Three iterations of the Italianate in brick and wood, all built at the crest of the highest hill of the city’s most desirable neighborhood, at a time when the unobstructed views west and east were spectacular. The flushboard-clad Almy house (75 Prospect) is the most intimate in scale, much more representative of the 1840s and the early 1850s. The masonry used by Binney and Owen (79 Prospect) Houses celebrates the larger scale coming into use for substantial houses on the eve of the Civil War, both designed by Alpheus Morse, Providence’s architecture of choice in the years immediately following the expatriation and death of Thomas Tefft. At the corner of Cushing Street, these three urban seats create a marvelous tableau of mid-nineteenth-century taste and architectural ambition.
— 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
At the intersection of Prospect and Cushing Streets are two substantial brick houses designed by Alpheus Morse in the manner of urban Italian Renaissance palaces (72 and 79 Prospect Street). The main block of both houses is a large cube with 1-story entrance porches, regularly placed fenestration, and bold trim set against smooth wall surfaces achieved by the use of hard, pressed brick and tight mortar joints. While this form was as up-to-date as one could get on the eve of the Civil War, its popularity here had, in a way, never waned since its appearance almost a century earlier, in the ample houses built for Providence’s then emerging maritime elite. The juxtaposition of these two houses is especially interesting to contemplate as a design exercise by the same architect at the same time. On their interiors, both houses employ the same strong symmetry that obtains on their exteriors, with strong center hall flanked by principal rooms on either side.
The William Binney house (72 Prospect Street) came first. Binney, a Philadelphia native, was a founder of the Rhode Island Hospital Trust Bank, established in the 1860s to finance Rhode Island Hospital. He had come to Providence around the time of his marriage to Charlotte Hope Goddard; this is the first of several commissions that architect Morse received from members of the related Brown, Ives, and Goddard families in the 1860s, including both residences and new facilities at private institutions that these families patronized, including Rhode Island Hospital and the North Burial Ground. The Binney House had been divided into multiple apartments by the mid-20th century; it the 1970s, however, it was carefully rehabilitated for a much-reduced number of flats by architect Steven L. Lerner.
— 2006 Festival of Historic Houses Guidebook
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