HomeMy WebLinkAboutItem 4b. REQUEST TO DESIGNATE THE PROPERTY AT 571 PISMO STREET, CURRENTLY LISTED AS A LOCAL REGISTER REOURCE, AS A LANDMARK IN THE CITY'S INVENTORY OF HISTORIC RESOURCES
CULTURAL HERITAGE COMMITTEE AGENDA REPORT
SUBJECT: REQUEST TO DESIGNATE THE PROPERTY AT 571 PISMO STREET,
CURRENTLY LISTED AS A LOCAL REGISTER RESOURCE, AS A LANDMARK IN THE
CITY’S INVENTORY OF HISTORIC RESOURCES
BY: Eva Wynn, Assistant Planner FROM: Brian Leveille, Principal Planner
Phone Number: (805) 781-7172 Phone Number: (805) 781-7166
Email: ewynn@slocity.org Email: bleveille@slocity.org
APPLICATION NUMBER(S): HIST-0944-2025
PROJECT ADDRESS(ES): 571 Pismo Street
APPLICANT: Ben and Saskia Winter REPRESENTATIVE: James Papp, PhD
RECOMMENDATION
Make a recommendation to the City Council on the property’s qualification to be included
in the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources as a Historic Landmark.
1.0 BACKGROUND
Ben and Saskia Winter, represented by James Papp, have requested that the property at
571 Pismo Street be designated as a Landmark in the City’s Inventory of Historic
Resources (previously called Master List Resource), as the George and Cordelia McCabe
House. The property is currently listed as a Local Register Resource (previously called
Contributing). The applicant has provided an evaluation of the property and its eligibility
for Landmark status (Attachment A), prepared by James Papp, PhD, Historian and
Architectural Historian.
2.0 DISCUSSION
2.1 Site and Setting
The property is located on the southern side of
Pismo Street within the western section of the
Old Town Historic District. The residence sits
between two Landmarks, the Patton House at
1407 Nipomo St and the Biddle House at 559
Pismo St. The Old Town Historic District was
created to encompass one of the oldest
residential neighborhoods and most of the
development was done around the turn of the
20th century. The high concentration of 100-
Meeting Date: 2/23/2026
Item Number: 4b
Time Estimate: 60 minutes
Map 1 - Property Location
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Item 4b
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Cultural Heritage Committee Report – February 23, 2026
year-old or older residences establishes predominant architectural and visual character
of the District. The District has many examples of High Victorian architecture, including
several variations, such as Queen Anne, Italianate, Stick and Gothic Revival influences,
along with more modest structures with simpler styles including Neo-classic Row House,
Folk Victorian, and Craftsman Bungalow. Most of the houses in this district were designed
and constructed by the homes’ first occupants or by local builders and were influenced
by architectural pattern books of the time period (Historic Preservation Program
Guidelines § 5.2.1).
2.2 The McCabe House
The residence at 571 Pismo was built in or prior to 1891, as evidenced by the December
1891 Sanborn Map of San Luis Obispo (Attachment A, pp 6.). George and Cordelia
McCabe owned the house until 1902 when the property was transferred to S. T. Coiner
from whom it changed hands several times in the 20th century. The residence was built in
the Eastlake style and the property is currently on the City’s Inventory of Historic
Resources. The property was listed as a Contributing Resource in 1983 and is now
recognized as a Local Register Resource under the Historic Preservation Ordinance,
updated 2026. The City’s Historic File (Attachment C) describes the property as Colonial
style architecture with Queen Anne influences. The submitted application expands on the
architectural style of the residence and how it was influenced over the years . The
response to staff’s questions (Attachment B) further elaborates why the resource
embodies Eastlake architecture, opposed to Colonial/Queen Anne, and discusses how
the remaining original features enable the structure to communicate its significance. The
notable features that communicate the style of the residence include the single-story
double bay-front Eastlake cottage with sitting porch and the pierced column portico. The
application describes both features as rare, and potentially the last example of pierced
columns on the Central Coast. The original design of the residence is traceable to a photo
from 1895 or 1896, before any notable alterations occurred (Figure 2).
Figure 1 - McCabe House circa 2025
Figure 2 - McCabe House circa 1895 or 1896
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3.0 EVALUATION
Pursuant to §14.01.030 of the City’s Historic Preservation Ordinance (HPO), the Cultural
Heritage Committee shall make a recommendation to the City Council on applications for
designation of Landmark Resources after evaluating the application against the eligibility
criteria for designation. A Landmark resource, defined in the Historic Preservation
Ordinance § 14.01.020.28, is the “is the highest level of individual local designation and
may be applied to a historic resource that has been found significant at the local, state,
or national level.” In order to be eligible for designation, a Landmark shall be at least fifty
years old, demonstrate significance under at least one of the criteria outlined in Section
14.01.060, and retain a high degree of integrity. The designation is reserved to those
properties that are of the greatest importance at the local, regional, state, or national level
in terms of age, architectural or historical significance, rarity, or association with important
persons or events in the City’s past that meet the eligibility and significance criteria.
3.1 Significance Criteria
In the City of San Luis Obispo, historic resources must meet at least one criterion set forth
in §14.01.060 of the Historic Preservation Ordinance to be eligible for inclusion on the
Inventory of Historic Resources and retain a sufficient or high level of integrity, depending
on the designation type as Local Register or Landmark. The significance criteria in
§14.01.060 include Events, Persons, Architecture, and Information Potential.
Events. Associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the
broad patterns of local or regional history or the cultural heritage of California or
the United States.
The evaluation states that the property is not significant due to its association with any
events that have made a significant contribution to local, state, or national cultural
heritage.
Persons. Associated with the lives of persons important to local, California, or
national history.
The evaluation states that the property is not significant due to its association with the
lives of persons important to local, state, or national history.
Architecture. Embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, region, or
method of construction, or represents the work of an architect or design
professional of merit or possesses high artistic values.
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The evaluation (Attachment A) describes that the McCabe House meets the architectural
criterion as a unique example of a late 19th century double-bay-front Eastlake cottage with
a sitting porch framed by pieced columns of extreme rarity. The evaluation states that “the
house embodies two types of construction, the double-bay-fronted Eastlake cottage and
the pierced-column portico” (pg. 45). Distinct characteristics include the character defining
Eastlake square bays, including “the five sash windows on each, the panels below and
above the windows, and the vertical edge-molding of each bay,” and porch between the
bays (pg. 53). The pierced-column portico is described as a rare and delicate feature,
which appears more often on demolished buildings than surviving buildings (pg. 47).
Information Potential: It has yielded, or has the potential to yield, information
important to the prehistory or history of the local area, California, or the nation.
The evaluation states that “the pierced columns on the McCabe House are likely the last
used on the Central Coast and possibly California, are exceedingly rare or possibly
unique examples of capital-free Eastlake pierced columns, and are likely to yield
information important in architectural history” (pg. 46). The form is described as the “last
use of the pierced-column portico in the region (pg. 2).
The request to list the property at 571 Pismo St as a Landmark is based on the
architectural criterion of designation and makes an argument that the pierced columns
are likely to yield information important in architectural history. The application indicates
the property is not significant for its association with Events, or Persons. Based on the
property’s current designation as a Local Register Resource and supported by the
submitted application, the subject property meets at least one criterion set forth in
§14.01.060 of the Historic Preservation Ordinance.
3.2 Historic Context
As stated in the evaluation, the McCabe House does not have any known association
with important persons or events, so the significance of the residence is related to its
original late 19th century architectural style and features (pg. 44). The 2025 Historic
Context Statement (HCS) provides general context for listing resources, and information
relating to specific development themes, including late 19th century residential
development that should be considered when evaluating resources. Late 19th century
residential properties significant under architectural criteria should retain integrity of
location, materials, workmanship, and feeling, although, it is expected that the setting will
have been compromised by later development. Wood frame buildings from this period
should retain good integrity, although minor alterations are acceptable (HCS, pg. 42).
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3.3 Degree of Integrity
According to the HPO and consistent with the National Register Bulletin No. 15, integrity
is defined as “the ability of a historic resource to convey its significance, typically
evidenced by the retention of attributes that existed during a resource’s period of
significance and including location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and
association” (HPO 14.01.020 (26)). The National Register Bulletin (pg. 44) provides that
integrity is a subjective judgment that must be grounded in an understanding of the
properties physical features and how they relate to the significance.
The property is currently listed as a Local Register Resource in the City’s Inventory, which
requires a resource to be found significant under at least one of the criteria described in
Section 14.01.060 of the HPO and that the resource retains sufficient integrity to convey
its significance. To be included in the City’s Inventory as a Landmark, the resource must
also meet at least one of the criteria, but is distinguished from Local Register properties
as having the greatest importance at the local, regional, state, or national level in terms
of age, architectural or historical significance, rarity, or association with important persons
or events in the City’s past, and needs to retain a high degree of integrity. The submitted
application (Attachment A) evaluates the integrity of the resource based on the National
Register seven aspects of integrity evaluation criteria as follows:
Location: The resource retains its original location, as verified on the 1891 Sanborn maps
(pg. 51).
Setting: The setting has largely remained unchanged as a suburban residential setting.
Houses have been developed in lots around the residence, many of which were built in
the 19th century, and the property retains much of its original viewshed (pg. 52).
Design:
The design of the character-defining Eastlake square bays remains the same,
including the five sash windows on each, the panels below and above the windows,
and the vertical edge-molding of each bay,
The design of the character-defining porch between the bays remains the same,
including the pierced columns and balustrade railing, but excepting the missing
frieze screen, four missing of the twelve original fretwork column inserts, and
missing upright balusters with their fretwork corbels.
The design of the character-defining frieze molding and its ten supporting corbels,
flat porch roof, and porch gablet with bargeboard incising (all Eastlake features),
as well as gable bracket and vertical plank decoration (borrowed from Swiss
Revival) has been replaced by a hip porch roof.
The design of the character-defining side gables has been replaced with a chalet-
style front-gabled roof, possibly circa 1925 with the filling in of the southwest
façade U (not a character-defining feature) or possibly circa 1933 after a roof fire.
The design of the character-defining Eastlake solid door, with molding and incising,
has been replaced by a two-panel two-pane door.
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The wall design throughout the front and side façades of character-defining shiplap
and one-over-one sash windows remains (pg. 53).
Materials: Retained materials include shiplap siding, sash windows, panels, molding,
columns, most column fretwork, and raining. The original materials that are no longer
present include the front door, balusters and their fretwork faux corbels, some fretwork,
corbels, frieze molding, frieze screen, gablet siding and bargeboard, and gable bracket
(pg. 55).
Workmanship: The key pieces of individual handwork, including the pierced columns and
most of the column fretwork, are retained, with the fretwork faux corbels of the balusters
lost (pg. 55).
Feeling: The submitted application states that the “McCabe House retains its location and
setting and the design, material, and workmanship of its pierced columns and the majority
of the design, materials, and workmanship of its double-bay-front Eastlake architecture,”
which allows the structure to convey the aesthetic sense of its time (pg. 55).
Association: The house is not associated with any significant persons or events,
“therefore association is not relevant” (pg. 55).
The evaluation’s analysis of integrity discusses each aspect of integrity and how the
McCabe House satisfies or partially satisfies that aspect. The evaluation describes that
the location and setting retain integrity, but the design, materials, and workmanship seem
to be only partially retained. The information provided is sufficient to confirm the McCabe
house meets the criteria to remain a Local Register resource, but the removal of
character-defining features calls into question whether the residence retains a high
degree of integrity. The Committee should consider whether the application contains
sufficient information to determine if the degree of integrity justifies elevating the resource
to a Landmark. The evaluation itself states that “the replacement of porch roof, gablet,
and side gables is a substantial loss to the McCabe House’s ability to convey its
significance as an Eastlake façade,” but that the McCabe House “retains the chief part of
its double-bay-fronted Eastlake design to convey the significance of the type” (Attachment
A, pg. 54). The committee should consider in discussion whether alterations to character-
defining design and removal of materials affect the overall feeling of the structure , and if
the integrity retained rises to the high level required for Landmark designation.
3.4 Conclusion
The submitted application requests the property’s inclusion in the Inventory as a
Landmark for its embodiment of a rare double-bay-fronted Eastlake cottage with pierced
column portico. The evaluation provides important background on the property and
appears to confirm the property’s current designation as a Local Register Resource,
affirming the resource qualifies for individual listing under the HPO, as updated in 2026,
and provides evidence the property’s current status is also likely warranted with sufficient
integrity to convey its significance.
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The Committee should discuss whether the residence is of the greatest importance at the
local, regional, state, or national level in terms of age, architectural or historical
significance, rarity, or association with important persons or events in the City’s past and
retains a high level of integrity; and make a recommendation as to whether the property
should be included as a Landmark Resource in the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources.
