It’s nothing special, no Painted Lady or historic mansion. Just a little 1-1/2 story house from the 1880s that some forgotten builder jazzed up with what the rich men in the big cities were adding onto their houses. Tacked onto an otherwise mundane example of working-class domestic architecture there’s an enormous second-story covered balcony, the kind with porch pillars (you Victorian architecture mavens will know the sort of thing I’m talking about) with the door where you can go out and take the air elegantly, just like all those rich men have in their summer “cottages” back East. And there’s a large smoothly semi-circular half-turret jutting out from–arbitrarily imposed upon–the second-story corner.
None of the proportions work, of course, architecturally speaking. The balcony and the turret overwhelm the rest of the house, since they’re both much too large to complement the facade as they were intended to do on the rich mens’ houses, seeing as how the rich mens’ houses were three full stories high, with drawing rooms and suchlike, and this is only a basic front-and-back two-bedrooms-upstairs working man’s house.
But bless his heart, whoever he was, he was determined to have Class, and Class he had.
And his neighbors’ houses were all eventually pulled down as they rotted away in the 1910s and 1920s, and replaced with Sears catalog bungalows, but his little house held on. I suppose that other people like me at various points in its life were similarly entranced with the turret and the balcony, and so they gave it a bit more maintenance than its contemporaries got.
But finally age and neglect caught up with it–all it takes is one slum landlord to not think the turret and the balcony were cute, and up goes the yellow poster.
Shit. 