HomeMy WebLinkAboutItem 6c. Review of a request to enter into a Historical Property Preservation Contract (Mills Act) for the Landmark George and Cordelia McCabe House located at 571 Pismo Street
CULTURAL HERITAGE COMMITTEE AGENDA REPORT
SUBJECT: REVIEW OF A REQUEST TO ENTER INTO A HISTORICAL PROPERTY
PRESERVATION CONTRACT (MILLS ACT) FOR THE LANDMARK GEORGE AND
CORDELIA MCCABE HOUSE LOCATED AT 571 PISMO STREET
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: HIST-0313-2026
PROJECT ADDRESS: 571 Pismo Street
APPLICANT: Ben and Saskia Winter REPRESENTATIVE: James Papp, PhD
RECOMMENDATION
Provide a recommendation to the City Council regarding a Mills Act historic property
contract between the City and the owner of property at 571 Pismo Street, to encourage
maintenance and restoration of the Landmark “McCabe House” property.
1.0 BACKGROUND
The owners of the George and Cordelia McCabe (McCabe) House at 571 Pismo Street
have submitted an application to enter into a Mills Act historic property preservation
contract with the City (see Draft Agreement, Attachment A). Per the City’s Historic
Preservation Ordinance (HPO) § 14.01.030 (B)(8) the Cultural Heritage Committee (CHC)
is tasked with providing a recommendation to the City Council about the request.
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 (District) was created to encompass one of the oldest residential neighborhoods
and most of the development occurred around the turn of the 20th century. The high
concentration of 100-year-old or older residences establishes the District’s predominant
architectural and visual character. 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).
Meeting Date: 7/27/2026
Item Number: 6c
Time Estimate: 30 minutes
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Item 6c
HIST0313-2026
Cultural Heritage Committee Report – July 27, 2026
The residence at 571 Pismo was built around 1891 and in 2025 was added to the City’s
Inventory of Historic Resources as a Landmark (Attachment B - City Council Resolution
No. 11640). The McCabe House was added as a Landmark because it exhibits a unique
example of a late 19th century double -bay-front Eastlake cottage with a sitting porch
framed by rare, pierced columns.
2.2 Mills Act Contracts
The Mills Act Program is a property tax reduction program for protection of cultural
resources that encourages their maintenance and restoration (§ 3.6.2 of the General Plan
Conservation and Open Space Element). Participation in the program is limited to
designated 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
(HPO § 14.01.050 (A)(1)).
The City and owners of a Landmark may enter into a historical property preservation
contract under which the owners agree t o restore, maintain, and protect the property in
accordance with historical preservation standards. Owners may qualify for property tax
relief, potentially realizing tax savings of between 40% and 60% per year. Contracts have
a minimum term of ten years, and contain standard elements set out in the Mills Act (Govt.
Code §§ 50280-50290), including: a provision for preservation (or, where necessary,
restoration and rehabilitation) of the property in conformance with state historic
preservation guidelines; periodic examination of the property for compliance with the
contract; and a provision binding the contract upon successive owners. Automatic one -
year extensions are provided, unless either party gives notice of non -renewal of the
contract.
Figure 1 - 571 Pismo Street Figure 2 - 571 Pismo Street Historic Photo
(1895/96)
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Item 6c
HIST0313-2026
Cultural Heritage Committee Report – July 27, 2026
2.3 Proposed Improvements
Several improvements and maintenance items are identified by the applicant for
completion during the term of the proposed contract (Attachment D, Application Request
and List of Improvements). The application notes that some preservation and repair work
has been completed and the requested contract will assist in the continued efforts to
preserve the Landmark. All of the items discussed appear to be relevant to the
preservation and maintenance of this property and are included in Exhibit A of the
proposed draft contract (Attachment A) and outlined below. Additionally, any work
undertaken on the property must, under the terms of the contract, be carried out in a
manner consistent with the City’s historical preservation standards and guidelines and
with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Treatment of Historic Properties, so as
to retain and preserve original, character-defining architectural features and the historical
character of the property.
