While Orchard Avenue highlights the aspects of the Queen Anne/Colonial Revival transition, Oriole captures the more medieval side. The block between Patterson and Parkside is architecturally the most interesting of this exceptionally appealing late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century residential enclave north of South Angell Street, east of Butler Avenue, and south of Blackstone Park. Number 39, the Amey E. and Edward M. Harris House (1896), is as iconic as, if somewhat simpler than, the Arnold House (24 Stimson Avenue). Numbers 40 and 44, built for John F. Allen and John H. Hambly (1898), are in design virtually mirror images of each other, with modulations to massing and detail that somewhat disguise the frequency with which architect Frederick E. Field resorted to formula (compare the Hough House). Number 54, an early, full-fledged Tudor Revival house designed by R.C. Sanders and built in 1903 for Elliot Flint, recalls how very much this popular early twentieth-century style was in some ways simply an outgrowth of the late nineteenth-century Queen Anne style. Flint was a prominent dealer of Ford automobiles, and Henry Ford is reputed to have been entertained here. The most impressive house in this block is number 67, built in 1915 for Herbert E. Walker from designs by Norman Isham. This is one of several of Isham’s designs inspired by the medieval seventeenth-century New England house. Isham designed two alternatives for the house, varying in size, and Walker chose the smaller one. In the late 1980s, Mr and Mrs Malcolm G. Chace III employed William L. Kite to revisit Isham’s larger scheme, along whose lines his addition to the east end of the building was completed.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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