4.0 ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINATION
This project is categorically exempt from the provisions of the California Environmental
Quality Act (CEQA). Inclusion of the subject property on the Landmark list of the City’s
Inventory of Historic Resources does not have the potential for causing a significant effect
on the environment and so is covered by the general rule described in §15061(b)(3) of
the CEQA Guidelines.
6.0 ACTION ALTERNATIVES
1. Make a recommendation to City Council on the property’s qualification to be included
in the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources as a Landmark, noting the elements of
the property which satisfy Evaluation Criteria and high degree of integrity.
2. Recommend to the City Council that the property’s Local Register status should be
retained and the property not be designated as a Landmark in the City’s Inventory of
Historic Resources, based on the finding that the property does not satisfy Evaluation
Criteria for a Landmark Historic Resource and/or does not retain a high degree of
integrity.
3. Continue consideration of the request with direction to the applicant and staff on
pertinent issues.
7.0 ATTACHMENTS
A. Landmark Application and Evaluation, 571 Pismo St (James Papp, PhD)
B. Response to Questions (James Papp, PhD)
C. Historic File – 571 Pismo St
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1
Master List Application
The George and Cordelia McCabe House
571 Pismo Street
I. Summary Conclusion
The George and Cordelia McCabe House at 571 Pismo Street in the Old Town Historic
District has three points of significance and extreme rarity, embodying the
• single-story double-bay-front Eastlake cottage with sitting porch
• pierced-column portico
and also possessing
• photo documentation of its earliest appearance to minute detail
Eastlake was the dominant late-nineteenth-century domestic architecture of Northern
California and the Central Coast and is the dominant architecture of the Old Town Historic
District’s nineteenth-century buildings, with 41 percent of them being Eastlake designs.
The double-bay-front cottage is an important Eastlake adaptation with roots in full-width-
front-porch Greek Revival cottages of the mid nineteenth century, transferred through later
Italianate cottages. There are only four double-bay-front Eastlake cottages in the City of San
Luis Obispo, the other three of which have been Master Listed —the Goldtree-McCaffrey
Attachment A - Landmark Application and Evaluaiton
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2
Building, Lewin House, and most recently Dana-Barneberg House—and there appears to be
only one other double-bay-front Eastlake in San Luis Obispo County: 1905 Vine Street in
Paso Robles. Those with sitting as distinct from entry porches —the case with all five San
Luis Obispo County examples—appear to be limited to the Central Coast, with one extant
example in Santa Barbara, making this a historically significant regional form.
To compound the rarity of the McCabe House, there appear to be only two houses with
pierced columns in the City of San Luis Obispo and five in the entire county, and the McCabe
House is one of only two in the county displaying fretwork within its piercing.
It also appears to be the sole
Eastlake on the Central
Coast, possibly California,
using pierced columns—a
form more associated with
Gothic Revival and Italianate
architecture of the 1850s
through 1870s. As the last
use of the pierced-column
portico in the region, the
McCabe House fulfills criteria
for designation as a
California Historical
Landmark.
The McCabe House’s pierced-column portico may also, because of its lateness, yield
information important to architectural history, a National Register criterion.
Finally, a previously unidentified photograph at the History Center of San Luis Obispo
County, developed from a glass plate negative, records the McCabe family with the McCabe
House probably in 1895 or 1896. It is rare for historic buildings to survive, ra rer still for
historic photographs of demolished buildings to survive, which is why communities
provide care for the preservation of both. Detailed early photographs of extant buildings
that can be still be associated with them, however, are scarcer than hen’s teeth, as such
photos are generally family possessions that become dissociated from the structure. The
practical advantage of such a photograph is that it can be used for meticulous restoration to
Secretary of the Interior Standards, which is the inte ntion of the current owners of the
McCabe House, Ben and Saskia Winter.
None of the double-bay-fronted Eastlake cottages in San Luis Obispo is in perfect condition.
The Goldtree House, originally an Italianate cottage later given an Eastlake façade, was still
later converted into a two-story apartment building. The Lewin House’s roof and southwest
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3
façade were reconfigured in the early twentieth century, and the Dana -Barneberg House
acquired canted side bays, lost its roof cresting, and was moved to a new location. The
McCabe House also had its roof reconfigured in the mid 1920s or early 1930s, impacting its
design, materials, and workmanship.
Nonetheless, it retains the integrity to convey the significance of its innovative double -bay-
front Eastlake form and rare pierced columns in their sitting porch setting. In addition,
because of its early photographic documentation, both these aspects can be further
restored to Secretary of the Interior Standards.
The McCabe House circa 1895 or 1896. George and Cordelia McCabe are seated on the porch,
with Leslie, Mabel, and Clarence standing in the garden. Courtesy of the History Center of San
Luis Obispo County.
Eastlake architecture is particularly important to preserve, restore, research, and celebrate,
as the recognition of this influential style on the West Coast has long been marginalized as a
result of the East Coast architectural historian Vincent Scully’s insistence —in a bizarre
footnote to his 1971 book The Shingle Style and the Stick Style—that Eastlake architecture
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never existed. This inveigled the seminal 1980s writers of architecture guides for the
burgeoning preservation movement to proscribe mention of Eastlake architecture from
their books, despite the fact that they included numerous images of it. As a result, Eastlake
is never mentioned in the “Architectural Character” of the Old Town Historic District ’s
description in San Luis Obispo’s Historic Preservation Program Guidelines, despite its
dominance as a style.
Eastlake architecture is alive and well and living in San Luis Obispo, and the George and
Cordelia McCabe House—an exemplar of the double-bay-front Eastlake Cottage with
pierced columns apparently unique on the Central Coast—should be added with its sister
structures to the Master List .
Submitted on 1 December 2025 by
James Papp, PhD | Historian and Architectural Historian, City & County of San Luis Obispo
964 Chorro Street, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 | 805 -470-0983
papp.architectural.history@gmail.com
on behalf of Ben and Saskia Winter
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Contents
I. Summary Conclusion 1
II. Timeline 6
III. Historical Context: The Strange Rise of Eastlake Architecture 9
IV. Pictorial: San Francisco Eastlakes 14
V. San Luis Obispo Eastlakes 15
VI. Arroyo Grande Easlakes 15
VII. San Luis Obispo’s Lost Eastlakes 16
VIII. Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom’s Eastlake Designs 17
IX. Historiographic Context: The Strange Erasure of Eastlake Architecture 18
X. The Development of the Double-Bay-Fronted Eastlake Cottage 22
XI. Pierced Columns in American Architecture 35
XII. The McCabe House: Period of Significance 43
XIII. Significance 45
XIV. Integrity 51
XV. Conclusion 58
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II. Timeline
ca. 1891 Construction of the McCabe House, based on its presence in the December
1891 Sanborn Map of San Luis Obispo (below). A 1 March 1891 transfer
between G. W. McCabe et al and the Bank of San Luis Obispo (County Deed
Index) may be related to a loan for construction. The block is not included in
the 1888 Sanborn Map. Although we know from E. S. Glover’s Bird’s Eye View
of San Luis Obispo, California that there were houses on it by 1877, there may
have been too few to interest the Sanborn Company.
Above: detail from a panoramic photo
taken from Cerro San Luis, early
1890s: St. Stephen’s at left, Nipomo
Street School at center (on what is now
Emerson Park), McCabe House the last
house on the right, before the vacant
lot where the Biddle House will be built
in 1893. Courtesy of the History Center
of San Luis Obispo County.
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ca. 1895 The McCabes are photographed in front of their house, George and Cordelia
on the porch, the children—Leslie, Mabel, and Clarence, about 12, 5, and 11 —
in the front garden. George McCabe, a blacksmith and wagonmaker, would
later go into the automobile business (“A Proposition : Two Trustees and a
Well Known Businessman Meet ,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, 27 May 1899, p. 4).
1896 Feb 11 A surprise party is held at “the residence of Mr. and Mrs. G. W. McCabe on
Pismo Street,” leading to the first press confirmation of their presence at the
house (“Surprise Party,” Tribune, 12 Feb. 1896, p. 2).
1899 May 12 A 1:30 pm fire at “G. W. McCabe’s residence on Pismo Street” causes $49.25 of
damage (“From Chief Payne’s Report,” Tribune, 20 July 1899).
1902 Dec. 2 George McCabe et ux transfer the property at 571 Pismo to S. T. Coiner, local
manager of the San Luis Implement Company (County Deed Index; “Getting
to the Front,” Tribune, 26 Aug. 1903, p. 1).
1905 Jan Harry A. Truesdale purchases the McCabe House from S. T. Coiner (“Coiner
Place Sold,” Tribune, 11 Jan. 1905, p. 2). Truesdale would later become
County Auditor but was at that time a postman, one of the first three selected
by civil service examination for the new free delivery in San Luis (“Carriers
Are Selected,” Tribune, 21 Jan. 1904, p. 1).
1911 Jan 28 The seven-room house and lot at 571 Pismo are advertised for sale for $2,450
between 28 Jan. and 2 Mar. in the Daily Telegram. It is purchased by Stephen
Albert “Bert” Call and Georgia Alice Smith Call (William Cattaneo, Jr., “Time
Traveling,” Telegram-Tribune, 10 Dec. 1978, p. 27). Members of the family will
occupy the house till 1970 (Polk’s San Luis Obispo City Directory, 1970).
1914 The Call family pays off the property’s mortgage (Cattaneo, op. cit.).
1925 Jul 21 S. A. Call applies for a permit for $1,000 of unspecified repairs to the
residence (San Luis Obispo Building Permits Collection [1906 –1927], Cal
Poly Special Collections).
1926 Apr The 1926 Sanborn Map book of San Luis Obispo shows the U on the
southwest side façade of the house filled in and a pushout added to the rear
of the northeast side façade.
1933 Gas water heater explosion at 2 am causes fire that does $1,000 damage,
“igniting the roof and back rooms of the home … while the city fire
department prevented spread of the blaze into the front part of the home”
(“Home Damaged in Night Fire,” Telegram, 27 June 1933, p. 8).
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1937 Feb Aerial photograph by US Army for US Department of Agriculture shows the
current front-gabled roof on the house (AXH-1937, frame 39, UCSB Aerial
Photography Collection).
1953 Aug 16 Bert and Georgia Call celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary with fifty
guests at their house at 571 Pismo (“Golden Wedding Anniversary,” 22 Aug.
1953, Telegram-Tribune, p. 2).
1970 Polk’s San Luis Obispo City Directory lists Joy Call living at 571 Pismo, the last
year a Call family member is recorded occupying the house.
1975 Feb 15 A photograph by Wayne Nicholls of part of a La Fiesta float in the front yard
of the McCabe House in the Telegram-Tribune records the pierced columns,
column fretwork, balustrades, balustrade fretwork, and porch frieze screen
(see p. 50).
1983 Aug 16 571 Pismo is added to the Contributing List in the Old Town Historic District.
ca 1986 Photograph by Barron Wiley (below) shows the McCabe House with missing
frieze screen, balusters intact but missing their fretwork, as well as fretwork,
bases, and caps missing from the columns.
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III. Historical Context: The Strange Rise of Eastlake Architecture
The Englishman Charles Locke Eastlake (1836 –1906) trained as an architect , but his
celebrity would come from furniture design and testy commentary about architecture,
interior decoration, and the shape of common objects. He was twenty-eight when the
Cornhill published his essay “The Fashion of Furniture.” The Queen then commissioned a
series of articles called “Hints on Household Taste,” from 1865 to 1866. In 1868 Longmans
published in book form Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other D etails,
for the first time includ ing Eastlake’s drawings of historic furniture and his own designs .
Eastlake promoted traditional craftsmanship and form following function. He inveighed
against false structural features (“It is not at all uncommon to see a would -be Doric or
Corinthian shaft shorn of its base and actually hanging to the side of a house until the
pedestal (which, of course, will also be made of cement) is completed”1), extension tables
(“It must depend for its support on some contrivance that is not consistent with the
material of which it is made” [75]), and French polish (“because the surface of wood thus
lacquered can never change its color or acquire the rich hue that is one of the chief charms
of old cabinetwork” [84]).
Above left: Eastlake’s sketch of a contemporary “telescope table” with “planks of polished oak
or mahogany laid upon an insecure framework of the same material , and supported by four
gouty legs, ornamented by the turner with moldings which look like inverted cups and saucers
piled upon an attic baluster” (p. 67, 1869 edition); right, his sketch of a Jacobean table “of a
very simple but picturesque design, […] the moldings […] distributed in the legs to give variety
of outline without weakening them [… ,] wi th a delicate bas-relief of ornament” (69–70).
1. Charles L. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (London:
Longmans, Green, 1869), p. 29.