The owners of the McCabe House intend to reconstruct or continue restoration of the
following improvements and/or repairs during the term of this contract:
reconstruct the descending screen
reconstruct the balusters and fretwork faux corbels
reconstruct the original wood picket fence
replace and reconstruct areas of dry rot
replace defectively applied glazing compound
reconstruct the original exterior sash lugs or ears
install period hardware
repaint
repair dry rot in other areas of the exterior f abric
reconstruct historic interior plaster
insulate the house
3.0 ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINATION
Entering into a Mills Act Contract with the owners of a historical property is not subject to
the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because it is not a
project as defined in CEQA Guidelines § 15378 (Definitions-Project). Implementation of
the Mills Act is a government fiscal activity which does not involve commitment to any
specific project resulting in a potentially significant physical impact on the environment
CEQA Guidelines §15378 (b)(4).
4.0 ACTION ALTERNATIVES
1. Staff Recommendation: Recommend to the City Council that the City enter into a
Mills Act Historic Property Preservation Contract with the property owners, to
encourage maintenance and restoration of the historic property at 571 Street.
2. Continue consideration of the request with direction to the applicant and staff.
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Item 6c
HIST0313-2026
Cultural Heritage Committee Report – July 27, 2026
3. Recommend to the City Council that the City not enter into the proposed historical
property contract. This action is not recommended because the City participates
in incentive programs that encourage maintenance and restoration of historic
properties, General Plan Conservation and Open Space Element, Program 3.6.2),
and as a Landmark Resource, this property is eligible for this program
5.0 ATTACHMENTS
A - Draft Historic Property Preservation Agreement - 571 Pismo Street
B - Resolution No. 11640 (2026 Series)
C - Historic Resource Evaluation 571 Pismo Street
D - Application Request and List of Improvements for 571 Street
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Attachment A – Draft Agreement
HISTORIC PROPERTY PRESERVATION AGREEMENT BETWEEN
THE CITY OF SAN LUIS OBISPO AND THE OWNER OF THE HISTORIC
PROPERTY LOCATED AT 571 PISMO STREET, IN THE CITY AND THE COUNTY
OF SAN LUIS OBISPO, STATE OF CALIFORNIA.
THIS AGREEMENT is made and entered into this _________ day of __________ , 2026, by and
between the City of San Luis Obispo, a municipal corporation (hereinafter referred to as the
“City”), and Ben and Saskia Winter (hereinafter referred to as “Owner”), and collectively referred
to as the “parties.”
WHEREAS, Owner is the owners of that certain real property commonly known as 571
Pismo Street (APN 003-615-003), and legally described as shown in the attached
“Exhibit B” (“Owner’s Property”); and
WHEREAS, Owner has agreed to enter into a Historical Property Contract with the City
for the preservation, maintenance, restoration, or rehabilitation of Owner’s Property, a historic
resource within the City;
NOW, THEREFORE, in consideration of the above recitals and in further consideration
of the mutual benefits, promises, and agreements set out herein, the parties agree as follows:
Section 1. Description of Preservation Measures. The Owner, their heirs, or assigns hereby
agree to undertake and complete, at their expense, the preservation, maintenance, and
improvements measures described in “Exhibit A” attached hereto.
Section 2. Effective Date and Term of Agreement. This agreement shall be effective and
commence upon recordation and shall remain in effect for an initial term of ten (10) years
thereafter. Each year upon the anniversary of the agreement’s effective date, such initial term will
automatically be extended as provided in California Government Code Section 50280 through
50290 and in Section 3, below.
