Old Pittsburgh House

October 5, 2019May 5, 2021

Re-securing the stairs

The staircase was one of the things that first caught my attention. From the outside the house was of an indeterminate age, but that sinuous banister, the turned newel post — these were definitely old stairs.

A hundred and forty years old, as it turned out, and of course stairs that old will have some issues. These creaked alarmingly, some steps flexed down when stepped on, the banister was wobbly and some spindles were loose or missing. The biggest problem was that about two-thirds of the steps had slipped out of the slots in the stringer, the board attached to the wall along the length of the stairs. In old houses or better new construction the steps fit into slots in the stringer, making the stairs secure. Here you can see the slots in the stringer — and how far the steps have moved out of them:

The stairs had slipped out of the stringer because the wall had shifted. On a balloon framed house like this one, the outside walls rest on top of the sill, a large wood beam that sits on top of the stone foundation. The part of the sill near the front of the house had rotted because of a leaky gutter that poured water against the foundation. As the sill weakened it shifted, turning slightly, and the bottom of the outside wall at the front of the house moved with it. Only about an inch and a half, which might not sound like much, but you can see the effect on the baseboard on that section of the wall — it’s attached to the wall, not the floor, so it’s now tilting backwards.

Baseboards are not supposed to look like this.

Getting the rotted sill replaced was the first thing I did after I bought the house. After the work was done, the contractor and engineer told me that the wall was stable now but it had to stay where it was — moving it back into place would have damaged it. They figured this might be the case for the staircase too, although the stairs are about twelve further back on that wall and the baseboard on that section is straight.

While the staircase was creaky and not really solid, it seemed to be holding. There was a lot of other projects that were more immediately urgent. In the meantime I kept a nervous eye on the situation and did some research on how stairs are engineered and how they could be shored up. The quick fix would be to put blocks of 2x4s under each step and screw them into the wall, then fill in the stringer slots and the gaps between treads and the wall. This would just provide support for the stairs where they were now, leaving the unsightly gaps to be laboriously filled in and camouflaged, but at least it sounded like something I could handle on my own.

The first step in fixing stairs is to remove everything — drywall, plaster, lath — from the underside in order to see what’s going on. I’d been putting this off because I knew it would be a dirty, miserable job and involve endless rounds of cleaning and vacuuming afterwards.

My partner J. was out of town for a week and I decided it was a good time to get this over with. I could work for many hours without stopping and make a mess without it impacting him. First, I hung up heavy plastic sheets to enclose the stairs to the basement, which are directly underneath the stairs I was working on. Pulling down plaster generates a lot of dust and grit and I didn’t want to have to clean the entire basement (including a furnace and water heater).

Taking down the drywall patches was easy, but removing the remaining plaster was a lot slower because the keys (the rough plaster that’s squeezed between the strips of wood lath and holds it all together) were still solid. The plaster had to be broken off bit by bit.

Demo-ing plaster has to be the dirtiest part of renovation. In Pittsburgh, which had bad pollution for decades, it’s extra-messy, because along with the usual grit from deteriorated old plaster, sealed-up spaces often contain superfine black dust from decades of coal fires and industrial pollution. All of this stuff rained down onto the steps (and my head) along with chunks of plaster and lath. Every few minutes I had to stop and clear up before continuing — the basement stairs would be so covered with rubble that I couldn’t get footing.

It took several hours of halting work and when I was finished, clothes, respirator, goggles and every inch of exposed skin were a uniform dull coal gray. Plaster is also surprisingly heavy, so even removing a small section like this results in multiple contractor bags, each of which look almost empty but weigh about 40 lbs. When I multiply this by the combined weight of all the plaster in all the rooms, it’s hard to understand why the house vibrates during high winds, but that’s a topic for another day.

Once the underside of the stairs was completely exposed and everything was cleaned up it was easier to get a good look at the situation.

I could see that the treads had been replaced at some point. It also looked like someone had already made an attempt to shore up the stairs; there were small blocks here and there, although most of them were loose and didn’t seem to be doing much.

When I pushed up on the steps that sagged the most, I was able to move them up an inch or so, close to where they should be. I started to wonder if the stairs could actually be pushed back up into the slots and then secured. It would make the rest of the stair renovation a lot easier if I didn’t have to figure out how to fill the slots in the stringer and the gaps between steps and the wall. The final result would look a lot better, too.

