Arlington Place

Allentown is fortunate to have two Victorian residential “pocket” parks whose origins predate the time that Frederick Law Olmsted came to Buffalo to design its parkway system, but perhaps none is as successful as embodying the mid-19th century ideal of integrating nature with homes as is Arlington Park.

The green space was dedicated as city park land in 1866 and named Wadsworth Park after a popular mayor of Buffalo, James Wadsworth. The housing which sprang up around the green suggested country comforts and, even today, Arlington Park delivers the sense of another world removed from the bustle of the commercial streets just beyond. Residential parks such as Arlington Park are products of romantic philosophies which spread through all fields of 19th century thought and art, including landscape design. The intention was to gain a close communion with nature by bringing the country into the city.

The houses on the south side are the oldest on the park and the three brick Italianate gabled style homes built between 1867-1870 at No. 18, 24 and 30 Arlington stand far back from the street, sited on deep lots.

Wadsworth Park was renamed Arlington Park in 1885 to distinguish it from the street just outside the park that still bears the name Wadsworth.

At No. 12 Arlington Place stands a two-storey Empire cottage built late on the street, in 1878. The cottage is covered by a straight sided Mansard roof supported by a moulded wood curb. Flat-headed and corniced dormers surrounded by carved and capitaled pilasters expand the roof line beneath the curb. A two-storey bay on the east side of the house encorporates a T-shaped chimney stack with a delicately corbeled peak. A full entablature separates the stories. A tower with a pyramidical roof overhangs the front entryway, which is enclosed by a porch whose roof is encorporated in the entablature. The cottage is one of a very few small-scale homes built in the Second Empire style. The difficulty of adapting the Empire style to a diminutive form is beautifully overcome in this example.

At No. 18 Arlington is a two-storey Italianate structure built in 1867 which seems typical of the style, lovely but unremarkable, except that the house stands further back from the street than most of the others The illustration here, from a photo taken at the turn of the century, demonstrates that the sand was needed to contain the sprawling porch that once fronted the building and extended nearly to the street, it more closely comports with the county atmosphere of the park than does the contemporary urbane severity of the house today.

At No. 60 Arlington you will find yourself looking at the most unlikely and wonderful single residence in the City of Buffalo. Built in the 1850's by Richard Hatch, a stairbuilder by trade, the original structure is a two-storey Gothic Revival building of board-and-batten construction. First and second-storey windows are crowned by label-moulded brows beneath a steeply pitched gable roof. There are a handful of board-and-batten constructions left in the city, and this house is believed to be the only remaining residential example.

Sometime in the 1880's one Jane Heath, who also owned the Italianate house next door at No. 58 Arlington, added a porch to her home. What a porch it is! A string-moulded vergeboard drips like rich icing from the eaves of the root. A modillion-bracketed pediment encorporates an elaborate cut-out of twelve-spoke mandalas flying over a pattern-spool frieze interrupted by cut-out panels in an Alto Deutsche motif. Elaborately turned spindle posts are bracketed to the porch roof by jigsaw-cut brackets in an complex foliate design. The Stick-design balustrade recalls Chinese Chippendale fretwork. The Ring-and-vase spindle turnings of 17th century furniture are aped in the cut-out panels that cover the porch's base. The rich pastiche of cultural symbols and stylistic conceits has somehow made a perfect marriage with this exemplar of American Gothic. Miss Heath apparently liked her front porch so much that she had it copied some years later on No. 58.