Had to drive to Watsonville twice yesterday. Town founded in 1852 and there is a full range of architectural styles on display, from the Italianate of the 1850s in the famed downtown Mansion House (With a Classical Chicago Skyscraper next door)
To many many classic California bungalows
And plenty of those little shotgun Victorian cottages that are ubiqquitous in NorCal, sort of the 1890s version of the ranch house
And this cool Shingle style cottage
If you want the joys of Classical ornament, you can find it both downtown
and in the neighborhoods
gothic churches, spanish colonial of course
and this marvelous 1850s Italianate cottage right out of Alexander Jackson Davis’ patternbook
Downtown has a Main Street with several intact early 20th century “highrises”
While neighborhoods feature every kind of Victorian styling
and there is doubtless more….
Tags: California architecture; architectural history; Watsonville
Time Tells 
September 15, 2013 at 2:49 am |
[…] The town is way down in the South Bay next to San Jose, and is the gateway to Santa Cruz on the coast. Indeed, we live in the Santa Cruz mountains just over the county line but we are still scholastically and politically within Los Gatos, although its downtown is about 10 miles away. The town began, if I can believe the historic plaques along the onetime railroad in the town square, in the middle of the 19th century, which again is common for this part of the country (see my summer blog on Watsonville.) […]
January 30, 2014 at 12:05 am |
[…] Watsonville | Time Tells * 6th June 2013 | Jean a drawing a day * she sells seashells | scissors, glue & […]
August 7, 2014 at 5:24 pm |
[…] Oh, you can see my posts extolling the architectural history of Los Gatos and Santa Cruz as well, not to mention Watsonville. […]