A stairway is a structure made of many separate parts. If it’s secured to the wall, it’s stable, otherwise, it can sag or twist, a bit like one of those articulated wooden snakes. The usual method to fix an sagging staircase is to take it apart and put it back together, but that’s a complicated process and very expensive. According to the Old House Journal book it’s possible to brace the staircase , move it back into the stringer and then secure it. This was a lot less expensive and involved than taking things apart, but still a bit beyond my skill level. I’m willing to experiment and learn on things that aren’t critical, but stairs are something you want to be sure about. We needed a skilled carpenter who had experience with stairs.

An architect I know had the same issue in an old brick house in Uptown and she had high praise for the carpenter who did the work. Joe came by to take a look at our situation and said he thought he could get the stairs most of the way back into the stringer. Before he returned to start the job, I spent a few hours cleaning out the stringer, scraping out gobs of foam and putty that had been used over the years to fill in the spaces between the steps and the wall.

This was the ugliest part of the staircase.

Once all that material was gone it was apparent just how precarious the stairs actually were. They were really only secured at the top, a state of affairs that wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

For next few days we stepped softly, moved slowly and made sure to not be on the stairs at the same time. I kept imagining them collapsing and stranding us upstairs, like that scene in The Money Pit. Thankfully we only had to live with that new awareness for a few days before Joe came back and started work.

It was interesting to see how he braced the stairs against the opposite partition wall and the side of the stairs, using a diagonal 2×4 to distribute the pressure.

He also braced the stairs from below with 2×4’s placed vertically. By going back and forth and slowly adjusting the bracing from the side and below, he gradually lifted and moved the whole structure back to where it should be. He also attached blocks at several points along the stringer to keep those steps from moving too far.

Once he had moved the stairs back into the stringer — or as close as he could get — Joe added blocking underneath each step, using glue and screws to secure them into place.

There’s something very reassuring about that tidy row of identical blocks.

The bottom two steps couldn’t be moved back to the stringer, so he decided to replace those treads and risers. You can see the old floorboards under there. One day I’ll pull up the old diamond-patterned linoleum and refinish these floors.

The funny thing is the stairs don’t -look- much better, that won’t happen until I strip and refinish the woodwork, which will come after work on the second floor hallway ceiling and walls. But it’s wonderful to go up and down stairs that feel solid. A couple of the steps still creak a bit, but that’s fine — just part of the character of an old house.

September 21, 2019October 7, 2019

Double Springs Schoolhouse, Floyd County VA

In July 1870 the Virginia General Assembly passed an Act to Establish and Maintain a Uniform System of Public Free Schools. This law also required racial segregation in the schools. By November of that year the first public schools in Virginia had opened. Less than a year later, more than 2,800 public schools had been established, more than 700 of which were designated for African Americans.

The Double Spring Schoolhouse before restoration (Photographer unknown)

From an article in the Roanoke Times:

“Because there were no school buses and children primarily walked to school, schools were placed within 2 miles of students’ homes. This resulted in about 100 schools in the county by 1900. Some one- and two-room school houses were built, while some schools were housed in rented facilities.”

This is one of those country schools. The Double Spring Schoolhouse in Floyd County Virginia closed in 1948 and stood empty and overgrown for many years. Here’s the schoolhouse as it looked in 1934 …

… in 1991:

And here’s the schoolhouse today. A local family bought and restored the building and now it’s left unlocked for whomever wants to visit.

Again, from the Roanoke Times:

“Typically, teachers taught multiple grades — often all seven — in one room. The district school boards paid residents to deliver firewood to the schools in the winter. Often students were responsible for splitting the wood and keeping the stove well supplied.”

A photo of the students taken in the the early 1900s includes members of the Vest family, whose descendants bought the schoolhouse and restored it.

Photos of former teachers hang above a bucket for washing up.

Small details add to the ambience. They might not be strictly accurate to what was here in the past, but any schoolhouse in a rural community would have had a similar jumble of donated items.

On the back wall above the coathooks are a depiction of Mount Vernon, Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of George Washington and the flag.

People still add items, so the interior continues to evolve.

There’s even an amenity — not the original one, though.

In so many places it wouldn’t be possible to leave something like this open. It’d be vandalized, items stolen. But up here in the mountains, it stands unmolested. Occasionally there are visitors, sometimes a school group. The schoolhouse has become a collective project of memory.

One function of preservation is that an environment can take you back in time in a small way. Actors sometimes talk about how the right costumes and sets can make their job easier, projecting them into a story. An old building that’s been left as it was can enable anyone who enters it to do the same thing.

