Beginning in the mid-1980s, The Armory Revival Company, formed to renovate houses in the area first targeted by the Providence Revolving Fund, began to develop appropriately designed, affordable in-fill houses in the same neighborhood,. The earliest of these, at 23 and 25 Hammond Street and 7 Gilbert Street, designed by Irving B. Haynes & Associates, are “Victorian Revival,” in a sort of homogenized Queen Anne mode, smaller in scale than the houses mentioned above on principal streets in the neighborhood but typical of the area’s side-street houses. The Victorian Revival houses gave way in the late 1980s and early 1990s to houses modeled on mid-nineteenth-century vernacular models, highly appropriate to this part of the city. James Estes designed the handsome two family houses at 36-38 and 40-42 Hammond Street, built in 1989-90. Greek- and Gothic-Revival-inspired houses, designed by Armory Revival employee Edwin Gregory, line the southern stretches of Harrison and Hammond Streets. The stand-out revivalist house is The Octagon, a highly self-conscious revival of an unusual mid-nineteenth-century form with an octagonal plan, located at 70 Harrison Street and opened, appropriately, to great fanfare on 8 August 1988.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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