That house would be listed for closer to a million $ in my area! Wow! It has a lot going for it.

The kitchen would be "great for entertaining" & the handsome hutch would provide wonderful, attractive storage space. The built in work space is probably too small for your main work area, but what a nice little feature!

And Oh, the possibilites for a really special roof-top "garden!" I can see lots of beautiful pots filled with herbs & flowers & a trellis with a climbing rose & a clematis. I see wonderful outdoor furniture up there, giving you a great, private place to unwind after a busy day. Bet the view is amazing too. Also, imagine the parties you could have up there!

Looks like a spacious, well-built, interesting house with a lot of great features. Good neighborhood?

While the house next door looks like it was built in the 1800s.

Love it. :) I have about 20 local MCM (sort of) houses saved to my favorites on a local real estate agency site. I can't believe that houses that were going for $1m plus a couple of years ago are not now. :( More like $700k. Makes me wish I had rented for a couple of years. Of course taxes are absurd.

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Here is a link that might be useful: This is just one of them

Oh, meant to add the kitchen is awful too, but sheesh those views.....

Here is a link that might be useful: {{!gwi}}

palimpsest.....what would property taxes run on that property?

boopadaboo....interesting property! and yeah....those taxes!

Great neighborhood now, across from one of the original small squares in the city. At the time this house was renovated the neighborhood was a mix of blue collar, urban pioneers, and genteel poverty in some of the "big houses".

Graywings, correct: most of the single family houses in the neighborhood are 1800s. The one underneath all of this probably is too. The apartment building seen from the deck is probably 1920s.

The taxes are currently $5100 and some odd.

The tax assessment in this city makes little sense. There are houses with market value 2/3s that with the same taxes and probably houses of $1M with the same taxes.

Palimpsest...the neighborhood description puts me in mind of Philadelphia.

(Aside..somebody please tell the owner of that piano to move it away from the baseboard heater!!! I know it's only a little spinet, but still...)

It is interesting to see the gut renovations that were happening in a lot of late 19th and early 20th century urban neighborhoods in the 60's and 70's, when everyone who could fled to the suburbs, and the areas were run down, full of cheesy corner stores and bad apartment buildings, with no preservation efforts being made. Lots of us who were students and artists and other forms of bohemians in that era lived in horrid drafty apartments carved out of what had once been lovely old houses, and watched the young urban pioneers rip off the rotting wooden porches, pull out the rattling leaky window sashes, strip off the heavy moldings with their layers of lead-based paint, knock down the crumbling lath and plaster walls, root out the coal-burning furnaces in the filthy basements, and make houses like that one.

It is in Philadelphia :)

I had great aunts who lived in these neighborhoods as they devolved around them. The interesting thing is, in a lot of Center City the wealthy who stayed and the impoverished lived side by side--and it wasn't always easy to tell who was who. I know of two Delancey St houses that looked respectable enough on the outside, one of which had trees growing in the ell, the other of which had inches of pigeon ---- on the third floor. The owners just gave up on parts of the house and confined themselves to a few rooms.

The flip side of this house is those in which almost everything was preserved by benign neglect. I looked at a house a few years ago, that still had a (muddyish) brick floor basement with a cooking fireplace and beehive oven, a mid 19th century cookstove stuck inside that with and early 20th century stove pushed up against that with various flues shoved up the old chimneys. The first kitchen upstairs was probably the late sixties one that was still there.

Hah!
Oh, how I do love being right!
(And I love Philadelphia. History and architecture, to be sure...some of the best public sculpture in the country...the glorious museum of art...the Barnes Collection....and truly great eating. We've been known to bring coolers instead of suitcases, and spend all morning in the Italian market....)

I live in another Eastern city that is of similar age, in a neighborhood a little younger but not unlike Society Hill, so I know whereof you speak. The same happened here...little old ladies in reduced circumstances, living in genteel poverty in crumbling houses full of lovely antique furniture and fraying "Turkey carpets" and blackening silver. Nobody every refinished or renovated anything, unwittingly preserving value all over the place, as you describe.

We are very lucky that this neighborhood did have preservationists early on, whacking away at ill-conceived plans to alter the area's streets and build inappropriate things, coupled with a fairly stable but not expanding economy amid the depressed conditions that lasted in the South well into the 60's, when the ubiquity of air conditioning made modern living more possible. So we have a very large neighborhood of undisturbed blocks of now largely restored 19th and early 20th century buildings.

I hope whoever buys it "understands" It is on the historic register so the outside would be very difficult to alter.

I think the biggest potential problem with the exterior is the windows: They were made up as they went along, are probably far from standard size, and I am not sure, but if they are what I think most of them are, they are a pane of glass held in with deteriorating quarter round and caulk.Putting efficient windows in this house would be a major expense.

The interior of the house is not regulated in anyway so thats a real crap shoot as to what could happen next.

This house is way off the scale for my price range, and not my best location. The irony is that I just looked at a house from the same era, but a modernist-colonial-revival.
Open plan and 60s spirit tricked out with some colonial touchstones: the fanlight, 6-panel doors and colonial trim, some antique brick...THAT one had a new bathroom that had a glass vessel sink on a glass vanity, a frameless glass shower...with blue and purple iridescent glass tile. Not as an accent-- the majority of the bathroom. It was really an unfortunate choice for a fairly tradional MC house, in my book. Not my taste certainly, but it may have been more of a success in the house pictured here--the bathroom in the house pictured here is uncle to that purple glass bath.

We just removed some site-built windows like that at our house. What a mess! One of the windows was installed in such a way that it was impossible to remove without shattering glass everywhere. Another was easy to remove because it had never been sealed or caulked at all! Changing out the windows was expensive and labor intensive, requiring that the entire wall at that end of the house be resided. In our case, we're thrilled with our new windows and views, and we may even see a better heating situation next winter. But with the historical registry status, changing out the "inefficient" (to put it mildly) windows on this interesting house is likely to be quite a challenging proposition.

I wonder if there would be historic and/or energy efficiency tax credits available for bringing those windows and the heating system up to speed? I hate to think what the electric bill is for heating those vast spaces with those baseboard heaters. If the house is anything like ours, the original walls are lath and plaster on brick, and there's no way to insulate them properly unless you replace them with framing, foam, and two layers of sheetrock.

Did anybody watch "This Old House" 20 or so years ago when they redid the Wickwire's barn into a house in Concord, Mass? I remember because we lived in the next town then. The heating system for the great lofty space was fabulous. They went to Germany for a fabulously engineered (and ridiculously tidy!) boiler system, and put heating in the floors in addition to the hot water radiators, so that the room grew progressively cooler as it went up to the 20 foot ceiling...warmest at your feet, comfortable up to your head, and much cooler above.

If its typical, its natural gas fired baseboard hot water, but it looks like its supplemented with a through the wall or two. The house also looks like some split-system AC units were added at one time.

I am not sure what would be worse in these lofty and large windowed spaces--especially under that roof: the heat and humidity in the summer or the damp in the winter. I lived in an apartment with 14 foot ceilings and the kitchen in a loft. Not only was the ceiling in the kitchen 6'7'', but it was so hot in the kitchen, winter and summer that the autodefrost on the fridge evaporated the ice cubes right in the trays and "staples" went bad right in the cupboards.

Our complex looked into this and the incentive did not fully offset the cost of one historically appropriate window per unit--and this a special-price window because of the potential number of windows sold to the association.

This kitchen by Henrybuilt would be a better fit for this house, I think. Contemporary but organic:

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