North Fifth Street goes up a steep hill, and is lined an array of beautiful homes built from what I would suspect are the 1850s through 1900, with the majority built around and after the Civil War. Starting at the bottom of the hill, at Center Street, we see a Queen Anne style house on the right, which has been renovated so recently that the Google Street View still shows its old appearance. Below, is a Shingle Style house, with siding replacing the shingles on many of its sides.
Then we begin to get to many of the amazing transitional Italianate and Second Empire hybrids, such as the one below. They a
Then the incline of the street begins to increase, and the houses are in a variety of styles.
There is even an Arts and Crafts style four-square house mixed in with the Nineteenth Century houses, as well, as can be seen below on the right.
Then there’s this amazing Queen Anne, which was for sale, for less than $300,000. That’s what you can buy in a small town in the Midwest.
On one of the side streets, we spotted a Tudor Revival house in the distance.
There are also “pure” Italianate houses, such as the one below.
I spotted very nice in-fill houses, which are the two in the middle below. I was impressed with how much renovation and redevelopment that has been going on in this neighborhood.
One of the oldest houses in the neighborhood must be this one story Greek Revival center hall house below, which we have seen in Dutchtown just recently.
There is also this two story house, which is abandoned. I would be surprised if it stayed abandoned for much longer considering how much rehabbing I saw.
Next door, for example, its Italianate neighbor is receiving a meticulous renovation, though they have not gotten to the back porch yet.
Coming around to the front, you can see that the front facade is slowly receiving a dark blue trim color with gilding for the accents.
To the right of the Queen Anne houses in the first photograph is what appears to be one of the oldest and smallest houses in Hannibal. It is an early one-story, yeoman/middle class-type frame house that would have been prevalent in the mid-Nineteenth Century urban landscape of the Midwest (with regional variations in the South and North). Their small size means that very few have survived, replaced in the late-Nineteenth Century by larger Queen Anne houses, the early-Twentieth Century by Craftsmans and Four Squares, the mid-Twentieth Century by parking lots and urban renewal, the late-Twentieth Century by vacant lots, and the early-Twenty-First Century by income-producing redevelopment/revitalization/urbanization/whatever other buzzword is in vogue at the moment. The survivors are in smaller towns, where even there they are not assured preservation since their small size discourages owner-occupancy.