Would You Like Ranch With That?

California has seven major architectural styles; eight if you count Spanish. They are ranch, ranchette, rancher, American Ranch, California Ranch, rambler and raised ranch. Seems like that anyway.

Not that there’s anything wrong with ranch-style houses. I grew up in one and purchased two more in California. They are pure American, born and bred. They hug the ground and favor slabs or crawl spaces rather than basements, at least in California, a concession to the state’s propensity to shake, rattle and roll at the most inopportune times. They are practical and easy to build. And they are boring.

Rochester is Different

Rochester and many upstate NY cities are a different story. The Landmark Society identifies a variety of urban home styles here including Federal, Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne, and plenty of  “Revivals,” including Colonial, Greek and Gothic. The one style that my purely unofficial observations appears to be the most prolific, at least in the Park Ave. neighborhood where I live, is a style that doesn’t appear to be a recognized as an official style at all: the American Foursquare.

Foursquare Houses

Besides the extensive appearance of Foursquares in the city, I’m emphasizing this particular style for a personal reason as well. I made an offer on one of these classics the day I arrived in Rochester and was in escrow by 5 pm that evening. Like just about everything else, there are vast and important differences between buying a home here and in California.. More on the topic of home buying here, as opposed to California, in a future installment.

The Foursquare is house design became popular in the mid 1890s and continued to the late 1930s, according to Wikipedia, which describes it as a “square, boxy design, two-and-one-half stories high, usually with four large, boxy rooms to a floor, a center dormer, and a large front porch with wide stairs. The boxy shape provides a maximum amount of interior room space, to use a small city lot to best advantage. Other common features included a hipped roof, arched entries between common rooms, built-in cabinetry, and Craftsman-style woodwork.”

American Foursquare Design 

A typical design would be as follows: first floor, from front to back, on one side, the living room and dining room; while on the other side, the entry room or foyer, stairway and kitchen. Sometimes a bathroom was also included. Second floor, front to back, on one side, bedroom, bathroom and bedroom; while on the other side, bedroom, stairway and bedroom. The bedrooms had a slightly longer dimension along the front and back of the house with side-by-side closets between the bedrooms. This gave a very efficient layout, with a bedroom in each corner and a centralized bathroom and stairway. The top floor was generally just a big open space with one to four dormers. The basement generally contained a large natural convection furnace or boiler.

More from Wikipedia:

The American Foursquare style is occasionally revived in new developments, although its appeal is as a "traditional-looking" style rather than a fully authentic one, often including modern 2-car attached garages and other features absent in originals, and typically built on larger lots.

An ad for an American Foursquare house from Sears Roebuck & Co. 

The American Foursquare shared many features with the Prairie architecture pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. During the early 1900s and 1910s, Wright even designed his own variations on the Foursquare, including the Robert M. Lamp House, "A Fireproof House for $5000", and several two-story models for the American System-Built Homes. Unlike other houses of the style, Wright's versions featured more open main floor plans achieved by removing or minimizing partitions between the entry, living room, and dining room. He in turn inspired other Prairie School architects, such as Walter Burley Griffin, to design similar Foursquares in the following decades. Later Foursquares often had the same type of interiors as Bungalows with open floor plans, lots of built-ins, and fireplaces. Many examples are trimmed with tiled roofs, cornice-line brackets, or other details drawn from Craftsman, Italian Renaissance, or Mission architecture.

Mail Order Plans

The Foursquare was a popular mail-order era style along with the California bungalow. When one was ordered, it came in a boxcar with a book of directions and all the parts pre-cut and numbered for self-assembly. These homes are particularly common in neighborhoods near rail-lines built in this era. The largest mail-order house catalog companies were Sears and Aladdin.

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Letter to Spectrum

We interrupt this blog to respond to a letter from “America’s fastest-growing TV, Internet and Voice provider,” according to Spectrum's ads.

Mr. Georff Boytos

VP of Marketing

Spectrum

Dear Mr. Boytos:

Thank you for your letter containing my new “Saving Card,” and for letting me know about your new TV Stream service. Yes, sign me up! I’m trying to 'cut the cord' as they say in your biz, but offers like this demand my full attention.

I went online to get the list of channels being offered (I’m guessing they are just the ones I want), but they were not available, even under the “click here for more details” button. I even tried to chat, but your representative wouldn’t budge until I told him how my day was going, and I refused to have that conversation because I could not see how he could be looking up the channel lineup for me if we were chatting along about my day. So that went nowhere. As VP, you probably know what they are, so before I sign on the dotted line, will you kindly send along those “25 most popular live TV channels” you are offering?

Also, there are 10 lines of type at the bottom of the second page of your letter that I'm not able to read. 

Maybe this is your first letter. To help with your next one, I’ve compiled some tips I found online about how to increase readability and a running score about how you did. No charge.

Rule # 1: Column width should be about 65 characters, including spaces.

Your column width: 237 characters

Your score: Fail

Rule # 2: The minimum type size for readability is 8 points.

Your text: 5 pts.

Your score: Fail

Rule # 3: Black type on a white background has the best readability.

Your text: Light gray.

Your score: Fail

Rule # 4: Use serif fonts for content and sans-serif fonts for headlines.

Your content text: san serif

Your score: Fail

Rule # 5: Don't justify right margins, because it forces the space between letters and words to be uneven and less readable.

Your margins: Justified

Your score: Fail

Rule # 6: Use white space in and around the text, making it easier for readers’ eyes to flow through the words without being distracted by other design elements.

Your white space: None

Your score: Fail

I can’t wait to sign up for your new promotion, so please get back to me right away.

Yours truly,

Steve Wilson

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East/West Climates

Take the weather in Rochester ... please.

California definitely has the edge in this contest, especially on the cool, central coast. Monterey Peninsula temperatures average between 45 – 70^o F, year-round (yes, that includes winter and summer), whereas Rochester, has a more turbulent average of 18 - 80 ^o F. Rochester’s true climate picture is more accurately painted with its highs and lows. The historic low of -22 ^o F. was recorded in 1934 and the mercury rose to 102 ^o F. in 1936. That’s a range of 124 degrees, compared to Monterey where temperatures don’t vary more than 25 degrees on average, year-round.

On the other hand, Rochester has real weather with abrupt and dramatic changes of seasons. Weather you can sink your teeth into. The landscape turns brown on the CA central coast early in May when the rain simply stops for six months. Sure, you can plan a picnic or an outdoor wedding without fear of a cloud burst, but you can’t wash your car, water your lawn or have a glass of water in a restaurant without asking for it. The entire countryside goes into dormancy.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

John Ruskin
English - Writer 1819 - 1900

With no rain, artichoke farmers along the coast must pull water from the aquifers, creating a vacuum that sucks in ocean saltwater, poisoning the soil and requiring even deeper wells to find uncontaminated irrigation sources.

On the surface, lack of rain allows fires to rage causing massive damage. Last year was the state’s worst fire season ever. A total of 9,133 fires burned 1,381,405 acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, including five of the 20 most destructive wildland-urban interface fires in the state's history. Throughout the year, fires destroyed 9,470 homes and other structures, more than the previous nine years combined. Wildfires killed 43 people – 41 civilians and 2 firefighters – almost higher than the previous 10 years combined.

Although fires subside drastically when the rainy season begins in late fall, the damage they have caused continues as flooding and mudslides ravage the hills and mountainsides that have been laid bare by fire.

In comparison with the golden state’s record, Rochester’s weather doesn’t seem quite so bad.

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