The Double Springs Schoolhouse is located at the intersection of Double Springs Road (870) and Stonewall Road (612) in Check, Virginia.

May 9, 2019September 22, 2019

Some old houses (and other interesting things) in SW Virginia

I visit southwestern Virginia regularly to see family and always end up looking around at old houses and suchlike. Lots of history around here, good and bad. Not a lot of money, generally, so old things tend to stay put rather than being torn down, tossed or made spiffy. For instance, this wonderful house near Fancy Gap, right off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Despite the issues, it seemed like it might still be occupied, or perhaps only recently vacated..

The porch and the trim with the little squares picked out have a folk-art quality; maybe that was a local style.

A much larger house on a rise overlooking the fields a couple of miles away has something of the same folk art feeling. I caught it mid-renovation, not looking it’s best. Still, it’s quite something to be driving up a country road bordered by fields, come around a curve and see this.

The house is asymmetrical, fairly simple in the basic structures, but on top of that the builder added windows of many different sizes, a tower (or is it a turret?), gables, multiple porches, a gazebo-like thing on one corner, lots of brackets and little notched trim along every edge. This house is sui generis.

I took these photos while standing in long grass on an uneven hillside, and later spent some time trying to rotate the photo to make it accurate, but some things just didn’t resolve — like that chimney. It has a gentle bend.

That wide cornice (?) on the porch is unusual and makes the columns look even more slender. I didn’t go up onto the porch, but here’s the view from the road in front of the house, which must look much the same as it did a hundred years ago.

A house like this must have a story and sure enough, this one does. Nailed to a post across from the house was a plastic folder with several copies of this flier:

Someone who lives in a nearby town told me that this area was a bit like the Wild West in those days; most people drank a lot, everyone had guns and there were feuds, both family and political. People got shot all the time. The Carroll County Courthouse tragedy of 1912 mentioned on the flier is a fascinating story, one that made international news at the time it happened.

(Here’s Jeremiah Sidna Allen, the man who built this house, and yes, that’s a mug shot)

The story has been well-told elsewhere, but here’s a quick version: J. (Jeremiah) Sidna Allen’s brother Floyd was a farmer, shopkeeper and moonshiner, famous for his temper. After his nephews were arrested for fighting (someone kissed someone else’s girlfriend) and taken by wagon to the jail. Floyd intercepted the wagon, beat the deputy and freed his nephews. He was arrested for assault and interfering in an arrest and was put on trial in the courthouse in Hillsville. Members of his family, including Jeremiah, brought their weapons that day and when the verdict of one year in jail was read, Floyd refused to go. The courtroom erupted in a gun battle. When it was over, the judge, the prosecutor, a juror, a witness and a sheriff were dead. Some of the Allens, including Floyd, were captured immediately; others, including J. Sidna, escaped.

(The house around the time of the Courthouse tragedy, photo from this blog)

There was a big manhunt and the story was in the news for weeks (only displaced by the sinking of the Titanic). Floyd and his son Claud were convicted and executed for their part in the massacre. J. Sidna and other family members got jail sentences and were later pardoned. Later in life, . Sidna supported himself in part by telling his family’s side of the story and selling his woodwork. He was quite talented, as his fanciful house shows.

Fancy Gap is still a small community, not quite a town, with less than 300 people. I usually stop at the Pottery and Fabric Outlet when I come through; it’s housed in a couple of wood buildings right off the parkway. I didn’t get photos, except for this old carriage outside, but here’s their website so you can get an idea.

It’s definitely worth a visit. The pottery outlet has hundreds of glazed plant pots in all sizes, plus birdbaths. The pots are seconds but still quite good and the prices are maybe a third of similar stuff at a big box store. Inside, there’s a lot of home decor items, mostly very country or old time-y style. I got these simple iron hooks for $2.09 ea. They’re rough, but they’re going in the basement storeroom, so that works.

A little over an hour north and east is Salem, a much bigger town. We were just driving through when I glimpsed a mansard roof on a side street and had to check it out.

This is North Broad Street, where the folks with money lived — still live, given the level of maintenance it would require to keep houses of this age in such good condition. There are houses of many styles here, from the 1880s to the 1950s, all set back on large lots.

Of course this one caught my eye — I love mansard roofs. This is an example of the Second Empire style (that’s the reign on Napoleon II) was, which popular from about 1860 – 1880. The roof and the arched windows are the most recognizable elements of that style.