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The historic furniture he illustrated was mostly early-seventeenth-century. His own designs
for furniture were in what he called the “Early English” style, also pursued by his
contemporary architect and furniture designer William Burges . They were solid, planar,
and—apart from decorative flourishes of Romanesque arches, turned supports, corbels,
bosses, rosettes, perforation, incising, and geometric borders —angular. Joinery was
exposed, and flat surfaces of oak allowed to speak for themselves, with decoration reserved
for edges. Eastlake’s designs were explicitly an attempt to rationalize, simplify, and make
furniture muscular as well as plain. “[O]bjects intended for real and daily service, such as a
table which has to bear the weight of heavy books and dishes, or a sofa on which we may
recline at full length, ought not to look light and elegant, but strong and comely” (146).
Eastlake was also making an effort to nationalize design using English models, much as
Norman Shaw was doing with Queen Anne architecture at the same time.
Eastlake’s designs and ideas caught on in America, where their flat surfaces, straight lines,
and lathe-made spindles and finials were susceptible to the new mass manufacture along
less substantial lines. Eastlake fought back: In a preface to the expanded fourth edition of
Hints on Household Taste in 1878, he warned, “I find American tradesmen continually
advertising what they are pleased to call ‘Eastlake’ furniture, with the production of which I
have had nothing whatever to do, and for the taste of which I should be very sorry to be
considered responsible.”
By 1878, however, America had already invented Eastlake architecture. Charles Eastlake’s
furniture looked like buildings. (John Gloag says the same of Norman Shaw’s oak bookcase
for the 1862 International Exhibition: “architectural composition […] masquerading as a
piece of furniture [Victorian Taste {New York: Harper, 1973}, p. 92].) The term Eastlake was
used of architecture in the press as early as 1875 (“the Renaissance, or more properly at the
present day the Eastlake architecture” [“A Great Modern Invention Is Building,” Scranton
Morning Republican, 28 Oct. 1875, p. 3]) and was in common architectural usage by the
1880s (in William T. Comstock’s Modern Architectural Designs and Details [1881], for
instance, and Samuel and Joseph Newsom’s Picturesque California Homes [1884]).
Yet Eastlake architecture starts as early as 1871, with Philadelphia architect Frank
Furness’s winning entry for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Architectural
historian James O’Gorman in Three American Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright,
1865–1915 laments it as “a building blatantly mixing forms from a variety of sources” and
“a textbook example of eclecticism” without ever identifying its clear organizing aesthetic:
Charles Eastlake’s newly published furniture designs.2 Mansardic roofs, arches, columns,
corbels, scenic plaques, geometric decoration, and joiner -like exterior elements are all from
Eastlake’s book, as can be seen in comparisons on the following page .
2. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), pp. 16–17.
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Above: designs for a cabinet and a library bookcase by Charles Locke Eastlake, plates 1 and 25
in his book Hints on Household Taste, 1868; below left: the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts, designed by Frank Furness in 1871 and completed in 1876. Below right: Hilamon Spencer
Laird’s Masonic Temple, San Luis Obispo, 1875.
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Furness went on to be the leading exponent of Eastlake on the East Coast, but on the West
Coast, one can see Hilamon Spencer Laird, San Luis Obispo’s first longstanding professional
architect, adapting, for the town’s second Masonic Temple, the basic form of Eastlake’s
cabinet and bookcase through Furness’s Pennsylvania Academy building, along with
Eastlake decorative principles like borders of bosses and perforations (the latter doubling
as basement illumination) and motifs (like the sunburst at the street façade crest). This
plain, muscular building put San Luis Obispo at the cutting edge of the new architecture.
Wood construction lends itself to Eastlake architecture, given its origin in furniture and
preference for geometric shapes, and it is not surprising that Eastlake would come to
dominate the wood architecture of California. Queen Anne architecture, in contrast, has its
origins in English brick, hung tiles, and plaster, and its curvatures and Neoclassical motifs
had to be adapted to wood.
Eastlake architecture developed, as we see, at the beginning of the 1870s; Queen Anne
architecture was introduced to America by Henry Hobson Richardson with the William
Watts Sherman House in Newport, RI in 1875 –1876; and the firm of McKim, Mead, and
Bigelow (later McKim, Mead, and White) introduces Colonial Revival with Oakswood in
Lennox, MA in 1877–1878.
Good rules of thumb for distinguishing Eastlake, Queen Anne, and Colonial Revival are that
• Eastlake, in urban circumstances, generally has a flat, mansardic, or hip roof (in
suburban circumstances side gables), often with a diminutive or decorative front-
facing gable or gablet; Queen Anne, a large open gable, front-facing; Colonial, a front-
facing closed gable or open-pediment gable, usually accompanying a hip roof, or a hip
roof with central hip dormer
• Eastlake, square towers and bays; Queen Anne, round ones; and Colonial Revival,
octagonal or canted ones
• Eastlake, spindle columns; Queen Anne, Ionic; and Colonial Revival, Tuscan
• Eastlake, geometric friezes; Queen Anne, figural; and Colonial Revival, blank
• Eastlake, plain sash windows and occasionally square and usually stained perimeter
panes; Queen Anne, plain sash windows (occasionally a Juliet balcony and/or a
Palladian window); and Colonial Revival, diamond or square panes in the upper sash
• Eastlake, arches; Queen Anne and Colonial Revival, porticoes
• Eastlake, vertical corbels; Queen Anne, horizontal modillions; Colonial, plain soffits
• Eastlake, porch frieze screens; Queen Anne and Colonial Revival, none
• The sunburst pattern is a specifically Eastlake motif, possibly with its origin in an
early seventeenth-century chair at the Earl of Mount Edgecumbe’s Cotehele,
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illustrated by Charles Eastlake in plate 11 of Hints on Household Taste (detail below)
and still extant in the great hall at Cotehele, now belonging to the National Trust.
At the discretion of the architect, builder, client, or local practic e, decorative elements were
occasionally borrowed from one style to another, but , in general, stylistic vocabularies were
consistent. Charges of eclecticism and mixing forms tend to come from a present -day
inability to listen to nineteenth-century architectural vocabulary rather than a nineteenth-
century inability to speak it clearly.
Though Eastlake was initially a reform style emphasizing strength, simplicity, and form -
following-function, it is the style people think of as “Victorian” and cluttered , from the
propensity of builders and clients to add more—and more elaborate—spindles, borders,
bosses, rosettes, moldings, stained glass perimeter panes, and wall shingles. Some Eastlake
buildings reveal a compulsion to cover every surface and extend decoration from every line
or point, from ridge cresting to frieze screens and ascending or descending finials. Samuel
and Joseph Newsom’s 1884–1886 Carson Mansion in Eureka is the apotheosis of this
tendency. (Pure Eastlake, the Carson Mansion is often called Queen Anne, as Queen Anne is
the only late-nineteenth-century architectural style most people have heard of.)
Eastlake, like Queen Anne, fell from fashion in San Luis Obispo soon after the turn of the
century. Colonial Bungalow architecture, which came late to California (“Our Colonial
Craze,” San Francisco Examiner, 13 Sep. 1891, p. 13), and lacked the multipliable decorative
features of Eastlake, became the latest reform architecture for simplifying and streamlining.
It dominated from the early 1900s to the early 1910s in San Luis Obispo, interspersed and
influenced by the Prairie School, before being displaced by yet another simplifying,
muscular, back-to-basics architecture: the California Bungalow.
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IV. Pictorial: San Francisco Eastlakes
V. San Luis Obispo Eastlakes
Erickson House (above); Shipsey House (right)
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Biddle House
VI. Arroyo Grande Eastlakes
Heritage House Museum (126 S. Mason)
McKennon House
Above: Pitkin-Conrow House; left: 127 S.
Mason
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VII. San Luis Obispo’s Lost Eastlakes
Above: Cortesi House; below: a house once on the Cuesta Grade, photographed 1912
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VIII. Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom’s Eastlake Designs
Above: a design advertising “S. and
J. C. Newsom, Eastlake Archts.”
From their pattern book
Picturesque California Homes,
1884; left, the Newsom’s 1884–
1886 Carson Mansion, Eureka
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IX. Historiographic Context: The Strange Erasure of Eastlake Architecture
Eastlake disappeared from architectural historiography through the hubris of an influential
scholar dismissing something he knew nothing about in a footnote to an essay about
something else that, unlike most footnotes, everyone read. In his 1955 dissertation–based
The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright ,
Vincent Scully transformed a fabric into an architectural style. The nature of academia is to
look, ex post facto, for patterns that people were not aware of at the time, yet it is as
dangerous to deny the self-awareness and intentionality of people in the past as it is of
people from other cultures, by assuming that either is more primitive than the analyst.
Suddenly, every building covered with unpainted shingles was being labeled Shingle Style
as if that had more reality than the Colonial Revival, Queen Anne, or other styles their
architects or builders thought they were creating. Worse, sometimes the shingles were put
on later, or unpainted shingles were painted, or they were merely a fungible option to other
fabrics on a model, instead of clapboard or novelty siding.
Next, in 1971, Scully combined his shingle book with an essay on a phenomenon he had
noticed in some Swiss Revival architecture, “the development in [American] wooden
domestic architecture between 1840 and 1876” of asymmetry and external articulation of
framing ([New Haven: Yale] p. 2).3 Having shown his facility for catchy names, Scully
decided to call this the Stick Style, and indeed the name caught on —so well that people
forgot that what he was explicitly and admittedly describing was Swiss Revival, one of the
earliest and most persistent and influential revival styles, which from England to America
and back to Continental Europe.
Scully includes no single example of Eastlake architecture in his “Stick” section, but
someone must have suggested that one example (the Bassett House, New Haven [fig. 17])
was Eastlake (it isn’t), because in an accompanying footnote (note 90, p. lv) Scully
denounces the notion that Eastlake was a recognized architectural style in nine teenth-
century America. In point of fact, Eastlake architecture was much designed in, written
about, and hugely popular, particularly on the West Coast. A search of newspaper.com’s
database shows the term “Eastlake cottage” mentioned 1,687 times in California
newspapers between 1881 and 1900, compared to 245 times in the rest of the United
States. In contrast, during the same period “Queen Anne cottage” was mentioned 12,086
times in the rest of the United States and only 458 times in California. So a Yale -based
architectural historian might be excused for not having seen much Eastlake architecture —
though not for denying its existence.
3. The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Downing to the Origins of
Wright (New Haven: Yale UP, 1971), p. 2.
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In Footnote 90, Scully, contradictorily, both criticizes Eastlake architecture as “watered -
down Gothic revival Sachlichkeit, derived from Pugin and Ruskin” and questions its
existence. He adds, “[Charles] Eastlake’s actual influence was mainly in furniture design”
and claims the term Eastlake architecture is “an epithet coined by the Eclectic Apologists of
the early twentieth century.” All of which is demonstrably false:
• Charles Locke Eastlake’s “Early English” furniture designs were intentionally stripped
down, handcraftable Romanesque compared to Pugin’s complex Gothic.
• His furniture designs were portrayed as simple unpainted wood, in contrast to Ruskin’s
polychrome Continental Gothic.
• Hermann Muthesius’s Das englische Haus (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1904, 1905) focuses
on Norman Shaw, C. F. A. Voysey, Edwin Lutyens and their ilk and their Queen Anne– and
Arts and Crafts–descendant architecture from the mid to late 1890s and early 1900s
(the more Neoclassical of which gains the nickname Wrenaissance later in the twentieth
century), which was antithetical to Pugin and Ruskin (whose English and Continental
Gothicisms were in turn antithetical to each other) of many decades earlier. Muthesius’s
concept of English Sachlichkeit (objectivity or functionalism) is best expressed by his
epigram from William Morris at the beginning of his third chapter, “Der Aufbau des
englischen Hauses” (The Construction of the English House): “Of all things not wanted
at the present day, the thing that is least wanted is ornament”—which is antithetical to
American Eastlake architecture. It is hard not to accuse Scully of being disingenuous
here, since he knew almost no American readers would have access to Muthesius’s
book, untranslated even in abridgment till 1979 and in full till 2007 . (The fact that he
doesn’t explain where the term Sachlichkeit is from is even more snobbish and
disingenuous.)
• Charles Locke Eastlake, a trained architect, designed furniture, but his furniture designs
were quickly translated to architecture, particularly in the American West, where the
forms and decorative elements of the one were easily adapted to the wood mater ial and
machined spindles, molding, and bosses of the other. Scully might not have been
expected to pore through contemporary newspapers, but The American Architect and
Building News, which in its first two years discussed Eastlake exclusively as furniture, by
its 19 January 1878 edition was discussing Eastlake as architecture (A. F. Oakey, AIA,
“The Possibility of a New Style in Architecture,” vol. 3, no. 108 , p. 22). By 9 August 1884
the journal was speculating that “the Neo-Gothic and the ‘Eastlake’ have not become so
completely things of the past in the West as they have in the East” (“American Interiors,”
vol. 16, no. 450, p. 63).
