Erie Buildings tells of Erie past through our downtowns, mansions and government halls
Want to know a little more about your old home, the mansions along Erie's West Sixth Street, or the town that GE built in Lawrence Park?
Or maybe you'd like to see more Tudor-style homes like those on South Shore and Seminole drives.
That information and more is available on Erie Buildings, a website listing thousands of Erie County homes, churches, commercial and government buildings, lighthouses and other structures built before 1940. A service of Preservation Erie, the site provides photographs and information on each of the buildings from Erie County property records, plus the year built, its architectural style and a rating of its architectural or historical significance.
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The site also includes a history of well-documented properties, including Erie's Watson-Curtze Mansion and the Corry Armory.
The data can be searched by the property name, address, municipality, district or architectural style.
Tunnels, a small army of servants and an Underground Railroad stop
Buildings tell much of the story of Erie County, from its colonial roots through the industrial boom. Erie Buildings includes the history of a number of notable properties including:
The Crowley House in Lawrence Park, built by Irish immigrant Michael Crowley in 1832. The house has a recently excavated tunnel to Four Mile Creek and the Lake Erie shore and may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad that guided those escaped from enslavement in the South to freedom in Canada.
Gannon University's Old Main administration building, originally a 46-room private home. Owned by businessman Charles Strong and his wife Annie and operated and maintained by as many as 50 servants, the mansion, completed in 1896, was known for its lavish social events, including galas honoring Presidents William Taft and Grover Cleveland.
The former U.S. Post Office on Griswold Park, built in 1932, with tunnels to the adjacent Union Station and maybe even to Presque Isle Bay. The tunnels included a bomb shelter that could accommodate as many as 500 people plus a kind of pantry room stocked with rations to feed them.
Architecture and architects
The Queen Anne-style Watson-Curtze mansion along Erie's Millionaires Row National Historic District on West Sixth Street was designed by Green & Wicks, a Buffalo architectural firm.
Edward Green, a partner in the firm, designed the mansion, now a museum at the Hagen History Center. It was built in 1889-1891 at 356 W. Sixth St. for industrialist Harrison Watson.
Green also designed and built several other mansions along Millionaires Row, including the Queen Anne-style Downing-Galbraith house at 259 W. Sixth St. in 1880 and the Colonial Revival-style Otto E. Becker house at 652 W. Sixth St. in 1918.
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Erie's first registered brick mason, German immigrant Peter Grawoss, or Growotz, designed and built the city's oldest surviving brick home, the Federal-style Pierre S.V. Hamot house at 302 French St., completed between 1827 and 1831.
Hamot was a prominent merchant and businessman. His home later was owned by his daughter, Mary Hamot, and her husband George Starr, a founder of Hamot Hospital. It now is owned by UMPC Hamot.
Erie Buildings also can be searched by style, including Federal, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival, for more information on typical features plus a list of local homes and other buildings designed in that style.
Erie Buildings: A look to the past for future planning
Information on the Erie Buildings website is from a 2014 survey of historic buildings commissioned by Preservation Erie.
The survey by Wise Preservation Planning of Chester County built on an earlier survey of 500 historic Erie properties by Mercyhurst University students in 2012-13.
The completed 2014 survey includes information on 31,000 Erie County buildings.
"It's designed to be a tool, not just for property owners, but also municipalities and local leaders making decisions about our historic building stock and the communities and neighborhoods that are important to people," said Melinda Meyer, president of Preservation Erie.
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The survey has been used in Erie Refocused planning, county heritage planning and by communities applying for National Register of Historic Places designation for buildings and downtown historic districts, Meyer said.
Lawrence Park earned National Register designation for its historic district in 2018. Corry's downtown historic district was included on the National Register in April. Girard is in the process of applying for historic district recognition.
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"Preservation Erie worked very closely with all of those communities, providing technical support for them to pursue grant funding, solicit proposals from qualified consultants, write their nominations and work with their consultants to prepare them," Meyer said.
Contact Valerie Myers at vmyers@timesnews.com. Follow her on Twitter @ETNmyers.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Erie Buildings tells Erie's history through its stately structures
