In the last year or so, I’ve encountered so many fabulous historic apartment buildings that I feel like I have a new crush. Last August, as I rolled down a hill into Parkersburg, West Virginia, I saw the circa 1903 Savage Flats out of my passenger window, and little hearts began to dance in front of my eyes. (In reality, I pulled into a gas station parking lot so I could take some photographs.) The three-story brick building, with stair-step parapet walls, leans into its site with a facade full of movement and solid detailing, include handsome stone lintels and sills at the openings. The bow-shaped iron balconies are perfect embellishes to the solid plane of the facade, and add another layer of visual interest to the large block of a building.
This was the elevation that captured my peripheral attention.
Apartment dwelling in urban areas can be traced to both multi-story tenements constructed for the urban poor, and “flats” dating to the 1860s designed for middle and upper class tenants. The first apartment building in America is generally considered to be the five-story, 10-unit Stuyvesant Apartment House, designed by Richard Morris Hunt and built in New York City in 1869.
The corner entrance to the building.
Boarding houses, lodgers in private homes, and small-scale multi-family construction units were all strategies to meet residents’ need for shelter. There must have been such a demonstrated need in Parkersburg, a “hustling and up-to-date city at the confluence of the Ohio and Little Kanawha Rivers,” for Thomas G. Savage, a local entrepreneur, undertook the construction of the apartment complex that would bear his name.*
Another view of the facade.
According to the National Register of Historic Places nomination – Savage Flats is a contributing resource in the Avery Street Historic District – each apartment had its own balcony, and for many years, the apartment complex was “Parkersburg’s finest such and home to many business leaders, attorneys, and physicians.”
I could not figure out exactly how many apartments the building housed originally (or today) – I think maybe eight – but in the 1914 Parkersburg City Directory, I learned some of the resident’s names:
Brigham C. and Edna Icenhower (he was an engineer)
John R. Coleman, a travel agent, and his wife, Bertha
Lillie Cohn, the widow of Morris Cohn, was a milliner with a shop at 307 1/2 5th Street
Campbell D. Martin, a salesman, and his wife, Cora
Joseph A. Layne, an engineer, and his wife, Eva
Rear elevation of the Savage Flats.
As someone who has never lived in an apartment complex (I lived in a triplex once, and that was the largest multi-family dwelling I’ve ever occupied, other than a college dormitory), I don’t know if I would have embraced life at the Savage Flats, but it is certainly a handsome building.
A circa 2015 photograph of the building by Carol M. Highsmith. West Virginia Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.https://lccn.loc.gov/2015631915
I passed through Parkersburg on my way home to Central Kentucky, and I don’t know much about the Savage Flats Building beyond what I have gleaned from the NRHP files and online sleuthing (I would LOVE to find some historic interior photos or descriptions of the apartments!). It is perhaps not as vaunted an address as it was in the early 20th century, and the property transfers reveal some wild swings in appraised value and sales transactions.
The graceful dance of all of the elements on the the two main elevations has remained with me for months and months, and I hope the building has a secure and prosperous future.
*From a 1907 promotional brochure for Parkersburg, Parkersburg, 1907; a souvenir of the city of Parkersburg … and a symposium of the industrial, commercial, professional, social and religious life, together with a complete city directory of Parkersburg and her suburbs by W.M. Barnes Directory Company. https://archive.org/details/parkersburg1907s00barn/page/196/mode/2up
An apartment complex is only as good as its worst neighbor. Even a bad landlord is in some ways better than than a bad neighbor. A bad landlord is usually never around; a bad neighbor is always around. While I too have never lived in an apartment complex, my mother has (in both purpose-built historic and then-contemporary apartments as well as huge, old Victorians adapted into apartments), and that rule comes straight from her stories.
great!