Benevolent Street, #89

About this Property

#Reason for Demolition

Unsure. We can assume that during the renovations of the next-door Bannister House, this narrow home was deemed to be in too rough a shape, or too expensive and insignificant to restore.

#Current Events

The house was razed in 2015 and the site is now empty.

History

From the College Hill Historic District nomination form, Edward F. Sanderson & Keith N. Morgan, January 1976

(Manuscript, not publicly available) House (by 1857): 2 1/2-story, shingled frame, end-gable-roof house with a three-bay, side entry, facade. A hipped hood on brackets, a second-story bow window and window cornice heads are major elements of the house’s vernacular Italianate styling.

#Maps

The earliest map we have public access to are the ones at Brown University. Volume 2 of the 1889 map does not cover this portion of Benevolent Street. This house and the Bannister House (#93) are visible on this 1899 map.

• 1899 Sanborn Insurance Map, Volume 2, plate 119 — Numbers 89, 91, and 93 are all present as wooden structures
• 1937 G.M. Hopkins Map, Plate 19 — 91 Benevolent Street is gone and the stone addition to #93, the Bannister House, seems to have been added

Interestingly, there is a house in between these two narrow ones at number 91, also a 2 and one half story structure. In a 1920 Sanborn Map, the house at #91 still stands. In the 1937 map, the house is gone. When the Gowdey documentation was written about this cottage and the Bannister House, it describes a garden in between. While Edward M. Bannister and his wide resided next door at #93 from 1880 to about 1900, it was a dense little block of homes.