Section 3. Agreement Renewal and Non-renewal.
a. Each year on the anniversary of the effective date of this agreement (hereinafter
referred to as “annual renewal date”), a year shall automatically be added to the
initial term of this agreement unless written notice of nonrenewal is served as
provided herein.
b. If the Owner or the City desires in any year not to renew the agreement, the Owner
or the City shall serve written notice of nonrenewal of the agreement on the other
party. Unless such notice is served by the Owner to the City at least ninety (90)
days prior to the annual renewal date, or served by the City to the Owner at least
sixty (60) days prior to the annual renewal date, one (1) year shall automatically be
added to the term of the agreement as provided herein.
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c. The Owner may make a written protest of the notice. The City may, at any time
prior to the annual renewal date, withdraw its notice to the Owner of nonrenewal.
d. If either the City or the Owner serves notice to the other party of nonrenewal in any
year, the agreement shall remain in effect for the balance of the term then
remaining.
Section 4. Standards and Conditions. During the term of this agreement, the historic property
shall be subject to the following conditions:
a. Owner agrees to preserve, maintain, and, where necessary, restore or rehabilitate
the building and its character-defining features, including: the building’s general
architectural form, style, materials, design, scale, proportions, organization of
windows, doors, and other openings; interior architectural elements that are integral
to the building’s historic character or significance; exterior materials, coatings,
textures, details, mass, roof line, porch, and other aspects of the appearance of the
building’s exterior, as described in Exhibit A, to the satisfaction of the Community
Development Director or their designee.
b. All building changes shall comply with applicable City specific plans, City
regulations and guidelines, and conform to the rules and regulations of the Office
of Historic Preservation of the California Department of Parks and Recreation,
namely the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation and
Standards and Guidelines for Historic Preservation Projects. Interior remodeling
shall retain original, character-defining architectural features and architectural
ornamentation to the greatest extent possible.
c. The Community Development Director shall be notified by the Owner of changes
to character-defining exterior features prior to their execution, such as major
landscaping projects and tree removals, exterior door or window replacement,
repainting, remodeling, or other exterior alterations requiring a building permit.
The Owner agrees to secure all necessary City approvals and/or permits prior to
changing the building’s use or commencing construction work.
d. Owner agrees that property tax savings resulting from this agreement shall be used
for property maintenance and improvements as described in Exhibit A.
e. The following are prohibited: demolition or partial demolition of the historic
building; exterior alterations or additions not in keeping with the standards listed
above; dilapidated, deteriorating, or unrepaired structures such as fences, roofs,
doors, walls, windows; outdoor storage of junk, trash, debris, appliances, or
furniture visible from a public way; or any device, decoration, structure, or
vegetation which is unsightly due to lack of maintenance or because such feature
adversely affects, or is visually incompatible with, the property’s recognized
historic character, significance, and design as determined by the Community
Development Director.
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f. Owner shall allow reasonable periodic examination, by prior appointment, of the
interior and exterior of the historic property by representatives of the County
Assessor, the State Department of Parks and Recreation, the State Board of
Equalization, and the City as may be necessary to determine the owners’
compliance with the terms and provisions of this agreement.
Section 5. Furnishing of Information. The Owner hereby agrees to furnish any and all
information requested by the City which may be necessary or advisable to determine compliance
with the terms and provisions of this agreement.
Section 6. Cancellation.
a. The City, following a duly-noticed public hearing by the City Council as set forth
in Government Code Section 50285, may cancel this agreement if it determines that
the Owner has breached any of the conditions of this agreement or has allowed the
property to deteriorate to the point that it no longer meets the standards for a
qualified historic property; or if the City determines that the Owner has failed to
preserve, maintain, or rehabilitate the property in the manner specified in Section 4
of this agreement. If a contract is cancelled because of failure of the Owner to
preserve, maintain, and rehabilitate the historic property as specified above, the
Owner shall pay a cancellation fee to the State Controller as set forth in Government
Code Section 50286, which states that the fee shall be 12 ½% of the full value of
the property at the time of cancellation without regard to any restriction imposed
with this agreement.
b. If the historic building is acquired by eminent domain and the City Council
determines that the acquisition frustrates the purpose of the agreement, the
agreement shall be cancelled and no fee imposed, as specified in Government Code
Section 50288.
