought it in 1954, but this came at a high price: to finance the restoration, he sold off the property on which the pergola, conservatory, and carriage house stood, and they were demolished; three stylistically inappropriate apartment buildings took their place. In the 1960s Buffalo built a series of expressways which destroyed several of Olmsted’s parkways, including the Humboldt Parkway, which constituted the southern boundary of Parkside.

In the 1950s and 60s much of Buffalo’s white middle class fled the city. The purchase of a few houses by African Americans often triggered panic selling by white homeowners in a neighborhood, and rapid change in the racial composition of the population. In some cases, including the Hamlin Park Historic District, contiguous with Parkside, stable middle-class African American communities took shape.ix In others, slumlords replaced owner-residents as property owners, and deterioration proceeded rapidly. But Parkside is the most conspicuous example in the city of a neighborhood which successfully integrated. Matters came to a head in 1963. Realtors began applying the technique of ‘blockbusting’ they had perfected elsewhere in the city to Parkside, and a sense of panic began to spread. The Parkside Community Association was created in this environment. On 1 July 1963 its organizers distributed an 8-page outline, of what the group stood for, to neighbors. The text read in part:

“Integration present and future is a fact. Four Negro families presently own or occupy homes. More persons of a minority race will no doubt purchase homes in the near future. This is their right as it should be any person’s right to reside where he chooses. No one is opposed to anyone residing in our community because of race or religion.

What the group wants for this neighborhood is to make it the best possible place to live—to raise our families, to obtain an education, to grow intellectually, spiritually, and physically. We want good neighbors regardless of color. We want all to stay and continue to live where we live. We want to attract persons of all ages, religions, races, education, economic abilities, etc. to our fine community. We want to preserve the area’s residential character. We are proud of our public and parochial schools and of our well-kept houses, trees, lawns, shrubs, and yards. We like to live in the City of Buffalo…”x

The PCA fought against the subdivision of single family homes into multiple units. It fought against unethical practices by realtors. Dick Griffin and Jack Anthony, the white activists who took the initiative in organizing the association, recruited an early African American homeowner named Frank Mesiah. He became an original board member of the PCA, and later President of the Buffalo Chapter of the NAACP. Defying the odds, Parkside has remained a stably racially integrated community for fifty years.

During much of the 1960s and 70s, Parkside’s stability was perceived to be precarious by residents. The city was in trouble. There was serious rioting in 1967; gunshots were audible in the distance from Parkside streets and porches. In the early 1970s Buffalo bled jobs in its core manufacturing industries, steelmaking and auto manufacturing. In Parkside in this era renovated historic houses stood cheek-by-jowl to dilapidated structures. The real turnaround began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A group organized in 1983 to file for historic district status, which was granted in 1987. That same year the PCA bought a building on Main St. to serve as its headquarters. By then the PCA had a full-time paid director. The final step in the neighborhood’s rehabilitation was the creation of the Martin House Restoration Corporation in 1992, to oversee the renovation, and in some cases the reconstruction, of all of the original Frank Lloyd Wright buildings at the heart of the neighborhood. This restoration project changed perceptions of Parkside. Grand houses on Jewett Parkway, which had been cut up into warrens of small apartments decades earlier, were now reconverted to single family dwellings. For those who like great architecture, racial and ethnic diversity, and urban living, Parkside had become a great place to be.

What makes a neighborhood like this tick? Voluntary associationalism is a big part of the answer. Parkside would never have integrated successfully without the Parkside Community Association. The PCA continues to play an essential role today, organizing community events, including annual home tours. The Martin House Restoration Corporation draws heavily on the energy of Parkside residents. Parksiders have made significant contributions to help finance the restoration; they also volunteer as docents. Other voluntary organizations dedicated to a brighter future for Buffalo draw on Parkside residents, including the Olmsted Conservancy, which is dedicated to the preservation of the city’s park and parkway system.