Doubtless the mainstream architectural profession on the East Coast mostly looked
down on Eastlake architecture so-called, despite Furness have apparently introduced it
to America and practiced it in a variety private and public buildings, but a reading of The
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American Architect and Building News would make it hard to deny its existence. And
even if Scully did not have access to West Coast pattern books like those of the
Newsoms, he should have done to East Coast books like William T. Comstock’s
previously mentioned Modern Architectural Designs and Details, published in New York
in 1881. It’s subtitle is “Containing eighty finely lithographed plates, showing new and
original designs in the Queen Anne, Eastlake, Elizabethan, and other modernized styles .”
One may glory in or abhor Eastlake architecture, but one must be willfully obtuse to deny
its existence and popularity in the late nineteenth century.
Yet that is what Scully’s followers did: a cultlike denial of the objective reality in front of
them. The popular guides to American building styles that guided the Preservation
Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s largely blackballed Eastlake and Swiss Revival,
in deference to Scully, while writing of “Shingle” and “Stick.” This created a particular
problem in San Francisco, where Eastlake architecture was the overwhelming choice in the
late nineteenth century, solved by creating a category called “Eastlake/Stick” or “Eastlake-
Stick,” despite the fact that beyond the occasional Swiss gable bracket in an Eastlake gable,
Swiss Revival and Eastlake have nothing whatever to do with each other as architectural
styles, either aesthetically or in time period.
Virginia McAlester’s 1984 A Field Guide to American Houses has become the longest
survivor in print of the preservation guides and is demonstrative of the phenomenon. She
admits to Eastlake being only a decorative overlay of other forms but not an architecture in
itself. Her “Stick” chapter’s 16 photos comprise 12 Swiss Revival houses (pp. 258–260), 3
Eastlakes (p. 261), and 1 Queen Anne (260). Meanwhile, the “Queen Anne” chapter contains
about two dozen photos of Eastlake houses, as she transfers spindle c olumns and porch
friezes—core characteristics of Eastlake houses—to a newly invented category of
“Spindlework Queen Anne.”
“Stick” became so popular (and poorly understood) a term that it was even included in a
1973 episode of The Streets of San Francisco, where old-school detective Karl Malden and
college-educated detective Michael Douglas have the following conversation while staking
out at a house that’s a potential crime scene:
“Looks kind of creepy.”
“Huh, Stick.”
“What?”
“The architecture’s called Stick. You can tell by those bay windows. See how
they’re squared off? Must be 1885 or ’90, maybe.”
“But you just put that down in the report. Observations like that are going to get
you right to the top of the department.”
In fact, the house used for the episode was the 1867 Italianate Adams House, 300
Pennsylvania Avenue, with canted bays, but in a brief night shot with the film flipped left to
right it was hard to tell. (Square bays, of course, are indicative of Eastlake. Swiss Revival
tends to eschew bays, which were not part of Swiss architectural vocabulary.)
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The residual effect of the Scully Cult for the preservation profession can be seen in
contrasting Charles Page and Associates’ 1976 Santa Cruz Historic Building Survey (Santa
Cruz: City of Santa Cruz, 1976), where Eastlake cottages are frequently so identified, with
successor firm Page & Turnbull’s 143 -page 2013 Historic Context Statement and Survey
Report: City of Arroyo Grande, where the word Eastlake goes unmentioned, despite the
Arroyo Grande having one of the finest concentrations of Eastlake architecture south of
Pacific Grove, including the masterwork Pitkin-Conrow House.
Ironically, the American architect who most closely followed Eastlakes actual beliefs and
practices was lionized by Scully: Henry Hobson Richardson. Richardson’s mature style —
with semi-circular arches; reliance on planes where the texture of the stone, lik e the texture
of Eastlake’s oak, speaks for itself; and decoration reserved for borders —
Richardson’s 1880–1882
Crane Memorial Library,
exterior above and interior at
left, uses planes, surfaces,
shapes, and repetition in
much the same simple and
rhythmic way that Eastlake
did in his cabinet design at
right (plate 30, Hints on
Household Taste, 1868).
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X. The Development of the Double-Bay-Fronted Eastlake Cottage
Some architectural styles, like Greek Revival, are defined by symmetry; others, like
Italianate, Queen Anne, and Colonial Bungalows, favor asymmetry. But certain forms persist
through changes of decorative style. The symmetrical one-story Greek Revival cottage with
full-width front porch appears to be the forebear of the double-bay-front Eastlake cottage.
The above 1850s building, Sunnyside, near Natchez, with square columns and rectangular
transom (Greek Revivalists were aware the ancient Greeks did not use arches on their
buildings so eschewed fanlights) demonstrates the one-story Greek Revival cottage
subtype, as do examples below (1850 and 1873 respectively) from New Orleans.
The subtype was equally present in San Luis Obispo, as in the lost Stanusich Adobe, top of
next page, center rear, to the right of the extant Gothic Revival Hays-Latimer Adobe on West
Monterey Street , in a detail of Leon Trousset’s 1870 panorama at the Mission Museum.
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The subtype also survives as the Dallidet Adobe (below left in a detail from an 1876 Carlton
Watkins photograph), whose symmetry, hip roof, porch, white-painted square posts, and
rectangular transom conveyed the Greek Revival to contemporary observers (photo at
bottom by Gregory Morris, 1954).
The last extant nineteenth-century Greek Revival in San Luis Obispo was built between the
1870 Trousset painting and the first Sanborn Map in 1874: the redwood cladding of the
Sauer-Adams Adobe at 964 Chorro, which is essentially a Greek Revival cottage on top of a
lower commercial story—or Monterey Style adobe, three-dimensional Greek Revival having
been brought to Monterey by Thomas O. Larkin of Massachusetts by way of the 1835 Larkin
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House. Yet Esteban Munras of Monterey had designed a two-dimensional Greek Revival
trompe l’oeil interior for the Mission San Miguel, executed by Salinan Indians, in 1820 as
California’s earliest Greek Revival architecture. The Sauer-Adams’ square columns with
capitals and bases, as well as pediments above each window (seen below in a 1950s photo),
are more sophisticatedly Greek than the Dallidet, but the layout (and rectangular transom
above the entry door on the ground floor) are the same Greek Revival form.
Greek Revival was going out of fashion by the 1870s, having dominated San Luis
architecture in the early American period, but Italianate domestic architecture would
remain popular through the end of the century in San Luis. The simple, functional, and
attractive Greek Revival cottage had only to replace the Greek columns that held up its
portico with Italianate ones (chamfered square posts with horizontally exaggerated
capitals, astragals, and high bases) and separate them with their own hip or shed roof (seen
on the following page in the circa 1887 Pinho House, Marsh Street, before it was
surrounded by the Manse).
Of new architectures, Queen Anne was too high-gabled to adapt to the low-pitched hip or
side-gabled Greek Revival cottage form, and the Colonial Bungalow would establish itself
with an asymmetric porch and front-facing gable as a pediment over either colonnade or
bay. Eastlake architecture, however, had been introduced to America by Frank Furness as a
symmetrical form with mansardic roof (steeply tilted hip but unoccupied and
unfenestrated, unlike an actual Second Empire mansard). Add spindle columns, frieze
screens, perimeter-paned windows, and peaked roof peeking over a hip portico and the
Italianate cottage, formerly a Greek Revival cottage, becomes an Eastlake cottage, as seen
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below on two New Orleans examples, from the Uptown Historic District (left, photo by
David J. L’Hoste) and 815 St. Maurice Avenue in an 1883 duplex. Revealing their heritage,
the ground-floor frames and crown molding on both are still distinctly Italianate.
In New Orleans such cottages acquired Eastlake decorative features —including front-facing
gable exposed above a hip porch roof (see also the late Greek Revival from 1873 on page 22,
which seems to have been influenced by its contemporaries), but they kept their full
porches, presumably out of utility for the heat. In San Luis Obispo, in contrast, two bays
enclosing the central porch and entrance would give the same light and views behind huge
sash windows but some measure of protection from cold days and evenings —akin to 1940s
Streamline enclosures of earlier Colonial and California Bungalow porches but designed in
from construction.
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Double-bay-front is an Eastlake
characteristic. In San Francisco, nineteenth-
century townhouses typically have
asymmetrical bays opposite entrances. The
few double-bay-front examples tend to be
Eastlake, like the triplex at left (2139–43
Pine), with characteristic square bays;
spindle frieze screen; corbels ; gablets; and
geometric dogtooth fretwork, window
dentilation, bosses, checkerboard, and
sunbursts, or the quadriplex with similar
characteristics (4186–92 17th Street) below
(Elizabeth Pomada et al., Painted Ladies: San
Francisco’s Resplendent Victorians [New
York: Dutton, 1978], pp. 23 and 58).
The other double-bay-front style in San Francisco, however, is Renaissance Revival,
recalling the flanking towers of French cha teaux. Renaissance Revival arrived in America
just before Eastlake. The Hartford Daily Courant in a 25 Sep. 1869 column “Our
Architecture” notes, “We are just now in a reaction against the Renaissance revival of the
classic and returning to the Gothic” (p. 2), perhaps the first American newspaper mention
of a style already employed in Europe by the mid 1850s. Renaissance Revival is today often
mistaken for Eastlake and even was in the nineteenth century, as the 187 5 quotation from
the Scranton Morning Republican on page 10 suggests: “the Renaissance, or more properly
at the present day the Eastlake architecture .”
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Classical columns, arches and segmental
arches in and above windows, figurative bas
relief, and the absence of spindlework and
geometric decoration indicate Renaissance
Revival, even though some elements,
particularly the triangular pediments over
windows—a motif absent from Charles
Eastlake’s Mediaevalist furniture designs—
will be borrowed in Eastlake architecture as
the gablet (photos from Pomada, et al., pp.
27, 46, and 63).
We now have two possible progenitors of the double-bay-front Eastlake: (1) the Greek
Revival full-width-front-porch cottage, through its Italianate adaptation, Eastlake
adaptation, and glazing of the porch ends with square bays, and (2) the double -bay-front
Renaissance Revival.
Notably, none of the Renaissance Revival buildings above—2537–41 Washington, 1491–99
McAllister, and 3933 21st Street—or the Eastlakes on the previous page has a sitting porch,
only an entry porch (the wide porch of 4186 –92 17th Street is to accommodate four doors).
Sitting porches are for small towns, not big cities. But even in surrounding areas of
Northern California, double-bay-front Eastlake cottages have entry porches rather than
sitting porches between the bays.
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Samuel and Joseph Newsom’s 1884 –1885 Picturesque California Homes 1 and 2 include one
double-bay-front out of seventy-four plans: vol. 1, pl. 12, “now building at Eureka.” The front
elevation, top left below, shows a Renaissance Revival cottage (classical columns, segmental
arched windows, segmental pediments, quoining , elaborate free-form crest decoration) has
only a stair-top entry porch (confirmed by the floor plan); likewise the circa 1885
Renaissance Revival cottage in Napa (top right) and the Eastlake (with Swiss Revival gable
bracket) 1888 W. S. Clark House in Eureka (bottom left). Is this a cultural or climatological
feature of Northern California double-bay-front architecture? Or influenced by the more
formal affect of Renaissance Revival? At bottom right we see a much less elaborate building,
the Eastlake 1905 Vine Street, Paso Robles, built between the 1892 and 1903 Sanborn
Maps. Besides the four in San Luis Obispo City, it appears to be the only double -bay-front
Eastlake in San Luis Obispo County, and all five have sitting porches between their bays.
Pacific Grove’s cottages tend to asymmet ry or full-width front porches, the latter perhaps
because they were used only during summer. I have found no extant examples there, though
I have found one demolished example built between the 1897 and 1905 Sanborn Maps.
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Trio of full-width-front-porch cottages on 18th Street’s 100 block, Pacific Grove. The left two
combine Italianate columns, Eastlake frieze screens, and Swiss gable brackets; the rightward
one, Italianate columns, Eastlake sunburst corbels, Swiss gable bracket, and later bay.
Moving south to Santa Barbara, one-story
cottages tend to have full-width front
porches and be Italo-Eastlake, with hip roofs
and Italianate columns but center gablets,
like the four at the south end of Brinckerhoff
Avenue in the Brinckerhoff Landmark
District and the two at left. The rare star of
Brinckerhoff Avenue is 519, below, an angled
-double-bay-front sitting-porch Eastlake.