Section 7. Enforcement of Agreement.
a. In lieu of and/or in addition to any provisions to cancel the agreement as referenced
herein, the City may specifically enforce, or enjoin the breach of, the terms of the
agreement. In the event of a default, under the provisions to cancel the agreement
by the Owner, the City shall give written notice of violation to the Owner by
registered or certified mail addressed to the address stated in this agreement. If such
a violation is not corrected to the reasonable satisfaction of the Community
Development Director or designee within thirty (30) days thereafter; or if not
corrected within such a reasonable time as may be required to cure the breach or
default of said breach; or if the default cannot be cured within thirty (30) days
(provided that acts to cure the breach or default may be commenced within thirty
(30) days and shall thereafter be diligently pursued to completion by the Owner);
then the City may, without further notice, declare a default under the terms of this
agreement and may bring any action necessary to specifically enforce the
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obligations of the Owner growing out of the terms of this agreement, apply to any
court, state or federal, for injunctive relief against any violation by the owners or
apply for such relief as may be appropriate.
b. The City does not waive any claim of default by the Owner if the City does not
enforce or cancel this agreement. All other remedies at law or in equity which are
not otherwise provided for in this agreement or in the City’s regulations governing
historic properties are available to the City to pursue in the event that there is a
breach or default under this agreement. No waiver by the City of any breach or
default under this agreement shall be deemed to be a waiver of any other subsequent
breach thereof or default herein under.
c. By mutual agreement, City and Owner may enter into mediation or binding
arbitration to resolve disputes or grievances growing out of this contract.
Section 8. Binding Effect of Agreement. The Owner hereby subjects the historic building
located at 571 Pismo Street, San Luis Obispo, California, Assessors Parcel Number 003-615-003,
to the covenants, reservations, and restrictions as set forth in this agreement. The City and Owner
hereby declare their specific intent that the covenants, reservations, and restrictions as set forth
herein shall be deemed covenants running with the land and shall pass to and be binding upon the
Owner’s successors and assigns in title or interest to the historic property. Every contract, deed, or
other instrument hereinafter executed, covering or conveying the historic property or any portion
thereof, shall conclusively be held to have been executed, delivered, and accepted subject to the
covenants, reservations, and restrictions expressed in this agreement regardless of whether such
covenants, restrictions, and reservations are set forth in such contract, deed, or other instrument.
Section 9. Notice. Any notice required by the terms of this agreement shall be sent to the address
of the respective parties as specified below or at other addresses that may be later specified by the
parties hereto.
To City: Community Development Director
City of San Luis Obispo
919 Palm Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
To Owner: Ben and Saskia Winter
571 Pismo Street
San Luis Obispo, CA, 93401
Section 10. General Provisions.
a. None of the terms, provisions, or conditions of this agreement shall be deemed to
create a partnership between the parties hereto and any of their heirs, successors, or
assigns, nor shall such terms, provisions, or conditions cause them to be considered
joint ventures or members of any joint enterprise.
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b. The Owner agrees to hold the City and its elected and appointed officials, officers,
agents, and employees harmless from liability for damage or from claims for
damage for personal injuries, including death, and claims for property damage
which may arise from the direct or indirect use or activities of the Owner, or from
those of their contractor, subcontractor, agent, employee, or other person acting on
the Owner’s behalf which relates to the use, operation, maintenance, or
improvement of the historic property. The Owner hereby agrees to and shall defend
the City and its elected and appointed officials, officers, agents, and employees with
respect to any and all claims or actions for damages caused by, or alleged to have
been caused by, reason of the Owner’s activities in connection with the historic
property, excepting however any such claims or actions which are the result of the
sole negligence or willful misconduct of City, its officers, agents, or employees.