According to A Field Guide to American Houses, Second Empire homes were relatively rare in southern states. This one is also interesting in that aside from the roof and the ornate trim, it’s a rather simple brick building.

Shutters inside and out! (And a humble touch that reminds me of my own house: the plastic extender on the downspout.)

This lovely Queen Anne is right across the street. Like other houses on this street, it’s beautifully kept, as if it was never permitted to fall into disrepair.

That porch!! It makes so much sense that the most ornate part of the house would be the area where people will be able to see it up close. Even the screen doors and the mailbox are just right.

And such a good color scheme — there are at least five colors on this house, but it’s so well thought-out that everything harmonizes, nothing leaps out. Whomever came up with these colors really knew what they were doing.

There’s something so satisfying about seeing the same level of care and detail on the side of a house. And check out those cornerboards, picked out in the darker yellow, which help define the structure and visually break up large areas. So nice. Even the garage, just visible back there, got the same treatment.

Right next to that, a different approach on a smaller, less ornate house. Sometimes a very simple color scheme is just perfect.

It’s nice that the addition is smaller and behind the main structure, and that both addition and deck are the same color/style, so the original house remains the focus. I’m not so sure about the cresting (that little iron fence) on top of the bay window. The proportion looks off, it seems too big for that little bit of roof. I wonder if it’s original — if so, there would also have been cresting up along the roof peak. Still, cresting doesn’t seem right for the style of the house, which is more simple. Maybe that little bit was added more recently, to dress up the side of the house. Who knows? Most 19th century houses were very much mix-and-match, style-wise.

Back on the other side of the street, another simple pale color scheme on a much larger house.

The color isn’t historically accurate for a house of this period, but it’s really nice; the body and the trim are tonally close, with just enough difference to pick out the trim details and accentuate the structure. Subtract the porch and the bay window and this is clearly an Italianate style house, probably built in the 1870s. Although the roof is different, the basic shapes and proportions of the facade are quite similar to the brick house above. I’m guessing that lovely front porch and the central bay window above it were added 10- 20 or so years after the house was built, to update it a bit.

With so many beautiful houses in a small area, I know this town must have other great houses and buildings, but we were just passing through and didn’t have time to properly explore. I hope to come through again with more time and see more.

March 24, 2019March 8, 2023

The thing(s) about living near railroad tracks

This might seem like a divergence from the topic of old houses, but it isn’t really. An old house — any house — isn’t separate from its location. It’s part of a neighborhood, a city, a region; subject to the same environmental issues, forces of politics and commerce as everything else.

Like thousands of other Pittsburgh area residents, I live near railroad tracks. In a lot of cities railroad tracks are more on the edges of town, but here trains snake through densely populated areas, right through the center of the city. There are five different sets of tracks just below my house; there used to be a lot more.

28th Street Bridge, 1926. Pittsburgh City photo from the Historic Pittsburgh Archive

I’ve always liked trains; traveling on them, living somewhere I could hear them, but it took a couple of years after we moved in to get used to just how loud it can be when you’re close by. The rumble of trains shakes the hillside, their horns mark the rhythms of the day and night. Did you know that each engineer has their own particular horn pattern? I don’t need to look out the window to know that Amtrak is coming through, or that the dark red and gold locomotive is pulling past the warehouse down below, as it does most weekday afternoons. There’s a long, high-pitched squeal as trains round the curve a few blocks east. As the locomotives slow down the cars slam into one another, the first CRASHBOOM so loud the impact vibrates the hillside, then BOOMBOOmBOomBoomboomboom, fading down the line. When I’m outside working in the yard and a freight train goes by, the thunder of it fills the world.

What I didn’t learn until a couple of years later is that among the trains that pass through Pittsburgh each day, some of them, long trains of black tankers coming from the west, are carrying highly volatile crude oil from the Bakken shale in North Dakota. About 25 trains carrying crude oil, 40 -50% of all the oil going to refineries in the East, pass through Pittsburgh each week. This is a fairly recent development; it wasn’t until 2012 that rail shipments of crude oil began to dramatically increase. These trains are traveling on lines that were built to carry things like coal, lumber and agricultural commodities; they were never intended to carry such dangerous cargo.

Of course, not all tankers carry crude oil, they might contain other materials; anything from corn syrup to ethanol. If the contents of a tanker are hazardous there will be a red diamond-shaped sign on the side, with a number on it. (The number for crude oil is 1267.)

The number 1075 on the red hazardous materials sign indicates that this tanker contains liquified petroleum gas.