The hundreds of photographs of nineteenth-century houses in Virginia McAlester’s A Field
Guide the American Houses include (apart from Beaux Arts plutocrat palaces in Newport
and the Vanderbilts’ Renaissance Revival Biltmore in Asheville) only three double-bay-
fronts, all with sitting porches: a one-story 1858 Gothic in Demopolis, Alabam a; two-story
1877 Italianate in Bloomington, Wisconsin; and two-story Italianate I-house in Laurens,
South Carolina (pp. 204, 219, and 314 [New York: Knopf, 1984). Frequently reprinted
pattern books of the mid nineteenth century—Andrew Jackson Downing’s Cottage
Residences (1842) and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) and Henry Cleaveland’s
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Village and Farm Cottages (1856)—have, among hundreds of designs, no single-story
double-bay-front cottages and just three two-story houses with ground -floor double bays.
Dozens of catalogues of historic houses in California and other states reveal no double-bay-
front Eastlake cottages. It is an exceedingly rare nineteenth-century form in America,
which—after the symmetry of Georgian, Federal, Greek, and Gothic —embraced asymmetric
urban, suburban, and rural architecture. The surviving concentration of the form in San
Luis Obispo County is extraordinary and extremely historically significant .
The city’s earliest documented examples still extant are the GoldtreeMcCaffrey Building at
1212 Garden Street and Dana-Barneberg House at 531 Dana Street , both on the 1888
Sanborn Map (the Dana-Barneberg later being moved across the street).
The Goldtree House is an Italianate cottage with a double-bay-front Eastlake porch and
gablet. It was not a later adaptation, because the 1886 Sanborn Map shows the previous
Gothic-form cottage; the 1888 map, the Italo-Eastlake footprint, confirmed in the photo
detail below, with the Italianate hip roof and roof balustrade and Italianate hip porch roof
(the Dana-Barneberg, Lewin, and McCabe Houses all have or had flat porch roofs).
The Dana-Barneberg, Lewin, and McCabe
Houses also appear to have been originally
constructed as double-bay-front Eastlake
cottages from the physical evidence. A full -
width-front-porch cottage, however, is at the
Lewin House site in the 1888 Sanborn Map
(near right), replaced with a double-bay-
front cottage by 1891 (far right), but if the
second house was constructed with the
bones of the first, which is certainly
plausible, it was a thorough transformation
into the Eastlake form.
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Dana-Barneberg House around the turn of the
last century
Goldtree House as an Italianate cottage with
double-bay Eastlake porch attached
McCabe House in original form
Dana-Barneberg House now, absent ridge
cresting and gable finial
Goldtree House now, with McCaffrey Flats
conversion of 1908
McCabe House with 1925 or 1933 roof
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Lewin House in 1986, photographed by
Barron Wiley. Courtesy of the History Center.
Lewin House now
Lewin House prior to restoration in 2017 (above left and right)
Significant to the Eastlake double-bay front is that it is not just a decorative departure from
the Greek Revival cottage but a departure in form, replacing the full -width portico with a
smaller portico (or, in the case of the Lewin House, an uncolumned porch) sandwiched
between characteristically square Eastlake bays. The square bays’ sash windows took
advantage of the newly available larger panes of glass (unlike the two -over-two of Italianate
and six-over-six of Greek Revival) and clustered the sashes together to let in light and views.
The reduced portico was emphasized by its own gable or gablet peak (in the San Luis and
Eureka examples; in the Paso Robles and Santa Barbara examples, the peaks were put over
the bays).
None of the San Luis examples indulged in spindle columns: Goldtree and Dana -Barneberg
have chamfered square posts, like stripped-down Italianate, while the Lewin House has no
columns and the McCabe House the rare pierced ones, though modified for Eastlake use by
eschewing capitals that would interfere with a frieze screen . The Goldtree had (and has)
dogtooth fretwork borders; the Dana-Barneberg and Lewin, modified perforated egg -and-
dart without the darts, which may well be a borrowing from the lobed decor ation of Swiss
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Revival. The Goldtree and McCabe were constructed with porch frieze screens (partial, in
the case of the Goldtree, and surviving till the 1970s, in the case of the McCabe). Goldtree,
Dana-Barneberg, and McCabe all had fretwork-enhanced balustrades. Only the Goldtree had
perimeter stained glass; only the Goldtree and McCabe, corbels. Thus, with the same
elements of Eastlake form adapted from the Greek Revival cottage, these four Eastlake
double-bay-fronts demonstrate a wide variety of distinct and character -defining decorative
elements.
I have been able to track down no American double-bay-front Eastlake cottages outside
California and few in this state, but a strange coda to the form is its rebirth in New
Zealand/Aotearoa—a British Empire outpost more influenced by England and such forms
as Gothic Revival and Queen Anne—in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Double-bay-front cottages with sitting or entry porches turn up frequently in Auckland on
the North Island, as a half dozen examples on the following page attest. They more often
have gables over than gablets between the bays. Eastlake porch frieze screens are common,
along with Italianate columns and Swiss gable brackets.
This incursion would anticipate the second and broader architectural invasion of the
California Bungalow to New Zealand and Australia in the 1910s —particularly Australia,
where it suited the climate. But how the double-bay-front in the compact California form
characteristic of Eastlake and Renaissance Revival cottages made its way to Auckland
remains a mystery. Eastlake furniture was mentioned in New Zealand newspapers as early
as 1877 (“Fashions and Fancies,” New Zealand Herald, 1 Sep. 1877, p. 6) and was also
available (“The Greatest Sale of American Furniture,” advertisement, [Wellington] Evening
Post, 6 May 1886, p. 3). Charles Eastlake’s death in 1896 was widely covered in the New
Zealand press. But the press never mentions the characteristically American Eastlake
architectural style.
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Italianate columns and canted bays and Swiss
Revival gable brackets distinguish the
cottages above left and right (no date) and
below left (1910), but gables and gablets,
porch frieze screens and decorative wall
shingles make Eastlake origins clear.
Right: a spindle-columned fireplace from the
cottage above—beyond the square bays,
porch frieze screen, and door perimeter
panes—makes the Eastlake connection clear.
The cottages above (1910), below (1903) and
bottom left have Eastlake square bays, though
the faux quoining above would be
characteristically Italianate in America.
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XI. Pierced Columns in American Architecture
The innovative American architect Alexander Jackson Davis appears to have originated —or
first published—pierced columns in the illustration for “Cottage Orne Designed for David
Codwise, Esq.” in his 1837 book Rural Residences (below, the original 1835 elevation
[Metropolitan Museum of Art]), specifying that they were made of wood.
The cottage’s design is essentially Greek Revival, but Davis
in the early 1840s would use similarly two-dimensional
columns on Gothic Revival designs, in lattice or foliate
fretwork. Davis’s disciple Andrew Jackson Downing
portrays the master’s latticework columns on Gothic
houses in his popular 1842 Cottage Residence (fig. 51) and
1850 The Architecture of Country Houses (figs. 33, 76, and
128). At right, foliate pierced columns on the 1852 Peter
Davis House in Noank, Connecticut, an 1852 essentially
Italianate house with fretwork more common to the
Gothic, built by a 22-year-old shipbuilder who did his own
carpentry (Alma deC. McArdle et al, Carpenter Gothic, [New
York: Whitney Library of Design, 1983, p. 33).
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Samuel Sloan’s 1852 The
Model Architect has detailed
images of both flat fretwork
columns and heavier pierced
bases for substantially three-
dimensional Greek and
Gothic double columns (the
Gothic examples at near
right, but the Greek Revival
example similar and both
essentially Italianate in form
[republished as Sloan’s
Victorian Buildings, {Mineola:
Dover, 1980}, design 11, pl.
52, and design 12, pl. 56]).
Calvert Vaux’s 1857 Villas
and Cottages shows several
examples of lattice columns
but also a veranda with
elaborately pierced columns,
spandrels, frieze, and floor
and roof balustrades (at top
far right; fig. A, p. 111
[Mineola: Dover, 1970]).
A. J. Bicknell and Company’s
1873 Detail, Cottage and
Constructive Architecture,
shows the pierced column (at
bottom far right) close to
how it will appear in San Luis
Obispo County and in the
decade it seems to first
appear here (at least among
its survivors) (republished as
Victorian Architectural
Details [Mineola: Dover,
2005], pl. 23). Bicknell’s
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37
pattern book focuses on the Renaissance Revival, Swiss, and Second
Empire styles, though there are some repetitive geometric patterns
that are either already seeping over from Eastlake or will be picked
up in that style. Only eight years later, in the 1881 publication of
William T. Comstock’s Modern Architectural Designs and Details: […]
Showing New and Original Designs in the Queen Anne, Eastlake,
Elizabethan, and Other Modernized Styles, columns are largely
spindle, with the occasional chamfered or fluted square column
that would do with Renaissance Revival or Italianate (or Queen
Anne and Elizabethan/Tudor, which puzzled American architects
and builders, as the styles came from England, where there was no
tradition of porch building so no predetermined column type)
(republished as Victorian Domestic Architectural Plans and
Details[Mineola: Dover, 1987]). Comstock has not a single pierced
column in his pattern book, since piercing does not suit the three-
dimensionality of spindle columns
Above: the 1830 John Lane House, a Greek Revival with Vicksburg’s earliest pierced columns.
Most of that city’s pierced columns appear on Italianates of the 1870s, such as those on Belle
Fleur (above right, circa 1872–1875), resembling ones on the Bianchini and Music Houses in
Cambria and 1429 Nipomo in San Luis Obispo. Photographs from
southernlagniappe.blogspot.com/2011/02/architectural-mystery.htm, accessed 7 Nov. 2025.
In the built (and extant) world, p ierced columns appear to concentrate in specific locations,
presumably from local information cascades. The form is so prevalent in Vicksburg,
Mississippi, for instance, that the Vicksburg Foundation for Historic Preservation refers to it
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38
as the Vicksburg Pierced Column and claims it is found more often there than in any other
community, having sent enquiries to SHPOs in the Southeast and along the Mississippi.4 A
1987 inventory found fifty examples of buildings with pierced columns in Vicksburg; as of
the writing of an undated article on the foundation’s website, there were only forty,
attesting to the form’s fragility.
Pierced Columns in San Luis Obispo County
There is a concentration of pierced columns in Cambria, whose eleven nineteenth-century
houses of recognizably nineteenth-century appearance include three with pierced columns,
or nearly a quarter: the 1870 Guthrie-Bianchini House (now Cambria Historical Museum)
at 2251 Center Street, 1865 Music House (converted into a residence in the early 1870s) at
2581 Main Street, and 1877 Darke–Van Gorden–Squibb House at 4063 Burton Drive (dates
of construction from Cambria Historical Society plaques). How many other houses that may
have had pierced columns and were demolished —or whose columns were lost or
replaced—is unknown.
The Guthrie-Bianchi House’s pierced columns around the turn of the century, with spindle
columns on the porch at far left.
All three houses are Italianate. The Music House is out of the frame of the earliest, 1886
Sanborn Map of Cambria, but the Bianchini and Squibb Houses appear with their current
4. “The Vicksburg Pierced Column,” preservevicksburg.org/column.htm, accessed 6 Nov. 2025
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39
pierced-columned porches, so the columns are less likely later additions. Physical evidence
suggests, however, that the three Bianchini porches were built (or altered) at separate
times, as the rear one has Italianate chamfered square columns, the Burton Drive porch has
Eastlake spindle columns, and the Center Street porch has pierced columns.
Similar pierced columns on the Guthrie-Bianchini House (above) and Music House (below).
Note their larger upper and smaller lower piercings, emphasized by horizontal astragals
between them on the Bianchini House.
I have not been able to find pierced columns in Paso Robles, Arroyo Grande, or other county
communities apart from San Luis, where the only two pierced-column buildings are the
McCabe House and nearby 1429 Nipomo Street (equally notable as the only false-front
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40
aedicular Neo-Baroque house in the city or [possibly] county, the style having been
reserved almost exclusively for commercial buildings in the Old West ). 1429 Nipomo may
date as far back as 1877, as a structure consistent with the center block appears in the
same location in E. S. Glover’s Bird’s Eye View of San Luis Obispo, Cal. of that year, though it is
portrayed as a hip-roof Italianate without a front porch rather than a false-front gabled
building with a porch. Unfortunately, the Sanborn Map does not cover the block till 1891,
when 1429 appears in its current form, and the original structure was either rebuilt or
replaced in the interim. With square capitals and astragals, its columns are consistent with
the 1870s Italianate pierced columns of Cambria, and its existence may have influenced the
pierced columns on the McCabe House.
The Squibb House pierced columns, with elaborate fretwork inserts apparently never present
in the pierced columns of the Bianchini and Music Houses
The 1889 Righetti (Graves) House at the corner of Johnson and Palm appears at a glance to
have pierced columns, but they are, in fact, paired columns joined by a crown bracket but
terminating in separate bases. (The house is self-consciously Eastlake—its architect
described it as a “Romanesque cottage,”5 and Eastlake presented his round -arched furniture
5. “Bids on the Ernest Graves Cottage,” Tribune, 24 May 1889, p. 3.
