Thursday doors…in the neighborhood

My husband took Friday off for my birthday and we went to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio and home in Oak Park.  More of that in other posts.  Naturally that meant that Friday was the coldest day of an almost two-week span:  39, cloudy, windy, and chilly.  After the tour, we decided to brave the cold and walk around some of the historic neighborhood where all the houses, even if not designed by Wright,are huge and gorgeous.

Although this is a Thursday Doors post, I couldn’t share just the doors.  The houses themselves are worth a look even if, in this case, FLW didn’t design them .  In this first shot, you get both a gate and a door at no extra charge.  This might be my favorite house.  It’s certainly my favorite front walkway.

As we walked past this house, I discovered the only door we could afford.

Thursday Doors…City of Homes

Philadelphia is universally known as the City of Brotherly Love.  It’s probably mostly unknown as “City of Homes.” The Philadelphia Encyclopedia says:

Lining Philadelphia’s straight, gridiron streets, the row house defines the vernacular architecture of the city and reflects the ambitions of the people who built and lived there. Row houses were built to fit all levels of taste and budgets, from single-room bandbox plans to grand town houses. The row house was easy to build on narrow lots and affordable to buy, and its pervasiveness resulted in Philadelphia becoming the “City of Homes” by the end of the nineteenth century. As Philadelphia emerged as an industrial epicenter, the row house became synonymous with the city and was held up as an exemplar for egalitarian housing for all.

The oldest residential city street in the US, Elfreth’s Alley  in Philadelphia, is a showplace of 18th century row houses still in use. If you missed my post and Thursday Doors entry about it, just click on the highlighted link (the first one).  Most people in Philadelphia live in a row house.