These are the same type of tankers used to carry crude oil. Photos taken in West Virginia

This isn’t just my problem; forty percent of Pittsburgh residents live within the half-mile federal evacuation zone in case of a derailment. That’s much of downtown and the Strip District, almost all of Polish Hill, parts of Bloomfield, North Oakland, Shadyside, East Liberty, Point Breeze, Homewood, Wilkinsburg, Edgewood and communities further out. Public Source created a map showing the derailment danger zones around the railroad lines that carry crude oil through Pittsburgh. (The orange areas are the danger zones, the blue dots are schools.)

The prospect of a train derailment near my house isn’t just theoretical. That curve a few blocks east, where trains squeal as they round the curve? That was the site of a derailment in April 1987 of a mixed freight train which included a number of tanks of hazardous chemicals. One car, containing phosphorus oxychloride, ruptured and leaked. 16,000 residents were evacuated but fortunately there were no serious injuries. Again, that was just one car, and the contents were not flammable.

East Pittsburgh derailment, April 1987 (Photo by Dan Pagath)

If a crude oil train derailed and just one tanker caught fire, the outcome would be much different. This type of fire is too hot to extinguish; anything sprayed on it just evaporates. The protocol is to evacuate everyone and let it burn — for days — until it cools down. Living in an old wood-frame house on a windy, brush-covered hillside makes this a scary thing to contemplate.

Now I’m learning that Norfolk Southern Railway, which owns three of the railroad lines that run through town — including the Pittsburgh Line that runs through the Northside, Downtown, and the center of the East End — plans to greatly increase the amount of cargo they transport through Pittsburgh. The company has already started increasing the length of trains (from a max length of 1.5 miles up to 3 miles long). They plan to double the number of trains that will come through (item #6 in the linked document). And they have a plan called the Pittsburgh Vertical Clearance Project, which involves raising nine bridges along the Pittsburgh Line which are too low to allow double-stack trains to use this line. Double-stacked trains currently only run along the Mon Line, along the base of the hill in the South Side.

Norfolk Southern’s map showing the nine bridges to be raised in the Pittsburgh Vertical Clearance Plan. Note that the map omits the names of the East Pittsburgh neighborhoods the line travels through, while neighborhoods in other areas are labeled.

Adding double-stacked trains to the Pittsburgh Line would compound the issues of pollution and noise that already exist. The possibility of a derailment is just that — a possibility; the problems that double-stacked trains will bring are certain. Increasing train volume by introducing double-stacked trains will produce more pollution in densely populated neighborhoods and that pollution is concentrated in areas closest to the tracks. Double stack trains have a higher center of gravity, are therefore more unstable –especially when empty. And although double stack trains don’t carry crude oil yet, they will run alongside trains that do, which could increase the chances of a serious derailment and chain reaction explosions. In addition, much of the Pittsburgh Line through Pittsburgh is curved, not straight (derailments are more likely on curved tracks). The most recent derailment in Pittsburgh, on the South Side in August 2018 was a double-stacked train; the cause was a broken rail line.

Thus far, public attention on the Pittsburgh Vertical Clearance Plan has focused on the North Side, where five of the bridges Norfolk Southern wants to raise are located. But impacts from double-stacked trains and increasing rail traffic would affect everyone who lives along the Pittsburgh Line — about 112,000 people. Here’s a partial list of the places closest to the Pittsburgh Line, where these impacts would be greatest:

Northside (Heinz Field, PNC Park, Allegheny General Hospital, NRG Energy)
Downtown (around the convention center, the Westin Hotel, the Greyhound bus station)
Strip District (the tracks run parallel to Liberty Avenue, two blocks from the main shopping street)
Polish Hill (the entire length of the neighborhood)
Bloomfield (the southwest section, ie. Lorigan and Juniper Streets and areas near the Bloomfield Bridge)
Shadyside (Baum Boulevard,residential areas around S. Millvale, S. Aiken and S. Negley; the UPMC Shadyside campus; the trains run parallel to Centre and Ellsworth avenues, then go under Penn and alongside Target and Trader Joe’s)
Point Breeze (alongside Westinghouse Park and behind Construction Junction)
From Point Breeze, the line passes through Homewood, the edge of Regent Square, Wilkinsburg, Edgewood (behind the Towne Center Giant Eagle), Swissvale, through the center of Braddock and beyond.

