You are probably too late to buy the grand, 138-year old
High Victorian Italianate residence on NW Hoyt St., even if you were willing to
pay more than the $1.125 million asking price.
The well-preserved architectural gem is one of Portland’s
last grand Italianate houses, many of which flourished in the city’s most
elegant turn-of-the-century neighborhoods. Portland’s wet weather and development trends
eventually spelled doom for these carefully-crafted wooden marvels.
This house is notable aside from its architectural charm and its
lengthy home for a pioneer Portland butcher turned stockman, Joseph
Bergman. It was also the last home of
Ben Milligan and Jerry Bosco, two of Portland’s early architectural
preservation activists and artifact collectors.
From the late 1950s to their deaths in the late 1980s, Bosco and Milligan
bought old houses and restored them in Southeast Portland, and spent countless
hours retrieving more than 20,000 architectural artifacts from houses and
buildings being torn down during those years.
One of their last real estate purchases included the
badly-deteriorated, two-story West’s Block at 701 SE Grand Ave. Built
in 1883 as a store with housing on the second floor, the building had devolved to
a strip club on the ground floor and uninhabitable space above a hundred years
later.
Thanks to a bequest in their wills and long, hard work from many
friends, the West Block eventually was restored as the Architectural Heritage
Center, which is owned by the Bosco-Milligan Foundation. The center now houses a small fraction of
their artifact collection, including dozens of historic pieces of stained
glass. The building also houses exhibits
and offers lectures aimed at Portland’s architectural history and preservation.
Philip Austin knew Milligan and Bosco during their collecting days
and their final years at the Hoyt Street house.
“I was in there a lot, especially after they died,” he said. “When I was working on cleaning out the house
they had two of the bedrooms for storage, a front bedroom was the trunk room
full of old trunks full of stuff, and a back bedroom had shelving with
boxes filled with things. In the
basement were stain-glass windows and other stuff. They had put in some
ceiling medallions that they made and installed in the front parlors.”
Austin
has looked at the photographs in the recent realty listings. “It has been upgraded a lot since they were
there,” he says. While the interior
shows many tasteful 21st Century changes, the exterior has been beautifully
preserved.
As well
it should have. Having been listed on
the National Register of Historic Places since 1983, any changes to the
exterior would have been carefully regulated.
----Fred
Leeson
Join
Building on History’s email list by writing “add me” to fredleeson@hotmail.com
JackinPort tried to enter this comment but had some sort of difficulty:
ReplyDeleteI am very familiar with this house. I lived right behind it on Glisan St. for 13 years before I moved to the house in Beaumont that you remember. I knew the Hoyt St house then as the "Metzger House", though, not Bergman?
When I bought in '97, mine was an 1886 Victorian "fixer" that I spent 11 years restoring. The Hoyt St house and mine were most likely among the very first structures built west of NW 21st. The style of the Merzger(Bergman) house reminded me of San Francisco's many slanted-bay window Italianate row houses. There were more like it in early Portland, but our ever expanding downtown gobbled up most of these over time. An historic photograph I saw from a balloon revealed many Italianate (and Gothic) houses that were later built-over with larger commercial or apartment developments. As far as I know, this is the only remaining Italianate house left in Portland. I would be happy to be proven otherwise!