c. This hold harmless provision applies to all damages and claims for damages
suffered, or alleged to have been suffered, and costs of defense incurred, by reason
of the operations referred to in this agreement regardless of whether or not the City
prepared, supplied, or approved the plans, specifications, or other documents for
the historic property.
d. All of the agreements, rights, covenants, reservations, and restrictions contained in
this agreement shall be binding upon and shall inure to the benefit of the parties
herein, their heirs, successors, legal representatives, assigns, and all persons
acquiring any part or portion of the historic property, whether by operation of law
or in any manner whatsoever.
e. In the event legal proceedings are brought by any party or parties to enforce or
restrain a violation of any of the covenants, reservations, or restrictions contained
herein, or to determine the rights and duties of any party hereunder, the prevailing
party in such proceeding may recover all reasonable attorney’s fees to be fixed by
the court, in addition to court costs and other relief ordered by the court.
f. In the event that any of the provisions of this agreement are held to be unenforceable
or invalid by any court of competent jurisdiction, or by subsequent preemptive
legislation, the validity and enforceability of the remaining provisions, or portions
thereof, shall not be affected thereby.
g. This agreement shall be construed and governed in accordance with the laws of the
State of California.
Section 11. Amendments. This agreement may be amended, in whole or in part, only by a written
recorded instrument executed by the parties hereto.
Section 12. Recordation and Fees. No later than twenty (20) days after the parties enter into this
agreement, the City shall cause this agreement to be recorded in the office of the County Recorder
of the County of San Luis Obispo. Participation in the program shall be at no cost to the Owner;
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however the City may charge reasonable and necessary fees to recover direct costs of executing,
recording, and administering the historical property contracts.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the City and Owner have executed this agreement on the day
and year written above.
OWNER
____________________________________ ______________________________
Ben Winter Date
____________________________________ ______________________________
Saskia Winter Date
CITY OF SAN LUIS OBISPO
____________________________________ ______________________________
Tyler Corey, Deputy Director Date
For: Timothea Tway
Community Development Director
Pursuant to authority conferred under by Resolution No. XXXX
ATTEST:
______________________________
Teresa Purrington, City Clerk
APPROVED AS TO FORM:
______________________________
J. Christine Dietrick, City Attorney
ALL SIGNATURES MUST BE NOTARIZED
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EXHIBIT A
MAINTENANCE AND IMPROVEMENT MEASURES FOR THE MCCABE HOUSE
LOCATED AT 571 PISMO STREET, SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA
Owner shall preserve, maintain, and repair the historic building, including its character-defining
architectural features in good condition, to the satisfaction of the Community Development
Director or designee, pursuant to a Mills Act Preservation Contract with the City of San Luis
Obispo for property located at 571 Pismo Street. Character-defining features shall include, but are
not limited to: roof, eaves, dormers, trim, porches, walls and siding, architectural detailing, doors
and windows, window screens and shutters, balustrades and railings, foundations, and surface
treatments.
Owner agrees to make the following improvements and/or repairs during the term of this contract
but in no case later than ten (10) years from the contract date. All changes or repairs shall be
consistent with the City’s Historic Preservation Ordinance and the Secretary of the Interior’s
Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties:
reconstruct the descending screen
reconstruct the balusters and fretwork faux corbels
reconstruct the original wood picket fence
replace and reconstruct areas of dry rot
replace defectively applied glazing compound
reconstruct the original exterior sash lugs or ears
install period hardware
repaint
repair dry rot in other areas of the exterior fabric
reconstruct historic interior plaster
insulate the house
OWNERS
____________________________________ ______________________________
Ben Winter Date
____________________________________ ______________________________
Saskia Winter Date
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EXHIBIT B
LEGAL DESCRIPTION
For APN/Parcel ID: 003-615-003
To be included in final preservation agreement.