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41
as a Romanesque alternative to Gothic—but it also incorporates Swiss, Queen Anne, and
Colonial elements.) Paired columns in California Bungalows of the earlier twentieth century
also have distinct bases, referring to the columns on either side of Shinto torii gates.
In other words, pierced columns are, in San Luis Obispo, a specific and rare statement,
apparently numbering two survivors in the city and a total of three more in the county.
Above: paired columns on the 1889 Eastlake Righetti (Graves) House with separate bases
(photograph 1904); below: paired pairs of paired columns in the California Bungalow–style
duplex at 697 and 699 Chorro, the paired columns with separate bases representing the torii
or entrance gate to a Shinto shrine
Like the Bianchini and Music Houses, 1429 Nipomo (next page) has a simple rectangular
piercing with bead terminations (in profile). The McCabe House, in contrast, has fretwork
inserts of ball finials in profile—six per column originally, now four—themselves pierced.
Such fretwork balls or lobes often decorated Swiss Revival and were borrowed for Eastlake.
Importantly, unlike 1429 Nipomo or any of the pierced columns in Cambria—or any other
post-Gothic pierced columns I can find in California or anywhere else in the United States —
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the McCabe House columns lack capitals, so, in common Eastlake practice, they could
accommodate an openwork porch frieze screen.
Above: The aedicular Neo-Baroque duplex 1429 Nipomo, central section possibly built by
1877, with pierced columns, here photographed by Barron Wiley (courtesy of the History
Center of San Luis Obispo County); below: 2019 Google Street View of the square capitals,
astragals, and bead terminations of the piercings; bottom: pierced columns with lattice
inserts, 1854 Greek Revival adobe Casa Grande, New Almaden (San Jose)
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XII. The McCabe House: Period of Significance
The McCabes—assuming they either bought or built the house at 571 Pismo in 1891, which
is plausible given their mortgage history and documented occupancy of the property by
1895–1896—lived at the house for eleven years, long enough to establish association, if any
of them was historically significant during the period of association. In 1899, the Tribune
refers to George McCabe as a well known businessman, but that condition does not rise to
historic significance. Nothing is documented about any historically significant activities of
Cordelia McCabe’s at the time. The next occupants, the Coiners and Truesdales, lived in the
house too briefly to establish historic association and were, at any rate, either not
historically significant or, if arguably so (as with later county auditor Harry Truesdale) not
living in the house during their period of significance.
The Call family celebrates Joy Call’s birthday in the garden at 571 Pismo circa 1915: from left
to right, Albert G., Georgia, Joy, Beth, Aunt Rhoda Reed, Arthur, and Si. Courtesy of the History
Center of San Luis Obispo County.
The next occupants were Stephen Albert “Bert” Call—manager of San Luis Obispo’s gas and
electric company 1906–1909 before he and his wife purchased the house in 1911 and
subsequently a stationary engineer for the San Luis Obispo Ice and Cold Storage Company
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44
until his retirement in 1941 , living in the house till his death in 1955 (“Bert Call, 84, Native
Obispan, Taken by Death,” Telegram-Tribune, 10 Aug. 1955, p. 1)—and his wife Georgia, who
died in 1958 and did not receive attention from the newspapers except for social activities.
Son Albert G. Call, chief criminal investigator for the county sheriff and a union leader, did
not live at the house during these activities. Daughter Joy Call is documented by city
directories as living in the house until just before her retirement in 1975 from work in the
county tax collector’s office.
Georgia and Stephen Albert “Bert” Call in 1950. Courtesy of the History Center of San Luis
Obispo County.
Thus the McCabe House’s significance is based entirely on its embodiment of the rare
double-bay-fronted Eastlake cottage form and the pierced column form in American
architecture, which the circa 1895–1896 photograph shows to be the house’s original form,
and the period of significance coincides with the date of its construction to this
documentation, 1891–1896.
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XIII. Significance
The George and Cordelia McCabe House at 571 Pismo Street has three points of extreme
rarity in San Luis Obispo City and County:
• It is 1 of only 4 double-bay-fronted sitting-porch Eastlake cottages in the city, 5 in the
county, and 6 in the Central Coast region
• It retains 1 of only 2 examples of pierced-column porticoes in the city and 5 in the
county
• The façade has detailed photo documentation within 5 years of construction
Per the Historic Preservation Ordinance, the house embodies two types of construction, the
double-bay-fronted Eastlake cottage and the pierced-column portico. Under NRHP
Criteria for Evaluation, the pierced columns are likely to yield knowledge important in
architectural history, and, as likely the last use of pierced columns on the Central Coast, the
house meets criteria for California Historical Landmark designation as “the first, last, only,
or most significant of its type in the state or within a large geographic region.”
The McCabe House as a d ouble-bay-fronted Eastlake cottage Eastlake is the
dominant late-nineteenth-century architecture style in California. The Old Town Historic
District’s 37 documentably nineteenth-century Master and Contributing resources include6
• 1 Gothic Revival (St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church)
• 1 Neo-Baroque (1429 Nipomo)
• 1 Queen Anne (Erickson—687 Islay)
• 4 Swiss Revivals (Snyder, Angel, Greenfield, and Meredith)
• 6 full-width-front-porch (i.e., Greek Revival–based) Italianate cottages (654 Buchon,
654 Islay, 662 Islay, 454 Islay, 1526 Osos, and 673 Buchon)
• 9 Gabled Italianates (Rogers, Dana-Parsons, Fitzpatrick, 1415 Nipomo, 1516 Nipomo,
722 Buchon, 969 Pismo, 530 Buchon, and 651 Buchon, )
• 15 Eastlakes (Lewin, Jessie Wright, McKennon, Brooks, McCabe, Vollmer–497 Islay,
Biddle, Falkenstein, Nichols, Fleuger, Miller, Fumigalli, Erickson–461 Islay, McManus,
and 550 Islay [this last altered in form and decoration almost beyond recognition])
That is, 41 percent of the documentably nineteenth-century listed properties in the district
are Eastlake. It is an impressive concentration, and 87 percent of them are Master Listed —
with the two exceptions of the McCabe House and 550 Islay (the latter of which has had its
6. From E. S. Glover’s Berd’s Eye View of San Luis Obispo, California, Sanborn Maps, and newspaper
accounts; see Papp, Master List Application: Hans Nissen and Lena Peterson Hansen House, 1110
Buchon Street (2025), pp. 35–36.
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front porch subsumed into the house and has been shorn of any decorative features apart
from one wall-shingled front gable).
The subset of double-bay-fronted Eastlakes in the district is far smaller, 2 of the 15
Eastlakes in the district , the Lewin House and McCabe House. The McCabe House’s
surviving columns and balustrade, which the Lewin lacks; five-windowed compared to the
Lewin’s four-windowed square bays with crown and base panels—not to mention the
frieze screen, corbels, and fretworked balusters that can be restored to Secretary of the
Standards from the circa 1895 photograph—makes the McCabe House more complex than
the Lewin House in both its double-bay-front and porch and their decorative motifs.
The McCabe House’s pierced columns There seems to be little if any research on
pierced columns outside of the American South, yet the two photographs below of an
unidentified but no longer extant full-width-front-porch Italianate cottage (perilously
leaning) and a gabled Italianate, both in San Luis Obispo, show they were once more
abundant than the city’s two survivors. Pierced columns were used on structures as varied
as the urban and sophisticated 1856 extension of the Gothic Revival Moses Chase House in
Oakland (next page top left) and the remote and simple circa 1860 Italianate Pierano House
in Angels Camp and 1863 Knapp House in Pescadero (next page bottom left).
In general, pierced columns date to styles and structures decades earlier than the McCabe
House. Otherwise evidenced in San Luis and Santa Barbara Counties on Italianate and Neo-
Baroque architecture, the pierced columns on the McCabe House are likely the last used on
the Central Coast and possibly California, are exceedingly rare or possibly unique examples
of capital-free Eastlake pierced columns, and are likely to yield information important in
architectural history and meet the criteria for State Historical Landmark status.
Both photos courtesy of the History Center of
San Luis Obispo County
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47
Above left: Moses Chase House, Oakland,
extant; below left, Knapp House, 85 Stage
Road, Pescadero (Google Street View); above:
Italianate Trussel House, Santa Barbara
(HABS photograph, 1930s), demolished
Rare and delicate, pierced columns tend not to survive and for that reason warrant
heightened recognition and protection. Not only have three of the five examples pictured on
this and the previous page been demolished, the pierced columns of the Pierano Ho use in
Angels Camp have been “restored” as double columns, as seen in the Depression Era HABS
photo on the next page at top (loc.gov) compared to the 2018 photo below it
(beyond.nvexpeditions.com/california/calaveras/angelscamp ).
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The McCabe House’s photo documentation The detail from the McCabe House
photograph of circa 1895 on the following page shows the extraordinary degree of glass-
plate-negative precision in recording original detail merely of the porch, including corbels,
frieze screen, pierced column interior fretwork, fretwork baluster corbels, and door
molding and incising. Photographs of demolished, usually unidentified houses are rare, as
are historic house with no photo documentation earlier than HABS reports , historic
resources surveys, or Google street views. Of vanishing rarity are extant historic houses
with early, detailed photographic documentation. This photograph in the History Center
archives will allow restoration of the porch woodwork to Secretary of the Interior
Standards. In combination with the 1975 Telegram -Tribune, 1982 historic resources survey
photograph, and 1980s Barron Wiley photograph at the History Center, it allows us to
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identify any earlier restoration work, its source and accuracy, as seen in the 1895 and 1975
photos compared on page 41.
Though not a technical reason for listing, detailed photo documentation is of enormous
utility for accurate restoration to Secretary of the Interior Standards. A substantial number
of Master List resources in the Old Town Historic District have had either porches added
after the period of significance (e.g., the Italianate Rogers and Eastlake Jessie Wright) or
character-defining porches enclosed. Lack of photography or lack of interest in
investigating the existing photography has led to much misunderstanding of historic
integrity in San Luis Obispo, with many Master Listed buildings far more changed than we
generally believe or might care to admit .
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50
Circa 1895–1896 (above) and 1975 (below)
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51
XIV. Integrity
Each of the three Master Listed double-bay-
fronted Eastlake cottages in San Luis Obispo
has significant challenges with integrity that
were deemed insufficient to prevent them
from conveying their significance.
Of the two included in the original round of
Master Listing, the Goldtree House lost its
Italianate hip roof and roof balustrade and
Eastlake front central gablet and frieze
molding when in 1908 it became the
McCaffrey Flats, leaving only its square bays
and front porch. The Lewin House’s roof had
been reconfigured, presumably with the
pushout of its southwest wall between the
1909 and 1926 Sanborn Maps (below),
engulfing the façade’s original side gables
and also giving the street façade an
asymmetric appearance (above right).
Below: The original side gable is the front
multicolored one. The second multicolored
one topped a later (but since enclosed porch),
with the larger, non-original gable enclosing
both.
In addition, the Goldtree House, originally a cottage in a residential district, gained its
apartment floor because of the expansion of downtown, and by the time of its Master
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52
Listing, its original setting had been replaced by an apartment house on one side and office
buildings and parking lots on the others, none of which were there when it was a double-
bay-front Eastlake cottage or even at the McCaffrey Flats’ conversion of 1908 .
The more recently Master Listed Dana-Barneberg House, whose façade and side gables
remain in original configuration, was moved across the street in 1911, losing integrity of
location, and also had un-Eastlake canted bays added to both side façades between the
1891 and 1903 Sanborn Maps and lost its ridge cresting .
Thus the integrity of the McCabe House to convey the significance of the double -bay-front
Eastlake cottage type exists not in a vacuum of perfection but among real -world
comparisons.
Location The McCabe House retains its original location as shown on the 1891
Sanborn Map about the time it was likely constructed.
Setting The McCabe
House remains in a suburban
residential setting. The Biddle
House, built about two years
after it, in 1893, stands on its
southwest side; 1415 Nipomo,
dating from the 1870s, is
visible behind it, and the 1873
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church
and tower of the circa 1899
McManus House contribute to
its front viewshed. The
Nipomo Street School, closed
at the end of the school year in
1949 and demolished soon
after, has disappeared from
the viewshed, but the
schoolyard persists as
Emerson Park, allowing the
same view of Cerro San Luis
(right) through the clear sash
windows of the McCabe
House’s square bays and to the
street observer standing in
front of the house.
Page 90 of 107
53
.
Design The design of the character-defining Eastlake square bays remains the same,
including the five sash windows on each, the panels below and above the windows, and the
vertical edge-molding of each bay,
The design of the character-defining porch between the bays remains the same, including
the pierced columns and balustrade railing, but excepting the missing frieze screen, four
missing of the twelve original fretwork column inserts, and missing upright balusters with
their fretwork corbels.
