The George B. Sloan House, Oswego, NY

 

The George Sloan House in Oswego, 1866-1870. Principal façade (south).

The east façade.

 The west façade.

 

Today I am featuring the George B. Sloan House in Oswego. The house sits on a large piece of property and was built by one of Oswego's most notable citizens between 1866 and 1870. The pictures above display the three principal facades of the house, although trees, the bugbear of architectural photography, obscure some elements (argh!). The house's main street façade is the southern façade, which gives the impression that it follows the gable plan with an attached tower, but if you look at the eastern façade, you can see it is actually employing the side tower façade as we saw in the Norton house in New Haven. Unlike the Norton house, the orientation of the Sloan house does not feature the side tower façade as its principal entrance but focuses on the left side as the principal one. The center section is also not highly recessed as we saw in the Norton house, but who doesn't alter a plan a bit when building their own house? The massive projecting section attached to the right hand of the side tower plan also is a significant alteration. This historic photograph from a 1906 publication, Oswego Yesterday and Today, depicts the Sloan house as it looked at the beginning of the 20th century.

The house for being a creation of the 1860s and 70s is far more sedate than the Richardson-Bates house. The use of Ithaca limestone as the facing particularly gives it a powerful and monolithic appearance and the windows are deemphasized by a lack of dramatic surrounds or moldings. The brackets and cornice are spare, although the wood strips give the impression of a plain entablature. The deployment of brackets on the house is as spare as the cornice, only placing them in pairs at long intervals and for the support of the horizontal eaves beneath the gables. Still, the house has some interesting features that liven up the façade. The porch, not overly dramatic, employs the broken arch form of the 1870s that we saw in the Richardson-Bates house's balcony, and the door on the eastern façade has a delicate wooden awning with a tent roof. The Juliette balconies in the tower are a notable feature that add some horizontal emphasis on the top level. The west façade features a particularly large, glassed in conservatory. The stone laying itself is of interest as large blocks alternate with two thin blocks that cover the same space as a larger block; this gives the stonework the feel of being irregular fieldstone. The eastern façade features an elaborate two story bay window with deeply recessed panels. The principal entrance is in the tower's base. The following pictures show a few of the details.

 

The entrance on the eastern façade with awning. You might wonder why the roofs are painted red. Although I am not sure about this house's original coloration, Italianates often did not just employ grey slate as their finish, but used red tiles, blue slate, or even green slate. Tent roofs were particularly painted interesting colors. Historically, many were painted to look like striped canvas awnings.

A better view of the west façade showing the rear porch which is simpler in composition than the principal porch.

The house has much of its garden art and iron fencing intact, including its monogrammed posts.

The house also features an exuberant stick style carriage house/barn.

All in all the Sloan house is a fine example of Italianate, even with its quirky arrangement and conservative detailing.

The Richardson-Bates House, Oswego, NY

The Richardson-Bates House in Oswego, 1872/1889

Turning from Hillhouse Avenue to upstate New York, I decided to share a house I particularly enjoyed visiting in Oswego, NY. The Richardson-Bates house, which is now a museum, is a unique survivor; over 95% of the family's original belongings remain in the house, whose interiors have been preserved as they were when the family lived there. Because so many photographs of the interiors survive, curators have been able to replicate the rooms décor, which is an exceptional amount of knowledge to have been preserved about a house.

The house as it exists today was originally built as a wing attached to the family's old  wooden Gothic Revival house of the 1850s. The tower and the wing to the left (north) were constructed in 1872 by the architect Andrew Jackson Warner (1833-1910), an important architect practicing in Rochester, NY. The right hand wing (south) was constructed in 1889, when the wooden house was demolished. Although it wasn't built as such, the house follows the Davis and Downing's irregular plan, constructed in two stages. The new wing matched the existing construction well, giving the appearance of having been constructed at the same time. Perhaps the later construction of the right hand wing explains why it oddly comes forward, almost flush with the tower wall, rather than receding as was usual with this type of plan. These two photographs from a brochure published by the museum, show the house in its various stages of construction and come from a brochure handed out at the house.

The house in 1872 after the completion of the first stage. The old home can be seen to the right.

The house in 1889 after the demolition of the older home and construction of the final wing. A comparison between these historic photographs and contemporary views shows that the porches that once surrounded the bay window and the wing to the right of the door have been removed, making the house much more monolithic than it originally appeared.

The side view from the south looking north shows how the 1889 wing juts out almost to the level of the tower.

Some elements of the house's design reflect the practice of the 1850s, particularly the windows that simulate blind arcading and bell cotes in the tower. Other features are reflective of the 1870s. In the Richardson-Bates House, the entablature running underneath the brackets has been elaborated with decorative panels, the molding is much thicker and more deeply cut, and the window hood moldings are far heavier and more elaborate than we have seen. These are all qualities that became popular in the 60s and the 70s, especially the thickness and elaboration of hood moldings, which were often made of cast iron which allowed for greater elaboration at a cheaper price.

The house is not stuccoed, but is instead painted brick, a practice more common later; even the quoins, the alternating projecting blocks at the corner of a building, are simply brick laid to simulate stone. The brickwork has recessed sections in the front box window that simulate recessed paneling and there is some jutting brickwork on the chimney that appears to be an influence from the so-called Panel Brick style. The Panel Brick style is a term I have encountered in Bainbridge Bunting's Houses of Boston's Back Bay, and describes a practice popular in the 1870s of "utiliz[ing] brick masonry in which a variety of decorative patterns have been worked by means of projecting or receding brick panels" (188). The style also simulates classical elements like pilasters or entablatures in brick although they tend to be free in their expression of classical form. The picture below shows an example of this type of bricklaying on the library chimney.

Another aspect which this house draws from the vocabulary of the 70s is the balcony over the box window in the left wing. The balcony arch over the center section is a flat-topped trefoil arch, an arch broken and intersected by a square. This shape was less popular in earlier decades. Bunting calls the 70s one of the "decades of individualism" and architects were more willing to experiment with untraditional shapes, particularly for arches and hood moldings. This is a common one. It may derive from Romanesque doors which were flanked by pillars that altered the shape of the door, curving the sides to accommodate the pillars' capitals. The front door, in contrast, seems far more traditional, despite its over-scaled dimensions. The elaboration of the pilasters with panels (like the cornice) and the massive scale of the brackets reflect the exaggeration of features that characterize the 1870s.

The covered balcony.                                                 The front doors (that was my tour guide).

 

The interiors of the house are stunning; I ended up snapping a few photos before I found out I couldn't. Shhhh!

 

The entrance hall and staircase (left). The front doors had etched monogrammed frosted glass (right).

                                                               The parlor and library.

 

The stained glass transom over the front doors.

 

I had to take a final picture of one of the stupendous sphinxes guarding the main entrance. Garden sculpture such as this, usually of iron, was once very common in 19th century gardens, but much of it has been removed. Downing and Davis remarked that the garden vases and sculptures were part of the charm of Italy the Italianate style was meant to evoke. These sphinxes are part of that tradition, and their continued presence testifies to the excellent care the family spent on their house.