Norfolk Southern’s Pittsburgh Line runs through Shadyside/East Liberty. On the left are the backs of buildings along Ellsworth Avenue; on the right is Whole Foods.

In the last five years Norfolk Southern has greatly increased the amount of hazardous cargo it brings through Pittsburgh. They have made trains longer. Now they’re working to implement a plan that will double the number of trains they run and how much cargo those trains carry. Currently the Pittsburgh line carries about 25 trains a day; but it’s capacity is about 70 trains a day — which would mean virtually constant rail traffic, noise and drastically increased pollution. It’s easy to see how increasing rail traffic will benefit Norfolk Southern’s owners and stockholders, but not why their private interests outweigh the public interest and the costs to tens of thousands of Pittsburgh residents who live along these rail lines.

Obviously crude oil and other goods are going to be moved; it’s also clear that increased rail traffic will affect people, it’s just a question of where and how many. According to Pitt researcher’s estimates, adding double-stacked trains to the Pittsburgh Line would impact more than twice as many people as would be affected by more traffic on the Mon Line. It would seem to make more sense to make sure that as few people as possible are impacted.

Pittsburgh already has an air-quality problem. If Norfolk Southern is successful in all aspects of their plan, impacts from rail traffic through Pittsburgh will impact large swaths of the city with more air pollution, more noise and vibration and a higher likelihood of a serious derailment incident in a densely populated area. This would affect not only the 40% of residents who live near train tracks, but also property owners, developers and other stakeholders who have an interest in the revitalization of the city. Blocking Norfolk Southern’s plan to raise the bridges will head off a host of problems that would harm Pittsburgh residents for years to come.

——-

UPDATE: In May 2022, Norfolk Southern and North Side community groups came to an agreement whereby the railroad can raise the bridges and the North Side community groups would get 2 million to offset impacts to the community. City Council voted to accept this agreement, opening the door to double-stacked trains to run through Pittsburgh.

February 6, 2019September 22, 2019

Old conveyances

I’m not into celebrating wealth, which has a tendency to take over anything it touches, but some things are worth looking at for reasons aside from who could afford to own them. These vehicles embody the work of the people who designed, built, operated and maintained them: engineers, craftspeople, laborers, mechanics, drivers, cleaners. As such they also represent the history of labor and not just the trappings of wealth.

Even knowing that, I wrestle with the context, so let’s get that out of the way. Henry Clay Frick was a big industrialist, union-buster and one of the wealthiest men in American in the late 19th and early 20th century. He started with a modest mansion in Pittsburgh then moved to a very large mansion in New York, which later became a museum filled with the art he’d collected.

The Pittsburgh property remained in the Frick family and is now open to the public. Some parts of it, including the Car and Carriage Museum, are free of charge. There are a couple dozen vehicles on display at any given time, dating from the 1880s to 1940. Many of the carriages and two of the cars belonged to the Frick family. Another 20 or so vehicles came from other collectors — too many to have everything on display at once.

(above and below: the Penn 30 Touring Car, manufactured by the Penn Motor Company in Pittsburgh in 1911)

(detail of the Penn 30)

They’re so beautiful. Almost hyperreal, at first. Old things have their own power but are usually faded, incomplete, or broken. Everything here is clean, polished and in excellent condition; the physical presence is undiminished. The craftsmanship, materials and forms shine out.

(above and below: details of a brougham manufactured by Brewster & Co. in New York in 1881)

The carriages were my favorites. They look delicate but were designed for bumpy cobblestones and unpaved streets (or no streets at all). The lines of the bodies and the finishes and decoration are similar to furniture and the interior design of the time, but more restrained, suiting their functionality.

The back of the brougham with it’s tiny little window. The surface of this was so interesting — lacquer, maybe?

The shape of that pull-up top!!

I wonder if this is a one or two-horse open sleigh. Also, what happens when you hit a rock going across a field?

(An electric Stanhope, manufactured in 1903 by the Baker Motor Vehicle Company, Cleveland, Ohio)

(1914 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost touring car)
This one looks like it was designed for the express purpose of mowing down the proletariat.

(The Stanley Steamer, made in 1909 by the Stanley Motor Carriage Company, Newton, Massachusetts)

(1939 American Bantam roadster)

The exhibit space is large, open and clean but the light is an odd yellow color. That’s probably for conservation reasons but it was actually a bit unpleasant and made it difficult to work out the white balance for photos. I’ll go back at some point and try again — it’d be nice to get more details.

Here’s some more info about the Car and Carriage Museum.