Housing Styles of Tudor-ville and the Georgian Avenue

Coming from North Campus heading to South Campus on Niagara Falls Blvd I turned right.  It led me into a bunch of different neighborhoods where I could not really assess the housing type.  Just a lot of smaller cookie cutter type houses that everyone bought to have their own slice of the "American Dream."

I travelled over to Englewood Avenue which by chance led me to Cortland Ave, which then led me to some side street neighborhoods unknown to me. 

I went down and around this area and did some exploring of the different housing types and I found some interesting things.

I encountered a lot of different but very similar houses using the "Tudor Revival" style. 

I found 3, 2-1/2 story houses within a couple lots from each other, that looked like they were built around the same time period and owned by the same class of people, most likely middle class.  After perusing through realtor.com, my guess is that they were built some time between the 1960s and 1980s since they looked fairly new and unweathered on the exteriors, and also because other houses in the areas dated around mid 1960s.

What makes these "Tudor Revival?" Well for starters the facade of the houses were mostly a split level, half timbred style that was only somewhat different among all three houses I photographed. The half-timbering, you could tell, was purely ornamental and held no strucural value. They all had some sort of gothic feel to them with the darker color scheme. These houses also had an assymetrical design that was readily noticeable. The gables of the roofs were overlapping and jutting out from each other. The roof itself was steeply pitched and so was the roofing over the dormers. The long narrow windows also fit the mold of Tudor. Upon zooming in, the photo reveals the plank door with diamond pane windows  that also shouts "Tudor!" This house above also has the Tudor arch entryway.  

Pardon the stop sign but heres one more example.

On the other side of the street was this masterpiece "Colonial."

What a pretty house! To me this was the best part of my adventure today.

I think this house probably fits the "Georgian" or "Colonial Revival" type. Mainly because of its symmetry of the six pane windows and how the paneled door is the most prominent and ornamental part of the facade. The architecture of the door was really neat.  It boasted elaborate entablature which included tooth-like dentils, decorative pilastors (flattened columned supports, greek in style) and even a crown like cap. This house had a symmetrical hipped roof that I thought looked really cool with its dentil carved underside.

It may be just my opinion but owning this house says, "I want what everybody else wants but I want mine to look better."  

A house similar to this one and in close proximity is from 1963 and is selling for about $147,000. Thats not a hefty price tag in these hard times, but maybe still out of range of many working class families like mine I'm sure.  Its probably owned by a white collar middle class family that has jobs in the city or suburban offices or something "American" like that, as it embodies ideas of tradition.

These two architectural styles seemed to dominate this area. Again I must reiterate that I feel it was a traditional middle class neighborhood and that maybe most of these people worked in the city but wanted to own their own house outside of all the chaos. This neighborhood is a short distance from some of the nicer looking schools, and has access to many surrounding ammenities such as parks, resturants, and stores within a couple miles. Its approximately a 15 minute drive from downtown Buffalo (perhaps where they work). It seems like the perfect place to live and raise a family.