The design of the character-defining frieze molding and its ten supporting corbels, flat
porch roof, and porch gablet with bargeboard incising (all Eastlake features), as well as
gable bracket and vertical plank decoration (borrowed from Swiss Revival) has been
replaced by a hip porch roof.
The design of the character-defining side gables has been replaced with a chalet -style front-
gabled roof, possibly circa 1925 with the filling in of the southwest façade U (not a
character-defining feature) or possibly circa 1933 after a roof fire.
The design of the character-defining Eastlake solid door, with molding and incising, has
been replaced by a two-panel two-pane door.
The wall design throughout the front and side façades of character-defining shiplap and
one-over-one sash windows remains.
The McCabe House, like the double-bay-front
Renaissance Revival cottage published by the
Newsom brothers in 1884 (left), has a parlor
attached to one bay and bedchamber to the
other, still used as such by the current owners.
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54
As with the Goldtree-McCaffrey House, the replacement of porch roof, gablet, and side
gables is a substantial loss to the McCabe House’s ability to convey its significance as an
Eastlake façade, though not as substantial, in terms of massing, as if an apartment story had
been set on top of it, and the Goldtree-McCaffrey House was judged able to still convey its
significance as an double-bay-front Eastlake cottage with the retention of its square bays
and porch and their decorative features. Th e one feature the Goldtree retains that the
McCabe does not is its original Eastlake doors, although the McCabe door could be
reproduced to SOI Standards.
The McCabe porch, however, unlike the Goldtree, retains structural independence and could
be returned to flat-roof design with corbels, frieze, frieze screen, and conceivably even
gablet to SOI Standards.
Though in imperfect condition, overall, the McCabe House retains the chief part of its
double-bay-fronted Eastlake design to convey the significance of the type.
The other key physical feature of the McCabe House’s significance, independent of its
Eastlake design, is its pierced columns and associated fretwork. This unique and
historically important feature, with potential eligibility for State Historical Landmark
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55
status, retains its integrity, apart from four missing fretwork decorations and the original
integrated openwork frieze screen.
Materials As with design, retained material includes
shiplap siding, sash windows, panels, molding, columns,
most column fretwork, and railing. Lost material includes
the front door, balusters and their fretwork faux corbels,
some fretwork, corbels, frieze molding, frieze screen,
gablet siding and bargeboard, and gable bracket.
Workmanship Most structural and decorative
building materials of the mid to late nineteenth century are
factory milled, with local workmanship the assembly by
hand. As with design and materials, the retained assembly
is in the bay and porch features, the lost assembly in the
corbels, frieze, frieze screen, and gablet. The key pieces of
individual handwork—the pierced columns and most of
the column fretwork—are retained, with the fretwork faux
corbels of the balusters lost but reproducible by modern
craftspeople to SOI standards, given the photographs .
Feeling Feeling is a combination of the material integrities (location, design, setting,
materials, and workmanship) in the expression of an aesthetic or historic sense of a
particular time. The McCabe House retains its location and setting and the design, material,
and workmanship of its pierced columns and the majority of the design, materials, and
workmanship of its double-bay-front Eastlake architecture. It continues to convey the
aesthetic sense of its time.
Association In absence of historically significant persons and events for the house or
its features to be associated with, association is not relevant.
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Southwest (above) and northeast (below) side façades. All color photographs of the
McCabe House in this report are by Ben Winter.
XV.
Page 94 of 107
57
In sum, the integrity of the McCabe House in location, design, setting, materials,
workmanship, and feeling allows it to convey the significance of its rare double -bay-fronted
Eastlake cottage design in massing, spatial relationships, and decoration, as we ll as the
significance of its rare pierced-column portico, well in line with precedent set by other
Master List resources.
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XV. Conclusion
The McCabe House is significant for embodying the single-story double-bay-front sitting-
porch Eastlake cottage and pierced -column portico architectural types. Both types are
important in American, Californian, and San Luis Obispan architectural history, the first as a
possibly peculiarly Central Coast descendant of the full-width-front-porch Greek Revival
cottage form, the second as a phenomenon associated with the Greek and Gothic Revivals
and Italianate architecture here adapted—possibly uniquely—to Eastlake. They are
extraordinarily rare and important survivors in San Luis Obispo City and County but also
for California and the nation as a whole. The McCabe House retains the integrity to
communicate the significance of both architectural types, and Master Listing will ideally
lead to a Mills Act project to restore lost but thoroughly documented features of the façade
to Secretary of the Interior Standards, as the Mills Act was intended.
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1
Papp Architectural History - Sauer-Adams Adobe - 964 Chorro St - San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
24 Dec. 2025
Dear Eva,
I’m responding to your 23 Dec. 2025 queries in a document, in case you consider it useful
to attach to the Master List application as an addendum.
Query 1. The residence appears to have had significant changes since the original
home was built. The change to the roofline, addition of triplet windows below the roof
pitch, and removal of detailing appears to drastically alter the character of the
residence. My understanding based on your report is that Eastlake architecture is
known for its ornate detailing, much of which appears to have been lost when the roof
was altered and the horizontal frieze features were removed. The wide and low roof
pitch also seems to conflict with provided examples of Eastlake architecture. Could you
provide more details as to how the residence communicates its significance without
the Eastlake ornamental elements and with a completely altered roofline.
I address the replacement of the roof and the loss of specific decorative features and their
impact on integrity of design, materials, and workmanship on pp. 53–55 of the Master List
application, both in terms of the McCabe House itself and in the universe of other Master
List/Landmark double-bay-front Eastlake cottages in San Luis Obispo.
Let me reiterate here that what is key in evaluating integrity is to keep one’s eyes on the
prize: Any losses of integrity are not abstract but are based on the resource’s ability to
convey its significance, in this case the extraordinary significance of a specifically regional
form—the double-bay-front Eastlake cottage with interstitial sitting porch—and a more
widely distributed but, in contrast, locally rare form —pierced columns.
It is also important to emphasize that this is the first time the Goldtree -McCaffrey Building,
Lewin House, Dana-Barneberg House, and McCabe House—four houses of the same form
and decorative palette—have been connected to a single architectural style and related to
examples and architectural trends outside of San Luis Obispo. The city’s current version of
the Goldtree-McCaffrey Building is that it is Italianate (probably based on its corbels,
though these are the smaller and less elaborate corbels common to Eastlake architecture );
Lewin House, that it “has Carpenter Gothic influence” (the common default in the Historic
Resources Survey for every gable that approaches an acute angle); Dana-Barneberg House,
that it is “Victorian vernacular (“vernacular” being a semi-expert placeholder for “I don’t
know” and a definitional impossibility where outside influences and materials are present );
and McCabe House, that it is, as you point out, Colonial with Queen Anne influences . These
can’t all be true. In fact, none of them is true. But positing these styles was necessary
because of the denial of the existence of Eastlake—their actual style based on empirical
data and the dominant late-nineteenth-century California architecture.
Finally, unlike the vast majority of Master List buildings, we have a high -resolution early
photograph to facilitate understanding of the property and detailed comparisons of current
integrity and to serve as documentation for Restoration to Secretary of the Interior
Standards. In the vast majority of cases in San Luis Obispo, buildings have been listed with
Attachment B - Response to Questions
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limited understanding of their architectures, only speculation as to what they originally
looked like, and no documentation to restore them.
With all of that said, had either the double-bay front or the pierced columns been lost, the
McCabe House would no longer have been able to communicate its significance. The altered
roof, however, is not crucial to understanding either of these rare and important elements.
The roof does not, per se, “conflict” with Eastlake examples; 519 Brinckerhoff (p. 29 of the
application) has a similar full-width front gable; but that is irrelevant. It is clearly non -
original in design, materials, and workmanship. But it does not prevent the double-bay-
front Eastlake form and pierced columns from conveying their significance to the scholar or
the casual viewer.
If the purpose of the Master List is to preserve and convey important information about
unusually significant people, events, and architectures of the past , then the McCabe House
is a crucial addition. If the Master List is a beauty contest, maybe not.
The original side-gable-center-gablet roof façade is one of the characteristic roof types of
the double-bay-front Eastlake form—which includes double-gable on hip (1905 Vine, Paso
Robles) and double-gable on full-width front-facing gable (519 Brinckerhoff, Santa
Barbara) and possibly others yet undiscovered. But the Cultural Heritage Committee and
City Council have concluded over a span of four decades, with each of the city’s other three
double-bay-front Eastlake cottages, that significant alteration in the roof —including loss of
ridge-cresting (Dana-Barneberg), change in roof configuration (Lewin), and even the
addition of a second story (Goldtree-McCaffrey)—does not so undermine the ability of the
form to convey its significance as to disqualify it from Master List protection . This was so
even before the buildings’ relation as a subtype or their exceeding rarity and regional
significance was brought to light.
Many Eastlake houses have highly elaborate decoration, and many do not, as you see from
my photographic examples. The elaborate ones, like Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom’s
Carson Mansion (1884–1886), have impressed themselves on the public consciousness, but
the less elaborate ones are no less Eastlake. As the Newsoms themselves advertised, “The
degree of ornamentation will be governed, more or less, by the size of the builder’s purse”
(Picturesque and Artistic Homes and Buildings of California [San Francisco: 1890], p. 24). It
is the geometric nature of their decoration, in combination with Eastlake forms like square
bays or in this case the double-bay front, that is character-defining. As you see from the
early photograph of the McCabe House, its decoration was originally restrained, as was the
decoration on the other examples from the Central Coast.
The Swiss Revival decoration associated with the gablet (gable bracket, finial, lobed
bargeboard, vertical plank decoration—which are fairly common Swiss features borrowed
for Eastlake gablets) is gone, but their loss does not prevent the house from conveying its
significance as a rare double-bay-front Eastlake form or the pierced columns from
conveying their significance.
The Swiss Revival decoration, with its associated side gables and gablet, is technically
reproducible to Secretary of the Interior Standards, though it seems unlikely to be so
reproduced any time soon—if more likely than the removal of the top floor of the Goldtree-
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McCaffrey Building and the restoration of its original roof. (A surprising number of
buildings in town, however, have had their top floors removed).
Some characteristically Eastlake decorative features, like the 2 porch rails and 18 window
crown and base panels, remain intact. Others, like the frieze screen, 10 corbels, and
associated molding can be reproduced to SOI Standards.
The key (though non-Eastlake) decorative elements are the two pierced columns, most of
whose interior fretwork remains and the remainder of which can be reproduced to SOI
Standards, as can the porch balusters and their fretwork faux corbels.
It is the intent of my clients to undertake extensive restoration of decorative features and
the intent of the Mills Act to facilitate such restoration, and Master Listing is necessary for
Mills Act.
Query 2. The City's Historic file indicates the predominant architectural style of the
residence at 571 Pismo is Colonial with Queen Anne influences. Can you please identify
the discrepancy between the two evaluations? What features of the residence, besides
the pierced columns and sitting porch make the residence stand out as Eastlake
Architecture? Additionally, why would it have previously been considered Colonial
style with Queen Anne features?
My HRE on the McCabe House is chiefly devoted to the discrepancy you mention, which
arises from Vincent Scully’s erasure of Eastlake architecture —the dominant late-
nineteenth-century style of the West—from the American architectural canon.
Remember that San Luis Obispo’s Historic Resources Survey was done in 1982 —1983
when American preservation scholarship was still in its nascence. Serious architectural
histories (like Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s 1958 Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries and Burchard and Bush-Brown’s 1961 The Architecture of America: A Social and
Cultural History) had hitherto focused on large public buildings rather than small private
houses, large cities rather than small towns, major architects rather than popul ar
movements, academic rather than popular styles, and the East Coast rather than the West.
Even such an apogee of wood design as the Carson Mansion in Eureka, an Eastlake
masterpiece by Newsom and Newsom, who simultaneously advertised their expertise in
the Eastlake form, was referenced only to point out that masonry buildings by East Coast
architects were “by any absolute standard … superior” (Burchard and Bush -Brown, p. 267),
ignoring any explication of what absolute standard that might be. That there wa s a widely
popular and sophisticated form of architecture called Eastlake goes unmentioned in both
these massive studies.
The growing academic exploration of long -ignored popular and domestic architecture, for
which Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully deserves some credit, had the unfortunate
side effect of the invention of “styles” that nineteenth -century architects and builders never
recognized in their own era (“Shingle” and “Stick”) and denial of styles that those architects
and builders knew themselves to be practicing (Swiss Revival and Eastlake). This was
entirely Scully’s doing, but such was the paucity of knowledge and his academic prestige
that this rewriting of architectural history was swallowed by most of the authors of
taxonomic guides on which community surveyors, city planners, journalists, and even
subsequent generations of architectural historians would come to depend.
