SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2011
Look back on this year’s wonderful home tour.
505 North Hamilton Street
Owner Barry LaRue suspects, based on its exterior design, that this Queen Anne house was built between 1885 and 1889. The Alton E. Lewis family lived in the house for many years. The family probably bought it in 1901, when the Lewis brothers started the Michigan Ladder Company, which is still in business in Ypsilanti today. Alton Lewis put an addition on the front northeast corner of the house to expand the front hallway and add a staircase. The garage to shelter the new-fangled “automobile” was constructed around 1915....
121 North Huron Street
This spectacular example of a house in the Italian Villa style was built in the early 1870s. It became the home of Dr. John Andrus Watling, the first college-educated dentist to practice in Michigan and one of the founders of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. The house features a tall tower, an ornamental bay window on the side, and a front gable with hipped hoods over the street-side windows on the first floor. (Dr. Watling’s dental office was next door at 119 North Huron.) In the mid-1980s,...
35 South Summit Street
This diva of a house has had a long and eclectic life, beginning as a Gothic Revival sometime in the mid-nineteenth century and ending up as a Queen Anne. “It’s a sampler, quite wonderful—an architectural history lesson by itself,” said Heritage Foundation board member Jane Schmiedeke in a 1986 Ann Arbor News article. From a modest frame structure, built perhaps as early as 1842, the house evolved until the 1890s, when it began to look like it does today. By 1859 several additions to the house had resulted in...
32 South Normal Street
People who regularly drive down West Michigan Avenue have enjoyed watching the transformation of this circa 1893 Queen Anne house into a painted lady that sits high above the intersection of South Normal and Ypsilanti’s main drag. Adam Delaney, the owner of two concrete construction companies, purchased it in 2004 because “it needed to be fixed up.” Slowly but surely he has turned the house into a beautiful showpiece. His mom, Neeta Delaney, has great taste, and the two of them sparred over the exterior colors. The house features...
7 North Normal Street
This stately home, built in 1848, has long been a landmark for Ypsilanti residents and may have been designed by the architect who designed the 1840’s Greek Revival house at 218 North Washington Street that has been owned by the Ladies’ Literary Club since 1913. The architecture of the Normal Street house, with its double verandas of fretted columns, is reminiscent of the Greek Revival style of the antebellum South. The facade has a beautifully balanced design of French doors above and below; the Italianate details were later additions....
314 Hiawatha Street
A 1950’s split-level ranch house is typically not what one expects to encounter on a historic home tour. But for Brent Welsh and Adam Levengood it was exactly the type of “historic” rehab project they were looking for. After renovating a vernacular upright and wing house on North Hamilton in Ypsilanti, the two were eager for a change, and they decided to pursue a preservation project on a mid-century house. Their aim in putting their house on today’s tour is to spotlight a house from that era. The 1958...