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R 11640
RESOLUTION NO. 11640 (2026 SERIES)
A RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF SAN LUIS
OBISPO, CALIFORNIA, DESIGNATING THE PROPERTY LOCATED AT
571 PISMO STREET AS A LANDMARK HISTORIC RESOURCE,
KNOWN AS THE GEORGE AND CORDELIA MCCABE HOUSE
APPLICATION NO. HIST-0681-2025)
WHEREAS, the applicants, Ben and Saskia Winter, filed an application on
December 2, 2025, for review of the inclusion of the property at 571 Pismo Street on the
City’s List of Historic Resources as a Landmark; and
WHEREAS, the Cultural Heritage Committee of the City of San Luis Obispo
conducted a public hearing in the Council Hearing Room of City Hall, 990 Palm Street,
San Luis Obispo, California on February 23, 2026, and recommended that the City
Council designate the property at 571 Pismo Street as a Landmark Property on the City’s
Inventory of Historic Resources; and
WHEREAS, the City Council of the City of San Luis Obispo conducted a public
hearing on April 21, 2026, for the purpose of considering the request to add the property
to the Inventory of Historic Resources; and
WHEREAS, notices of said public hearings were made at the time and in the
manner required by law; and
WHEREAS, the City Council has duly considered all evidence, including the record
of the Cultural Heritage Committee hearing and recommendation, and the evaluation and
recommendation prepared by staff.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Council of the City of San Luis
Obispo as follows:
SECTION 1. Findings. Based upon all the evidence, the City Council makes the
following findings:
a) The subject property is eligible for inclusion in the City’ s Inventory of Historic
Resources as a Landmark because the property satisfies at least one of the
significance criteria for historic resource listing described in 14.01.060 of the
City’s Historic Preservation Ordinance (HPO), exhibits a high degree of
integrity, and is more than 50 years old.
b) The subject property satisfies architectural criterion as a unique example of a
late 19th century double-bay-front Eastlake cottage with a sitting porch framed
by rare, pierced columns. The building retains character-defining square
window bays, the porch between bays, and pierced columns framing the
portico. The pieced columns are rare features that have potential to yield
information important to the architectural history of the City of San Luis Obispo.
Docusign Envelope ID: DF596B4C-63DF-4B2C-97AA-BED23582DD2E
Attachment B - Resolution No. 11640 (2026 Series)
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Resolution No. 11640 (2026 Series) Page 2
R 11640
SECTION 2. Environmental Determination. The project is categorically exempt
from the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Inclusion of the
subject property on 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.
SECTION 3. Action. The City Council of the City of San Luis Obispo does hereby
designate the property located at 571 Pismo Street as a Landmark Resource, referred to
as “The George and Cordelia McCabe House.”
Upon motion of Vice Mayor Francis, seconded by Council Member Shoresman,
and on the following roll call vote:
AYES: Council Member Boswell, Shoresman, Vice Mayor Francis, and
Mayor Stewart
NOES: None
ABSENT: Council Member Marx
The foregoing resolution was adopted this 21st day of April 2026.
Mayor Erica A. Stewart
ATTEST:
Teresa Purrington
City Clerk
APPROVED AS TO FORM:
J. Christine Dietrick
City Attorney
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and affixed the official seal of the
City of San Luis Obispo, California, on ______________________.
Teresa Purrington
City Clerk
Docusign Envelope ID: DF596B4C-63DF-4B2C-97AA-BED23582DD2E
4/30/2026 | 3:42 PM PDT
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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 & - +LVWRULF 5HVRXUFH 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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4
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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5
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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6
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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7
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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8
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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10
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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13
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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15
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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16
VII. San Luis Obispo’s Lost Eastlakes
Above: Cortesi House; below: a house once on the Cuesta Grade, photographed 1912
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17
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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19
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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20
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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21
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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22
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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23
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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24
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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27
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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32
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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33
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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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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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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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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Circa 1895–1896 (above) and 1975 (below)
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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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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.
