Price Tags has been publishing long enough that I forget stories I’ve already done – like Portland’s Bowman apartment buildings. Here’s a post from 2012, with more details on how the ‘missing middle’ can be achieved.
Meanwhile, here are more Bowman examples from Portland – one right next to the complex featured yesterday.
I wasn’t even sure this was an apartment block, so elegant is the design. (Nor am I sure it was done by Bowman, though it’s certainly in that genre. Any PDXers have a definitive list?)
Here’s another of Bowman’s work, with those distinctive upper balconies, just around the corner:
Even though there is no setback or landscaping to soften the pedestrian experience, the clinker brick adds the necessary eye candy.
Bowman seems to have specialized in these small apartment blocks wherever there was a close-in streetcar neighbourhood. Here’s an example in Northwest: the Irving Street Bowman Apartments.
Note the use of poured concrete and tracings of the form work – something we associate with crude, unfinished construction. But here it’s saved by the architecture – something or other in, what, a French style?
It can be difficult to describe exactly what style Bowman is referencing because he used so many. As the Irvington Home Tour Guide notes: “Bowman began his career building “picturesque” Craftsman Style bungalows … but ultimately worked his way through many other styles including Colonial, Swiss Chalet, Prairie, and even Spanish Mission Revival.” And even, um, shingle-style? as above.
Here’s another in Northwest from 1925, on NW 20th:
Northwest PDX is a great place to go hunting for lovely small apartments from the early 20th century, like these:
Not by Bowman, likely. The pre-Depression era had many spec builders with a sense of taste, and there was a market that demanded it (along with the craftsmen to build it). Bowman wasn’t so much a pioneer in this form as a designer-builder who knew how to take advantage of opportunity.
He had to wait, for instance, for the 1916 expiration of deeds in Irvington which prevented multiple-family development, as well as any commercial development, even a small grocery or gas station. The solution was to make them look as much like elegant houses as possible.
Portland, clearly, allowed these blocks in otherwise single-family neighbourhoods throughout the city in the 1920s, (perhaps to the consternation of earlier residents). So why weren’t there in following decades more of these small blocks that fit in so well? You’d think today that it would be difficult for any affluent neighbourhood to object to such designs in the face of a housing crisis and the need for more choices, except for reasons of status.
Why don’t we simply pull out the plans, affirm the design guidelines, and make the middle a lot less missing.
There’s a reason. Find out tomorrow.
