History of Washington Park's Architects
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Information from the National Register of Historic Places:Architects | Development Companies | Residents | History of Winston-Salem | Ludlow's Plan | The Park | Streetcars
The streetcar's location on Cascade Avenue was the reason for that avenue's large showy houses, as well as for the hundreds of less elegant dwellings which make up the neighborhood which formed around it. Most of the earliest houses in the district are traditional vernacular frame buildings, generally one story in height, either gable-sided or L-shaped in plan, with ornamentation found only in the turned posts and sawn brackets of the front porch, and perhaps in a shingled gable. Larger, two-story 1-houses were also built, and similar-sized houses in the Queen Anne style.
However, the Craftsman style of architecture is perhaps the most well represented style in the district. Many of the lots in the Washington Park neighborhood were purchased as speculative investments, and "pattern-book houses" were erected, so-called because their plans and designs were made available in popular magazines and publications. The Craftsman style with its broad eaves and porch was popular nationally and was well suited to the southern climate. The style, known as bungalow, was easily adaptable to a range of income levels as is reflected in the variety of bungalows found in the district. The buildings generally follow a limited number of floor plans but allow almost limitless individualism through the mixing of porch placement, complex roof configurations, knee braces, various styles of applied siding, including decorative half-timbering, and design of the porch's supports and balustrade.
The district also boasts a concentration of foursquare and two-story Colonial Revival dwellings. A study of deed abstracts shows that houses changed owners frequently in the 1910S and 1920S. Perhaps the increasing sophistication and prosperity of the city's middle class prodded them to move to two-story houses.
The houses constructed in Washington Park during the 1930s Depression were not modest, but represent a continuation of residential styles of the 1920s. Gambrel-roofed frame houses with large shed dormers creating full second stories and those in the Tudor Revival style dominated. The change in domestic architecture in the neighborhood came in the 1940s when building materials and styles changed. Houses continued to be built in the Tudor Revival style in 1940 and 1941 and even later, but box-like house forms began to take over.
By the 1950s a combination of factors led to new construction in the neighborhood. However, the concentration on de-sign which had been so much a part of pre-World War II architecture was not in evidence in the small speculative housing built after the war.
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