The city of Buffalo still has serious problems. The 2010 US Census showed continued population decline, 55% from the 1950 peak. Although the ‘meds and eds’ sectors of the economy, driven by the presence of the University of Buffalo, Buffalo State University, Canisius College, and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, among others, suggests a future vector for economic growth, no industry has replaced the job losses in traditional manufacturing. However, even a casual visit to Parkside, and the older Victorian neighborhoods closer in to downtown, including the West Side, Richmond Avenue, Elmwood Village, and Allentown, suggests a thriving urban environment. Restaurants and art galleries are conspicuous. There is substantial bicycle and foot traffic. Grand old houses are being restored. A funky Bohemian vibe resonates. Some of these neighborhoods have astonishing ethnic diversity. African Americans, Anglos, and ethnic Poles, Germans, Irish, and Italians now live side by side, and share the neighborhoods with Puerto Ricans, American Indians, Arabs, and Vietnamese, and more recent arrivals from Burma, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Chad, Liberia, Ethiopia, Ukraine, and Belorussia. Some Buffalo neighborhoods are almost as diverse as Queens. The future multicultural America is already visible here. Parkside has already stabilized, and much of the old Victorian west side seems set to follow.xi

Douglas J. Forsyth is Associate Professor of History at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. He would like to thank Riva Betha, Steve Cichon, John C. Courtin, Francis R. Kowsky, Patrick J. Mahoney, Anthony Streeter Mixer, Jack Quinan, Michael A. Riester, Mary Roberts, Robert Schweitzer, George Stock, Susana Tejada, Cynthia Van Ness, Martin Wachadlo, and many Parkside homeowners for their assistance. All errors or omissions are his own. This article appears in a revised illustrated form as “Staying Put in Parkside” in American Bungalow No. 78, Summer 2013.

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Sources

i. On Olmsted’s work in Buffalo see Justin Martin, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (Cambridge MA: Da Capo, 2011).

ii. Quoted in Steve Cichon, The Complete History of Parkside, Buffalo, New York, self-published 2nd rev. ed., (Buffalo, 2010).

iii. Much of the information I have assembled about Jessie May Anthony Mixer comes from the Buffalo Express, which is available, and searchable on-line at www.fultonhistory.com. Jessie’s grandson, Anthony Streeter Mixer, graciously allowed me to interview him by telephone.

iv. Henry Russell Hitchcock, Buffalo Architecture, 1816-1940: [catalog of the] Exhibition, Buffalo, Albright Art Gallery, January 12 – February 12, 1940 (Buffalo: Albright Art Gallery, 1940).

v. On Frank Lloyd Wright in Buffalo see Jack Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House: Architecture as Portraiture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); Jack Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buffalo Venture: From the Larkin Building to Broadacre City (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2012); and Patrick J. Mahoney, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Walter V. Davidson House: An Examination of a Buffalo Home and its Cousins from Coast to Coast (Buffalo: State University of New York College at Buffalo and Monroe Fordham Regional History Center, 2011).

vi. Quoted in Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House, p. 107.

vii. . Frank Lloyd Wright, “A Fireproof House for $5000: Estimated to Cost That Amount in Chicago, and Designed Especially for the Journal,” Ladies Home Journal, 24 (1907) no. 5, p. 24.

viii. Frank Lloyd Wright to George W. Gessert, 5 July 1957. Reproduced in, Henry Winter, Final Edition of the Dynasty of Louis Comfort Tiffany (Boston, self-published, 1971), p. 14.

ix. On Hamlin Park see Maria Scrivani, Brighter Buffalo: Renewing a City, History and Architecture (Buffalo: Western New York Wares, 2009), pp. 29-36; Mark Goldman, “Buffalo’s Historic Neighborhoods: Hamlin Park,” Buffalo Spree (July/August, 2000). Ms. Riva Betha, a Hamlin Park resident and activist, graciously allowed me to interview her by telephone on 4 May 2012.

x. Quoted in Cichon, The Complete History of Parkside, p. 112.

xi. See Mark Goldman’s discussion of Allentown and the West Side in City on the Edge: Buffalo, New York (Amherst NY: Prometheus, 2007), pp. 387-99 and passim. This is, in my judgment, one of the finest books ever written about an American city.

By Douglas J. Forsyth

Can great architecture, design, and craftsmanship stabilize a neighborhood during a long economic downturn, and eventually contribute to its revitalization? The Parkside neighborhood in Buffalo, New York suggests that they can. The neighborhood owes its origins to the park system designed for the city by Frederick Law Olmsted, beginning in 1868. Olmsted was already renowned for his work on Central Park, in Manhattan, and Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, at the time, but his proposal for Buffalo represented his first effort to design a system of municipal parks, linked together by the broad roads he would later call parkways. By coincidence, Olmsted was working simultaneously on his first suburban residential community, Riverside, to the west of Chicago. For Riverside, Olmsted proposed curving avenues, to break the monotony of the grid characteristic of the city’s streets, along with generous lots, with ample room for trees. Olmsted was soon transferring aspects of his Illinois design to his work in Buffalo.i As early as 1872, there is a reference in a city report to a neighborhood called ‘the Parkside,’ which Olmsted intended as a border for what is today called Delaware Park, the centerpiece of his Buffalo park system. This report described it as: “a detached suburb adjoining the Park on the north and on the east, designed by private enterprise, so as to secure to it a permanent sylvan character distinct from the formal rectangular streets of the city proper…a district nearly three square miles in area, extensively planted, and guarded against any approach to dense building.ii” Elam Jewett, a prominent local landowner and newspaper publisher, laid out Jewett Parkway in 1874 as a broad avenue running from Main St., the principle north-south thoroughfare, to an entry to Olmsted’s park, dissecting the proposed neighborhood.

