1260 Potrero Ave
San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

Ohlandt Newlyweds House (Lydon,John and Bessie,House) - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance:
The house at 1260 Potrero Avenue appears eligible for the National Register of Historic Places at the local level of significance under Criterion C, architecture, in the context of the Victorian residential architecture of San Francisco, 1850-1900 Stick/Eastlake property type. The house is significant because it embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction; specifically, it is a distinctive but typically modest cottage in the San Francisco version of the Stick/Eastlake style. The period and date of significance are the same, the probable year of construction, 1888. In its original location, the house’s original exterior design, materials, and workmanship are intact except for the entry stairs and a replicated front door, the house is especially notable for its unusually intact interior, which includes faux burled walnut paneling and three marble mantelpieces.

The context of the Victorian residential architecture of San Francisco, 1850-1900, has been documented by Randolph Delahanty’s in the Victorian Style. After a pictorial overview, this exclusively San Francisco book discusses the raw land's division into lots and blocks, waves of building, row houses, the sequence of Victorian architectural styles, the sociology, interiors, construction and utilities, and the modern fate of these houses. This architecture is significant both because the 19th century architecture of San Francisco, the West Coast's then-largest metropolis, spread throughout the West, and because of its sheer quantity.

In 1975-1976 Judith Lynch Waldhorn surveyed most of San Francisco's surviving Victorian neighborhoods and found 13,487 Victorian structures, half of them "altered in some significant way." Of the total, nearly 6000 were Queen Anne, about 3600 were Stick/Eastlake, about 3100 were Italianate, and over 700 could not be classified into any specific style.

It is now recognized that the three principal San Francisco Victorian styles once thought to be strictly compartmentalized by date — Italianate in the 1860s and 1870s, Stick/Eastlake in the 1880s, and Queen Anne in the 1890s —actually overlapped and intermingled to a considerable degree. Delahanty, for instance, illustrates a Stick/Eastlake cottage built as late as 1897 (p. 163). The West's first architectural magazine, California Architect and Building News, was advocating and publishing cuts of Stick/Eastlake houses all through the 1880s, even though the journal had introduced Queen Anne in May 1882. Stick/Eastlake illustrations far outnumbered its Queen Anne cuts at least through 1887, and a strong representation continued in the magazine for several more years.

Thus, one possible division of the San Francisco Victorian residential architecture context would set each style as its own property type. The three major styles named above have been recognized as particularly San Franciscan at least since 1969, when the Junior League survey was published as Here Today, with text by Roger Olmsted and T. H. Watkins.

The Stick/Eastlake style (also known as Stick, San Francisco Stick, or just Eastlake) has been defined in print by Olmsted and Watkins, Scully, Gebhard, Waldhorn, the Woodbridge’s, and the McAlesters. The last-named report that townhouses [one of three principal subtypes they identify] are concentrated in San Francisco. There the Stick tradition developed its own distinctive idiom, which appears to have peaked in the 1880s, after the style was passing from fashion in the northeast." /4/ Because of San Francisco's urban density and narrow lot sizes the local version of Stick/Eastlake has two stories and a flat roofline.

with elaborate cornice and brackets. Its principal definer is the squared bay window. The other hallmarks which the McAlesters found always present are "vertical strips at sides of windows and sometimes on corner boards and wall, and "brackets which form upper extension of vertical strips. Features they found sometimes present are "false mansard roof," "false gable, wide band of^^trim under cornice, sometimes extends beneath brackets, frequently paneled, extended bracket[s]"sunburst or texture in gables," "cornice and brackets over bay windows," and "Eastlake trim."

In San Francisco Stick/Eastlake tends to have, on the one hand, features of the earlier Italianate style; pronounced vertical proportions especially in openings shape and ceiling height, a bold cornice with brackets, channel rustic siding, window tops shaped as segmental arches or straight across or with curved corners. On the other hand. Queen Anne features also may be present, such as a false o true gable end, sections of more complex siding, or a tower.

Another subtype in this context is the cottage. Unlike Newport 19th century San Francisco seems to have used the word 'cottage' to describe a modest one-story house Illustrations and contract notices in California Architect and Building News appear to make this distinction. The trim might be anywhere from extremely Sole to fairly elaborate, but the word seems to have connoted a workingman s residence. Pelton used it for most of the entries, even two-story 1882 pattern book Cheap Dwellings; his target audience was people of means," his goal "neatness, economy, and convenience. /6/ Delehanty also illustrates cottages, on pages 5, 103, 134, and 166. A. J. Downing had said that cottages should not imitate great styles. The subtype was clearly a non-stylistic building, the potential carrier of basic tradition. Truthfulness and simplicity must rule in cottage building, and to this end Downing attacks unnecessary ornament.