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| The Worman-Apgar House, Frenchtown, NJ. 1869 Photos: Wikimedia |
Moving on from Utica, the Worman-Apgar house in Frenchtown, NJ is an impressive and aggressively vertical irregular plan Italianate. The verticality is created by the narrowness of each of the facade planes. Although built in 1869, the house is far out of date, demonstrating the style of the 1850s and none of the complex carpentry associated with the late 60s and 70s. Nonetheless, it is a very high style example of the tradition of early Italianate designs. The house, finished in stucco scored to look like stone, is simple in its ornament. Large flat wall surfaces are pierced with round headed windows with thick moldings, and a flat architrave molding delineates the entablature. The thickness of the overhang is particularly notable as is the lack of brackets. The first floor flat head windows are without ornament. As on a lot of early-type designs, the fun is confined to interesting pieces of carpentry. Here, the curved tent-roof wooden awnings with fringes, the Juliette balcony over the door, and the simple, thin porch relieve the facade's solemnity. Also of interest is the slender wooden (flushboard) tower, which, at the top stage has a segmental arched window with a Henry Austin style eared molding. The cornice of the tower on all four facades has a pediment, a particularly elegant and vertical feature.
The house really does feel like an Austin design to me and it resembles, in its ornament, the Norton house. The front has a well preserved iron fence (see below). I think that the paint scheme for this house, although quite solemn, is very historically accurate in its attempt to suggest a stone construction.
What a great space the top of the tower must be!
ReplyDeleteI got to go up there when I was a kid, and it was very cool. Cushioned benches along all 4 sides of the walls, and a ladder in the center of the floor to climb up, if I remember correctly.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Italianate towers are pretty fun, especially for kids. I'd hang out there all day, if I had one.
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ReplyDeleteBack in 1974, a fledgling low-income winterization program (a national DOE-sponsored weatherizaton program was not in effect; in fact, DOE didn’t yet exist) was providing housing rehab services for low-income folks throughout a three-county region in northwestern New Jersey. With three paid staff and a bevy of Comprehensive Employment and Training Act volunteers, we at the Northwest New Jersey Community Action Program (NORWESCAP) were long on challenges to keep our trainees meaningfully busy, but short on materials dollars.
The houses that we worked on in Frenchtown, New Jersey, ranged from a three-room tar paper shack up on the hill to a grand beauty downtown (see photo) recently featured in the New York Times Weekender Travel section. The owner of the latter home, once a grande dame of the then-hardscrabble riverside community, had fallen on hard times, and the structure was literally falling in around her. I believe we worked on this house for a week or so. We isolated unused portions of the house; sealed up major holes into the basement; replaced broken glass; and—I clearly remember this—removed over 50 5-gallon pails full of pigeon manure from the roof. We sealed the gaping holes in the roof with tin and plastic roof cement, and managed to temporarily stop the otherwise inevitable rapid decay of this home.
I am sure that the original owner has left us by now (she was in her 90s at the time, but she still came out on the upper roof to inspect our work). But it does my heart good to know that we allowed her at least a few more years in her childhood home. And this fine Italianate structure is still gracing the Frenchtown townscape This home is probably worth more now than NORWESCAP's entire budget at the time—one million dollars—and the entire state budget for low-income housing programs in 1976. I know there are things we could have done more professionally on this and the other homes we worked on. Those who eventually went in and fully restored this landmark probably laughed at our amateur repairs, but we did save a home and touched a life. That alone proves the value of our continued work—almost 50 years later.
This wonderful house became an inn for a while after Ms Apgar died but has recently been transformed into a residence for artists, creating a reading room for the public to use in April 2023...it is really looking good these days, including the landscaping...https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bridge-street-residency-reading-room-opening-tickets-617123572217
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