OpenStreetMap (new tab)

Google Map (new tab)

Google Streetview (new tab)

Building History

The developer James Soules worked with architect Ross Chapin to design this small residential tract, consisting of eight detached cottages, each with an average size of 650 square feet. The whole tract covered only seven-tenths of an acre, and the architect organized the lot to retain 40 per cent as a common, central green space. This configuration, having a common central yard, recalled that of bungalow courts popular in the 1910s and 1920s across the US, but pioneered in CA. Each house has access to the central common as well as smaller private yards demarcated by picket fences.

The 2008 book Urban Design and the Bottom Line wrote of the 3rd Street Cottages: "Kitchens and front porches face the interior green. Visitors arrive from a public street that narrows to a private street, leave their car in a small parking area located on one side of the compound, and walk on a footpath to the interior green from which they access the front door of the home they are visiting. The cottages sold quickly as condominiums, typically to single women, young couples, and empty nesters. Generally in snall detached-home projects with a common green, owners choose to share maintenance of the green space. In such projects, the common green can be designed for any of a number of uses, including active play, quiet pursuits, vegetable gardening, or sitting and conversing. Soules and other developers have found small homes oriented to a common green to be popular in the marketplace." (See Dennis Jerke, Douglas R. Porter, Tery J. Lassar, Urban Design and the Bottom Line, [Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 2008], pp. 39-40.)

PCAD id: 24271