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.
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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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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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.
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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
Mills Act Application
The George and Cordelia McCabe House
571 Pismo Street
Introduction The McCabe House was recently raised to Landmark status by the San
Luis Obispo City Council at the recommendation of the Cultural Heritage Committee for the
house’s architectural significance as one of four examples in the city and six known
examples on the Central Coast of the Double-Bay-Front Eastlake Cottage, a form that
appears to be indigenous to this region, in addition to its architectural significance as being
one of the last documented examples of the use of wood pierced columns, an American
architectural form that appears to have been innovated by the influential early American
architect Alexander Jackson Davis, as recorded in his book Rural Residences (New York,
1837). The pierced column form is associated with Greek Revival and Italianate houses of
the mid nineteenth century, but San Luis Obispo’s three examples embody alternative
styles: the Neobaroque aedicular (temple-form) at 1429 Nipomo, which may date as early
as 1877 but whose columns may date from that time or later; the McCabe House, around
the corner on Pismo Street; and the Mill Street Historic District’s 855 Toro (the Richard
Leland House, following page), an asymmetric single-bay Eastlake cottage first documented
in the 1891 Sanborn Map.
Attachment D - Application Request and List of Improvements for 571 Street
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2
Association of pierced
columns with the late-
nineteenth-century Eastlake
form is currently unknown
anywhere but San Luis,
making the McCabe House and
the Leland House (at left)
essential to protect, retain, and
maintain. Eastlake was the
dominant late-nineteenth-
century architectural form in
California but is under-
researched due to its denial by
late academic Vincent Scully.
Mills Act The Mills Act is a tax abatement measure dating from the 1970s that
recognizes the added costs of restoring and maintaining historic properties, first passed by
State Senator Jim Mills of San Diego in the California legislature and then passed by popular
referendum after the State Supreme Court ruled the legislative passage unconstitutional.
The City of San Luis Obispo uses a ten -year contract as an enforcement mechanism to
prevent Mills Act properties from falling into desuetude and decay. These renewable
contracts focus on historic structure and fabric as well as such features (such as plumbing,
drainage, and electrical) that contribute to the resource’s sustainability.
Like many new owners of a historic house, applicants Ben and Sakia Winter have already
carried out extensive repairs and will be subject to unexpected emergency repairs and
reconstructions of historic elements. Within the contract, they undertake to preserve and
maintain the McCabe House and its historic structure and fabric. In addition, they will
reconstruct, to Secretary of the Interior Standards of documentation, the front porch’s
• descending screen (above)
• balusters and their elaborate fretwork faux corbels
(right)
After consultation, the façade’s ten true corbels would be problematic to reconstruct, as
they no longer have a flat-roof soffit to support and would have to project in a functionless
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3
way under the current shed roof, tending to collect water rather than protect the façade
from water, as well as directly juxtaposing two anachronistic features in a confusion of
historicity.
The Winters will reconstruct the original wood picket fence, though not with a precise copy
to Secretary of the Interior Standards.
In addition, the Winters undertake to continue restoration of the dramatic and character -
defining plate glass sash windows, including
• replacing and reconstructing areas of dry rot
• replacing defectively applied glazing compound
• reconstructing the original exterior sash lugs or ears
(sash lug/ear illustrated at right)
• installing period hardware
• repainting—
though not including repair of the interior sash counterweights, which would require the
highly invasive procedure of opening the walls from the exterior.
The Winters also undertake to repair and reconstruct
• dry rot in other areas of the exterior fabric
• historic interior plaster
Finally, in order to protect the character -defining fenestration from future risk of
replacement by non-historic insulated windows, the Winters undertake to insulate the
remainder of the house.
The result will be the preservation of an important exemplar of a regional form and the
restoration of character-defining features to Secretary of the Interior Standards to convey
its architectural significance.
Submitted on 21 May 2026 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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