Parkside was still well beyond the perimeter of urban development in Buffalo at the time, but the explosive growth of the city, which had become a major distribution and manufacturing center, would soon change that. In 1883 the New York Central Beltline Railway opened two stations offering easy transportation downtown for residents of the future community, including one at the intersection of Jewett Parkway and Main St. In 1885 the Parkside Land Improvement Company was formed, to realize Olmsted’s vision. Olmsted’s original plan called for lots as large as 100’ x 100’. Jewett Parkway looks today the way the entire neighborhood was originally envisaged, with large homes on large lots. But sales were slow, and officials of the company soon asked Olmsted to redesign smaller streets, with smaller house lots, in the area surrounding Jewett Parkway. This created greater socio-economic diversity, and gave Parkside the substantial middle class population, which it retains today. Many of the photos which accompany this article feature houses built on smaller lots on these streets: Woodward Ave., Summit Ave., Crescent Ave., and Tillinghast Place.

To Olmsted, add Louis Comfort Tiffany, Joseph Lyman Silsbee, and a clutch of prominent local architects. Elam Jewett, a devout Episcopalian, instigated the construction of the Church of the Good Shepherd on the parkway bearing his name. In 1887 the contract went to Joseph Lyman Silsbee and James Herbert Marling. Silsbee was one of the first prominent American architects to be influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement. He maintained partnerships in three cities in the late 19th century: Chicago, Buffalo and Syracuse. His practice was a significant incubator of the Prairie style and other strains of early 20th century modernism; Frank Lloyd Wright, George Grant Elmslie, George Maher, and Irving Gill passed through his studios at one time or another. Silsbee pulled out of his partnership with Marling shortly after the firm began work on Jewett’s church. By the time it was consecrated in 1888, Marling had formed a new partnership with Herbert C. Burdett, an early assistant in the office of H. H. Richardson. The exterior of the church clearly references the Richardsonian style, while the interior suggests the English Arts and Crafts movement. Jewett commissioned Tiffany to create a splendid cycle of windows, some of which are captured in the accompanying photos by Alexander Vertikoff. Around the Church of the Good Shepherd rose a group of houses by prominent local architects, including William Sidney Wicks and his partner Edward B. Green, the partnership of August Carl Esenwein and James A. Johnson, and Henry L. Spann, in styles mixing historicism with ideas drawn from the English Arts and Crafts movement.

Among the most intriguing structures from this early phase of residential construction in Parkside is the Knowlton Mixer house, built in 1901, on Tillinghast Pl. Mixer was co-owner of a prominent lumber company, and the house is lavishly furnished in fine wood. The designer was Mixer’s wife, Jessie May Anthony Mixer (born April 1869), a woman with no formal higher education, but with a lively mind and a strong sense of self-empowerment. Jessie’s father was a prominent businessman and freemason; she was a relative also of the women’s suffrage advocate, Susan B. Anthony. Jessie Mixer painted, and designed theater sets and costumes. In 1907 she dramatized a work by English poet W. Graham Robertson titled “A Masque of May Morning” and directed a production of it by the Girls Friendly Society of St. Andrew’s Church. She helped the painter Alice B. Muzzy execute a cycle of murals on the walls of the Studio Club in 1906. She was vice-president of the Society of Artists in Buffalo repeatedly at the beginning of the 20th century. She was also prominent among the organizers of a conference on the Arts and Crafts movement in Buffalo in April 1900, at which the renowned local furniture maker Charles Rohlfs, among others, spoke. In March 1910, when May Morris, the daughter of William Morris, visited Buffalo, Jessie May Mixer organized a dinner in her honor. The Mixers were also public supporters of women’s suffrage, among the sponsors of a Buffalo visit by nationally and internationally known advocates of women’s suffrage in October 1915, including Ethel Annikin, the wife of the prominent British Labour Party politician, and future Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden, and Edmund Keating, a US Congressman (D-CO).iii

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