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By the time of San Luis Obispo’s survey (the photographs were taken in 1982, the analysis
done in 1983), some general taxonomic books —like Poppeliers, Chambers, and Schwartz’s
What Style Is It? A Guide to American Architecture (Washington, DC: Preservation Press,
1977), Blumenson’s Identifying American Architecture (New York: Norton, 1977), Foley’s
The American House (New York: Harper, 1980), and Rifkind’s A Field Guide to American
Architecture (New York: Times Mirror, 1980)—had already been published; others—like
Virginia McAlester’s A Field Guide to American Houses (New York: Knopf, 1984) and
Woodbridge’s California Architecture (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1988)—were yet to come.
Blumenson includes Eastlake; Poppeliers et al., not; Foley has a brief but good discussion of
Eastlake in her chapter “Mansardic and Stick Styles”; Rifkind acknowledges it only as a
commercial style, though including an elevation of a clearly Eastlake house for which he
invents the term “Carpenter Queen Anne.”
But it is unclear which of these books San Luis Obispo’s surveyors had access to, if any. They
were offered two three-day seminars on local and California architecture (sixteen
classroom hours and two field sessions) and two two-day classes on historical research
(eight classroom hours), with five hours of weekly assignments during the su bsequent two
months (Cindy Lambert, “Saving San Luis Obispo County’s Identity with Preservation
Efforts,” La Vista, 2015, p. 59; S. E. Seager, “Architecture Class Offered,” Telegram-Tribune, 12
Jan. 1983, p. B-1). There appears to have been no professional architectural historians
involved in the survey itself or in its vetting.
Some of the attributions of architectural style and form in the survey are reliable, but most
show completely understandable gaps in knowledge that make the majority of
attributions—attributions that have persisted in the city’s records and online material —
inaccurate, such as the tendency to attribute no architectural style to adobes; refer to
Colonial Bungalows as Neoclassic rowhouses; confuse Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial
Revival, and Mediterranean; conflate Art Deco and Streamline Moderne; consistent ly
overlook Prairie School (though attribute our one Usonian building to Prairie School
because it’s by Frank Lloyd Wright, despite its dating from a full half century after he
finished designing Prairie buildings); call any wood building with a near-acute gable
Carpenter Gothic, regardless of date, while missing actual Gothic Revival; call any building
with deep eaves Craftsman, also regardless of date or design; claim buildings mix multiple
styles; and so on. (The surveyors were rarely aware of dates of construction and almost
never of architects.)
Notably, as far as I can tell, no building in the survey is described as Eastlake, despite
Eastlake’s dominance as a California architectural style in the late nineteenth century (e.g.,
the 1,687 mentions of the term “Eastlake cottage” during 1881 –1900 in California
newspapers compared to 245 in the rest of the United States in the Newspapers.com
database [see following page]), and despite the large number of Eastlake houses in San
Luis, consistent with the period of the city’s expansion.
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Newspapers.com database search (search performed on 18 Oct. 2024)
1881–1900 1901–1905 1906–1910
“Eastlake cottage,” California 1,687 507 139
“Eastlake cottage,” rest of US 245 2 3
“Queen Anne cottage,” California 458 202 705
“Queen Anne cottage,” rest of US 12,086 3,016 3,827
The McCabe House’s specific attribution of “Colonial with Queen Anne influences" appears
to be inspired by the replacement of its roof with a California Bungalow full -width chalet-
style gable, which the surveyors must have thought original. The survey describes the
Contributing List 1914 George Andrews House at 1307 Mill (above center), a California
Bungalow with just such a gable (as well as other California Bungalow characteristics like
knee brackets), as a “Colonial Revival residence.” The Master List Weill House at 2132
Harris (above left, date unknown)—a full-width-front porch Italianate cottage (with
Italianate columns and Italianate door, etc.), whose roof, like the McCabe House (above
right), has been replaced in chalet style, presumably also during the California Bungalow
period—is described as “single-story wood frame with Colonial Revival overtone.”
Apparently, someone confused full-width chalet roofs with open gables for the asymmetric
closed gables characteristic of Colonial Bungalows
The pierced columns, as I point out in the HRE, are not characteristically Eastlake, which
adds to the building’s rarity.
The double-bay-front form with square bays is the stand -out Eastlake feature in form and
massing (Italianate and Colonial Revival normally have canted bays, Queen Anne round or
canted bays; Greek Revival and Italianate cottages normally have full -with porches and no
bays; and Renaissance Revival cottages normally have entry rather than sitting porches).
Other characteristic features include the previously mentioned surviving porch rails (Greek
Revival and Italianate cottages tend to have columns without bal ustrades) and 18 crown
and base panels (these can be found in earlier Italianate architecture but are not
characteristic of contemporary Queen Anne or Swiss, Colonial, Renaissance, or Elizabethan
Revivals) and absent but SOI Standards –reproducible frieze screen and 10 corbels
(Italianate corbels are larger and more elaborate, while frieze screens are virtually never
employed in any but Eastlake houses). The original gablet was Eastlake but its gable
bracket and finial, lobed bargeboard, and vertical gable planking were Swiss Revival,
though this was a fairly common Eastlake borrowing.
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I hope this clarifies the significant formal and decorative features of the McCabe House, the
specific nature of integrity in relation to conveying their significance, the nature of Eastlake
decorative features and their extant and restorable extent on the McCabe House, and the
discrepancies of architectural styles as attributed in the 1982 –1983 Historic Resources
Survey and subsequent documents. Let me know if you have any other questions.
If you can get an hour or two off work, it might be helpful —and save time in the future—to
accompany me and Coco on a walk-through of the major historic districts to identify styles
in situ and in comparison, with observations on what has been changed. Others would be
welcome to join us—though I wouldn’t want it to become a scheduling nightmare.
Sincerely,
James Papp, PhD
Historian and Architectural Historian
City and County of San Luis Obispo
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Attachment C - Historic File
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HIST-0944-2025 (571 Pismo St)
Request to designate the McCabe House as a Landmark Resource (Inventory of Historic Resources)
Landmarks
Historic resources that are of the greatest importance at the local,
regional, state, or national level in terms of age, architectural or historical
significance, rarity, or association with important persons or events in the
City’s past, that meet one or more of the criteria outlined in Section
14.01.060 and that retain a high degree of integrity.
Significance Criteria:
•Events
•Persons
•Architecture
•Information Potential
(Historic Preservation Ordinance § 14.01.060)
Cultural Heritage Committee Purview
The Cultural Heritage Committee shall make a recommendation to the
City Council on applications for designation of Landmark Resources
based on an evaluation of the property's historic significance in relation
to the requirements for designation.
(Historic Preservation Ordinance § 14.01.030)
The George and Cordelia McCabe House
James Papp, PhD, on behalf of Ben
and Saskia Winter, submitted an
application and historic evaluation
of 571 Pismo St.
Landmark designation requested as
a unique example of a single-story
double bay-front Eastlake cottage
with sitting porch and the pierced
column portico.
571 Pismo St – Old Town
Historic Evaluation
James Papp, PhD, Historian and Architectural Historian
Eastlake Cottage
•Prominent architectural style in the late 19th
Century, often conflated with other styles
•One of four double bay-front Eastlake cottages
in the City of San Luis Obispo
•Historically significant regional form
Pierced Column Portico
•Rare example of pierced columns displaying
fretwork in the Central Coast
•One of two houses with pierced columns in the
City of San Luis Obispo
•Last use of the pierced column portico in the
region
(Papp, pg. 1-2)
Evaluation Criteria for Listing
Historic Preservation Ordinance § 14.01.060
Architecture
•Double bay-front Eastlake cottage with siting
porch
•Pierced column portico
Information Potential
•The pierced columns may yield important
information to the architectural history of the
City (Attachment A, pg. 2)
Persons or Event
•The significance of the McCabe House is not
replated to its association with persons or
events
The ability of a historic
resource to convey its
significance, evidenced by:
•Location
•Setting
•Design
•Materials
•Workmanship
•Feeling
•Association
Integrity
Historic Preservation Ordinance § 14.01.020(26)
Late 19th Century to Current
Landmark Designation
The property is over 50 years old, built in or around
1891, and appears to meet significance criteria
outlined in section 14.01.060.
The CHC should discuss whether the integrity meets
the level required for a landmark resource and
whether the resource is of the greatest importance
at the local, regional, state, or national level in
terms of age, architectural or historical significance,
or rarity.
Action Alternatives
Action 1: Make a recommendation to City Council on the property’s qualification
to be included in the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources as a Landmark, noting
the elements of the property which satisfy Evaluation Criteria and high degree of
integrity.
Action 2: Recommend to the City Council that the property’s Local Register status
should be retained and the property not be designated as a Landmark in the City’s
Inventory of Historic Resources, based on the finding that the property does not
satisfy Evaluation Criteria for a Landmark Historic Resource and/or does not retain
a high degree of integrity.
Action 3: Continue consideration of the request with direction to the applicant and
staff on pertinent issues.
HIST-0944-2025 (571 Pismo St)
Request to designate the McCabe House as a Landmark Resource (Inventory of Historic Resources)
Action: Forward a recommendation to the City Council regarding the eligibility of the
property to be designated as a Landmark in the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources
The McCabe House
One of six survivors of
the Central Coast’s Double-Bay-Front Eastlake form &
the only known pierced-column Eastlake
(likely of any kind, anywhere)
Eastlake architecture was based on
Charles Eastlake’s “Early English”
furniture designs from his 1868 book
Hints on Household Taste (right). The
architecture would emphasize geometry
and machine-manufactured elements to
San Luis was on the cusp of the
revolution (left: Hilamon Spencer
Laird’s Eastlake second SLO
Masonic Temple, 1875).
become the
century’s
first
modernist
—i.e., non-
revival—
style.
Eastlake architecture—
characterized by
flat and mansardic roofs
right-angled peaks
corbels
Romanesque arches
square bays & towers
geometric decoration
(sunbursts, bosses, &
perimeter panes)
lathed columns, finials, &
porch screens
—dominated California in
the last two decades of the
nineteenth century …
… in both number of houses
and their grandeur, including
Eureka’s Carson Mansion in
the previous slide and
Arroyo Grande’s Pitkin-
Conrow House in this …
… and our Old Town
Historic District,
exemplified here by
the Brooks House at
1518 Chorro Street,
shown in 1904 …
… and now, with
most of its Eastlake
features removed and
the rest obscured by
white paint.
Of particular rarity and significance is a form that appears to occur
only on the Central Coast: the Double-Bay-Front Eastlake Cottage
with interstitial sitting porch
Four examples of this regional type survive in San Luis Obispo, the
Goldtree, Barneberg, Lewin, and McCabe Houses …
… as well as one in Paso
Robles (right) and
a canted example in Santa
Barbara (below).
They appear to descend from the
Greek Revival full-width-front-
porch cottage, once a feature of
San Luis (right, from an 1870
painting by Leon Trousset) …
… through the full-width-
front-porch Italianate
cottage, of which examples
survive here (including the
Pinho House at left).
Our regional form incorporated
the double square bays that
occur in urban Eastlake forms
—seen here in examples from Olvera
Street, Los Angeles (above) and Main
Street, Ferndale (at left)—with the
suburban cottage …
… providing enclosure with
light and view in inclement
weather but including (unlike
one example from Eureka)
space to sit outside in clement
weather.
What makes the McCabe not merely one of six known survivors of
a specifically Central Coast architectural type—
the Double-Bay-Front Eastlake Cottage with sitting porch—
but probably unique anywhere is its pierced columns,
otherwise unknown in Eastlake architecture.
Pierced columns are generally associated with Greek Revival and
Italianate architecture. Of the five surviving examples of pierced-
column architecture in San Luis Obispo County, three are Cambria
Italianates, one the McCabe House, and one an aedicular Neo-
Baroque (above), around the corner from the McCabe House at
1429 Nipomo, and likely pre-1877.
This would make the
use of pierced
columns on the circa
1891 McCabe House
certainly the latest on
the Central Coast and
likely anywhere in the
United States.
Like many other Landmark buildings in San Luis Obispo,
including the other three Double-Bay-Front Eastlake cottages, the
McCabe House roof has been altered, but the double bay front and
pierced columns survive and continue to convey their significance.
Fortunately, we were able to connect the
McCabe House to a previously unidentified
photograph at the History Center, so original
Eastlake elements like the corbels, porch
screen, door, balusters and their fretwork
corbels, and missing column fretwork can be
restored to Secretary of the Interior Standards.
This architectural embodiment is so rare and important to the city,
state, and nation, and the opportunity to restore missing elements to
Secretary of the Interior Standards for documentation so
extraordinary, that the McCabe House is the ideal candidate for San
Luis Obispo’s new Landmark designation.